jamesinchina.com

Tones tones tones.

The scene: winter, a house in the small country town of Danzhou and my girlfriend's family are gathered around their wood stove pouring over an interview in the South China Metropolitan newspaper. The subject - me. They quickly skip over the boring parts talking about my business and foreign investment in China and quickly come to the bit they're interested in, my love life (elaborated out of all proportion from one sentence I did say on the topic). The thing is, the article says my girlfriend is a horticulturist. In fact, being a performing arts entrepreneur, horticulture is about the last thing she'd be interested in. The extended family gathered around the stove simultaneously leap up in anger. Who is this evil horticulturist I have been cheating on their dear daughter with???

It all comes down to tones. Much of the content of the article was pure fiction, so my first thought was that they simply made it up. But would they really have the imagination to pick such an esoteric occupation? Then it struck me. I said my girlfriend did performing arts - 演艺 - yan3yi4. They wrote 园艺 - yuan2yi4 - horticulture. The 3rd tone ends very low, while the 4th tone starts high so to get between the two you have to raise the pitch of your voice a long way, which if you do it slightly too slowly sounds a lot like a rising 2nd tone and 'performing arts' is instantly transformed into 'horticulture'. Note that yuan2yi4 has a different pinyin from yan3yi4, but a chinese listener is much more likely to rely on the tone rather than the pinyin and his brain automatically corrected my 'yan2yi4' into 'yuan2yi4' rather than 'yan3yi4' without even cross-checking with me first. I've made and heard other foreigners make this mistake with tones 3 + 4 over and over. If you can say 3 + 4 accurately every time, you can say anything.

*sigh*. Please learn from my sufferings, get your tones right and avoid being hunted down by your in-laws for vengeance.