Chinglish

I am fluent in Chinglish. So are most of the international students here at Lanzhou University. We are all studying Chinese at various levels, so our vocabularies are quite different. Almost everyone knows some English, so if there is ever confusion during a conversation in Chinese, English words are substituted.

It's actually a great system. If someone doesn't know English, someone else is able to translate from Chinese to English to Russian for example. Everyone is at least bilingual, but many of the students know three, four, five, or more languages. The students from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan especially impress me.

Chinglish also comes in handy with the Korean students. The Korean language has hundreds of cognates and near-cognates from English.

I am at the bottom of the totem pole as I only speak English and am just beginning to learn Chinese. As I mentioned in my last post, everyone likes me since I'm an American. Otherwise, I don't think I'd have many friends; it takes a lot of effort from both sides when I talk to some of my close friends here.

On the other hand, I surprise myself with how quickly I am learning Chinese. At first, I would study words for hours but not remember them the next day. Now I am often able to hear a new word once and be able to use it in conversation later.

As for the Chinese characters, it's awesome to walk down the street and recognize some characters and have an idea of what signs say. Before I came to China, the characters were just illegible scribbles to me. My first few weeks here I continued to think of them the same way. Now even characters I don't know or have never seen hold some sort of meaning because I can break the character down and recognize different strokes and their meanings.

While my Chinese is improving rapidly, my English is going down the drain. I am not speaking English regularly, and when I do speak it, I use hardly any of my vocabulary. I know I am forgetting many words and I often forget how to spell words. For example, I was studying with a Korean friend; he teaches me Chinese and I teach him English. He was saying that Korea's economy is "12" in the world. To correct him, I wrote "12th" but also wanted to spell it out... Only, I couldn't remember how it was spelled.

It's a joke now, so whenever I forget something in English someone says, "t-w-e-l-f-t-h."