KEY POINTS:
Language is a tough business - if you no can speaka da lingo.
A few days in Beijing is quite enough to remind yourself just how difficult it is to negotiate just about anything in China if you do not speak Mandarin.
Even a few years ago, it often seemed impossible to find an English speaker in Beijing. The Chinese isolation and assurance that theirs was the culture and driving force of the future meant few saw the need to speak English.
For these Olympics, of course, China seems to have shipped all available English speakers to Beijing where they are doing a good job of looking after the world's athletes and media. China as a whole has also realised that English, for the moment anyway, is still the business language of the world and has made huge efforts to improve.
Some of the English spoken and written can be of the fractured and unintentionally humorous type as seen on www.engrish.com and any departure by visitors from well-known phrases and textbook English can create confusion.
But, ai yo (as we say in China), these people and Asians in general leave us for dead when it comes to being a linguistic citizen of the world. I lived in Singapore for many years and always admired how almost all Singaporeans had two languages and many had three or more.
We Kiwis are babes in the wood when it comes to language, as I am proving here on a daily basis with Mandarin which does not go much beyond ni hao (hello) and xie xie (thank you). I am also wondering whether the decision not to put my daughters through local schooling in Singapore (where they would have been taught Mandarin) was the right one.
Actually, we Kiwis often don't do so well in English either. A look out the window today reveals that a pea-souper smog has settled over Beijing again - the same kind that was memorably and euphemistically termed "sea mist" or "cloud inversion" by New Zealand chef de mission Dave Currie the other day.
Wonderful use of the nuances of English language, that, although most of us wondered why he didn't just say 'smog' - seeing as the nearest sea is a long way away - and as a10-minute walk in the stuff prickled eyes and throat..
But English isn't as tough to master as Mandarin. A friend who lived in these parts for some years was a good Mandarin speaker but even he used to bemoan the fact that it uses a lot of the same words which change meaning hugely with only subtle intonation.
So a word can look and be spelled the same but can have a completely different meaning if mispronounced.
The friend was at a business lunch when a woman arrived late. He could see she was flustered and sought to put her at her ease. "What a nice handbag you have," he said in his best Mandarin.
The men at the table guffawed and the woman coloured to the roots of her hair.
My friend asked his neighbour why - and learned again the importance of precise intonation with Mandarin words.
Came the answer: "You just told her she had a nice foreskin."
Paul Lewis
Pictured above: Shoppers walk along a Qianmen Hutong in Beijing - one of Beijing's most fabled neighborhoods. Lying just outside the old imperial city and Tiananmen Square, it gets its name from a towering gate. (AP Photo / Andy Wong)
