Xiao Bao Bei

Sheep,Yang. Goat, Shan-yang. Pig, Zhu.

I’ve got horse and cow and dog and cat down, but sheep and goat and pig remain elusive, so I wanted to write them down here, in hopes that they’ll stick. 

Saying the sounds to Emmy, I realized how close the sheep and goat sounds are — I maybe bleet a shorter “baaah” for the goat, but basically they’re the same as far as I know — so it’s interesting that “goat” in Mandarin translates to “mountain sheep.” Having never given them much thought, I guess I didn’t realize how closely related they are, beyond each being sources of delicious cheese.

You can hear the Google Translate woman — who has a very Beijing accent — say goat here. Her pronunciation is very shh — shan-yang Though Rich’s pronunciation (and so the pronunciation in our house) is more san-yang.

Now, for a nice joke involving a yang, a san-yang and a zhu…

Bus, gōnggòng qìchē. (Sounds like: goong-goong-cheetz-uh.)

Unlike bird, which is the short-and-sweet nyoh, bus gets replaced with a mouthful — goong-goong-cheetz-uh — knocking it from the list of words I expect to be among my daughter’s firsts, despite the fact that she points out every one she sees. Did I mention there’s a bus stop outside our front door?

If I had a dollar for every goong-goong-cheetz-uh we greet and wave away from behind our opaque first-floor windows, it would begin to seem possible that I might pay off my student loans in time for my 1-year-old to start college.

But I digress.

I’m learning Mandarin alongside Emmy in a completely conversational way. Basically, Rich introduces a new word when we come across it, and then I try keeping it inside my little grab bag of words. They slip out with extraordinary ease.

Last night we bought a Christmas tree and brought up the boxes of ornaments, and so when Emmy entered the living room this morning there was not only a decorated Christmas tree but a a jingle bell on the front door handle. Amazingly, she was much more interested in banging and ringing the bell than she was in investigating the tree. (Are trees passé, since she sees them in the park?) When Rich woke up, we learned that bell is liing — think ling, with a little roller-coaster dip in the middle. By the time we pack the ornaments back up, God help me if liing isn’t securely in the bag. (Pun not intended, but why not.)

I’ve been thinking about the other languages I’ve tried to learn from “conversational” lessons. An Italian tape taught me to greet friends and ask the price of a yellow skirt in the window. And thanks to a French tape I used to listen to while sitting in Los Angeles traffic, my brain has retained, all these years later, just please, thank-you, elevator and “The lamp is broken.” La lampe est cassée.

Maybe if I were learning Mandarin on my own I’d be able to say, “Waiter, the check, please.” But since I’m learning it alongside a 1-year-old, the Mandarin in my odd little grab bag instead consists of:

How are you?
It’s time to eat!
Would you like to drink water?
Monkey.
Frog.
Bird.
Cow.
What does the ___ say?
Apple
Blueberry
Strawberry
Wash hands.
Bus
Airplane
Ball
Tree
Book
Dog
Cat
Hair
Head
Legs
Feet
Toes
Hands
Fingers
Nose
Ears
Belly
Butt
Where is it?
There it is!
Socks
Shoes
Where did it go?
Don’t eat that!
DIrty!
Come here.
Take a bath.
Wait.
Be careful.
Sweet little treasure.
I love you.

Bird, niǎo. (Sounds like, nyow.)

Like dog (goh) and book (sue), bird exchanges one short, simple sound for another: nyow.

It was a word I grasped quickly and used easily until I learned cow — nyoh — and suddenly my brain wanted to mix up the two. It’s a very humbling thing to realize, a beat too late, that one has pointed to the sky and told a toddler, “Look! A cow!”

I’ve since started thinking of nyoh more like nyohhhhh, with a drawn-out o at the end, mentally linking it to a cow’s moooo. Which actually works. Most of the time.

Not a whole lot of actual news in today’s New York Times piece about “hearing bilingual.” I’ve read that the link to language is social, so kids don’t learn it by watching TV; that infants favor the languages they heard in the womb; and that bilingual speakers are better executive decision makers. What’s new, it seems, is the idea of “neural commitment” — that monolingual babies stop registering words in other languages at around 10 to 12 months.

Also kind of neat, in studies where babies were shown silent films in which people spoke different languages, 4-month-olds could tell when the language being used changed, but around 8 months, monolingual babies stopped reacting, while the bilingual kids stayed engaged. The bilinguals, the thinking goes, registered that information was still being conveyed.

Now, if someone could release data on the thinking processes of bi-sippy-cup babies, who insist on toting around twice the necessary plastic…

This mother horse could barely be bothered to guide her baby toward the downier patches of lawn, or around the neighbors’ crushed beer cans. Nevermind find the energy to scold it. If she had, can you imagine? The Mega Millions of translation!

(Confused? Please to note the dorkiness of my earlier post.)

Tree, shù (Sounds like: sue.) Book, shū (Sounds like: sue.) Horse, mǎ.

Awesome things about Mandarin: there’s no verb conjugation and no feminine/masculine. Major challenge about Mandarin: it’s a tonal language.

Which Rich likes to remind me of, generally at moments when I’m making his ears bleed, clumsily repeating sounds to the point of making them other words.

Just after Emmy and I had mastered tree — sue — I saw Rich pointing to the books on her bookshelf and telling her: sue.

“What?” I stopped folding her clothes. “Are you kidding me?”

“You pay attention with a glass of wine, to find the nuance,” he told me. “You have to do the same with the words.”

Repeating that here it maybe sounds cute or super cheezy. But being told it was just annoying. Though I followed his point.

Tree, shù, is high and light. (Listen here.) Book, shū, is low and quick. (Listen here.)

Another trickster is horse: ma. A light, easy, ma. Sometimes when I take Em for a run in Prospect Park we pass a few lethargic horses dutifully toting riders along a path. Can ma, ma? I’ve started to say, knowing can is to see, ma (as you know) turns the words into a question and — since our recent trip to the Outer Banks, where wild horses did the gardening — that ma is horse.

Over dinner, I asked Rich about the awkwardness of the back-to-back “ma” and he laughed that there were actually five “ma” words — all different tonally, of course.

In high school I had a job involving a cash register and I used to think of giving $0.41 of change — one quarter, one dime, one nickel and one penny — as the jackpot of change.

Surely someone saying, “Ma ma ma ma ma?” is the jackpot of Mandarin translation.

Now, to sit tight and wait for the need for someone to ask: “Did the mother scold the horse?”

Airplane, fēijī. (Sounds like: fay-gee. As in, gee whiz.)

Somehow, above the roar of the city’s song, my girl manages to pick up on seemingly every airplane flying by and must accordingly adjust her view — whether throwing her head back in the carrier or smushing her face against the back door screen — in order to identify it with an insistent point of her outstretched index finger.

“Yes!” we say for the umpteenth time. “Fay-gee!”

Last week we took a better-late-than-never summer vacation in the Outer Banks, and she actually got to ride in one. Though, the view of the thing up close — boarding the small plane from the runway — seemed to more totally blow her mind.

Blueberry, Lán méi (sounds like: (gold) lamé)

If bananas are the most risqué fruit, blueberries are the most fabulous.

To see, Kàn (sounds like: can); Dog, Gǒu (sounds like: go)

Over enough drinks with a certain couple we like to talk about how we’ll someday make millions — or at least hundreds — with a curriculum that teaches “Chinese math” to white people. Remember those timed times-table tests we used to do in math class? 100 equations in four rows, ready set go? Second-grade Rich apparently blew through those (while I counted on my fingers) thanks to Chinese math, which consists not of this but of getting rid of all extraneous words.

Instead of thinking “2 times 2 is four,” you think, “2, 2, 4.” Instead of “4 times 4 is 16,” “4, 4, 16.” That’s it. Seriously.

Leave out “times” and “is” and you go from finger-counting American to an I-finished-15-minutes-before-everyone Chinese American. Emerson is going to kick some math ass.

I tell you this because Mandarin apparently works the same way. There’s a handy little word — “ma” — that basically acts like a question mark. Tack it on and you’ve got yourself a question. (Ni hao ma?) Another awesome word is go, which means dog. Which means it’s impossible to say “dog” in Mandarin without imagining a happy, energetic, running dog. To see, is can.

Since Mandarin handily works like Chinese math, if you wanted to say, “Do you see the dog?” you could just link together the essentials: dog, see, question mark. “Can go ma?”

Rich is going to be devastated that I’ve shared this top-secret information. If you somehow wind up making hundreds off of Chinese math, please do send a portion of the proceeds this way. 

*Above is Emmy’s dog cousin, Nigel, whose mom is Emmy’s talented Auntie Mina. (Hi, Mina!)

Shoes, xie zi (sounds like: shed-zuh)

We take off our shoes when we enter the house, but I even take off my “inside flipflops” (which sometimes see a trip to the patio or to throw out the trash) when I enter Emmy’s bedroom. However, the girl is mobile these days, and will take off crawling at a moment’s notice — leaving a person prostrate on the floor and suddenly alone, idiotically stuffing giant plastic coins into a singing pig — and so the first thing she discovers upon exiting are my flipflops. Which means, since everything she touches is destined for a taste test, I’ve mostly learned to say shoes by pleading, as I scramble to get up, “No, no don’t touch! Mama de shed-zuh!”

(To hear the correct pronunciation, you could watch this. I have no idea whose daughter this is, but I love her.)

Teeth, Yáchǐ (sounds like: YA-tse)

By our best guess, our little piranha is working on her eighth razor sharp tooth — or YA-tse, a word I remember because it sounds a little like the game Yahtzee, and so I think about little white dice. Which, especially when there were just the two, they looked enough like for the idea to stick.

By the sixth tooth I bought her a squat, rubber-handled Eeyore toothbrush, which she promptly ripped a good dozen bristles out of, clamping down with those terrifying YA-tse. (Plural and singular are the same word. Three cheers for Mandarin!)

Thinking about another word — preferably a dirty word — is supposed to aid the memory, and I’m embarrassed to admit here I’ve done this. Not intentionally, really — my brain just reached out for an association and grabbed what it could. Banana is Xiāngjiāo, which sounds like shawn jow, which sort of sounds like Sean John. My brain makes the coarse leap from basically “man” to “banana,” and it’s a word I never forget.

Again: totally crude. Truly mortifying to admit. But just guess if I can remember how to say “peach.”