Linguistic Enlightenments

I am currently taking Chinese 101, and it has been quite an experience for me. My family is Cantonese, so I have been exposed to Cantonese my whole life, even though I cannot speak it very well. I have also been around people who speak Mandarin, which is the dialect that is taught in schools. Although the two dialects are very different, they have some similarities, especially in the way Chinese culture and values plays out in language. Much of my extended family now speaks English a lot of the time, but for some of the members of my family who grew up with Chinese as their first language, some of the phrases and references they say are either direct translations of how they would say it in Chinese, or somehow related to the Chinese way of speaking, either grammatically or otherwise. As I take my Chinese class and learn about some of the idiosyncrasies of Chinese, I am able to have a better grasp of some of these references. For example, I learned last class how to say, “not bad” in Chinese, and my teacher explained that in Chinese culture it actually means “good,” but the Chinese just prefer not to say “good” in many contexts. I connected that with my family, where some of the members of the older generation prefer to say “not bad” when they really mean that something is “good.” They had translated the phrase directly from Chinese to English and continued to use it because of the way it had been used in their culture. I learned something else regarding the way my dad talks. My dad enjoys using various words and names and twisting them to make them something to make fun of in the strangest ways. A month or so ago, when we were learning how to say numbers, I realized that one of the things in his cache of words he makes fun of is the number “6” in Mandarin. He says it slightly different and puts it in a different context so that he gives it an entirely new meaning, and yet it is pronounced in such a way that it could still be construed as the word “6.” By taking Chinese in school, I have become better able to understand some of the language that my family uses and how that is a direct result of the cultural ways their first language was used. I also comprehend some of my father’s and other relatives’ more bizarre jokes.