Solly, my England velly not good.

Started on the impossibly crazy task of cataloging my books - 127 so far and not even halfway through. It's weird. Every book you don't own is bloody interesting. Every book you own, you can't be bothered to read them. So here i am, having all these books and not having read most of them.

I've been at it since afternoon but it's taking really long as i keep getting sidetracked and ended up reading one book or another. But here's an excerpt from a book i never knew i had, till now.

Hardship Posting: True Tales of Expat Misadventures in Asia
Introduction by Colonel Ken Oathe

"Solly, my England velly not good".
True tales of language problems and miscommunications in Asia.

Most people's first exposure to the Claymore-infested minefield of language barriers was probably when trying to follow the instruction manual of a Chinese, Japanese or Korean-made appliance back home. Blow me down! I did better following the flaming Greek or German instructions than the English ones.

In Culture Shock, Alfredo and Grace Roces put it better than anybody - "The Western visitor finds he is talking the same language but not communicating at all. With a sinking feeling he realises he is not in America, or England, or Canada but in an entirely different world."

Thank God, it's not just me then. In this case, they're talking about The Philippines, though it's equally applicable to other Asian countries as well. But the Filipinos do have the reputation of being the best and widest speakers of English, which only exacerbates the probem. (In fact i was nearly 20 before i learned that there's nothing wrong with exacerbation, and you can't go blind from it.)

Some made it easier for themselves. Dave the history-wallah says that Sir Stamford Raffles, to his credit, studied Malay, but also had Singapore's first linguist., Munshi Abdullah, at his elbow to bridge the gap between English and Malay speakers but when they changed Singapore's language to Chinese he was completely stuffed.

I do admire people who take the time and effort to learn the local lingo, though. I do. Anyone with cheeks that can resist that much slapping deserves to be successful. I mean Cantonese has 9 inflections for each word, for crying out loud. Mandarin's a breeze - there are only 4. But you'll need to know about 3,000 of those squiggly words to be fluent.

Like anywhere, you'll always seem to learn the naughty words first. So of course i can get in to trouble in just about every Asian port i call on, but have barely enough of the local lingo to get out of trouble.

It's hard to explain that feeling to your friends or family who have only ever lived in Countryside England, or Boise Idaho, that feeling of sheer... sheer... aaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrggghhhhhhh!!! when you've had an average morning and pop out to get a sandwich and a banana for lunch and you might as well be Marcel Marceau. The sounds don't help at all, no matter how you round your mouth, how clearly you enunciate it in the Queen's English, or how many time and HOW LOUD YOU REPEAT YOURSELF. So you end up gesticulating like some crazy circus animal until you end up with your sandwich and banana. Sometimes i think they do it on purpose... let's see how weird i can get this white guy with the big nose in the loud shirt to act - How bad does he want this banana? Hmmm, pretty badly obviously. Like making dolphins jump through flaming hoops for a measly morsel of sardine. Oh, i love Asia!

But if the heart attack doesn't get to you, it's also one of the fun aspects of living abroad... bridging those little cultural chasms with a kind of mish-mash language hybrid that even a blue-collar pigeon, the dropout product of the government school system, would be ashamed of.

Makes you feel ready for the Diplomatic Corp. Which reminds me, i've not heard back from my recent application. I want to be the Australian High Commissioner to Koh Samui and i dare anyone to think they are more eminently-qualified.

Or maybe if they don't need me in Koh Samui, somewhere like Cebu in the Philippines wouldn't be bad. All you got to do in The Philippines is say a three-letter word and everyone's happy. This word has about 11 different shades of it in that country, ranging from "absotively posilutely" to "maybe" to "dream on, Joe". The simple word is "yes".

No wonder my friends at The Lonely Planet say English in The Philippines "Sometimes varies wildly from standard English."

And what about Japanese? Just to say "never mind" is doozo ki-ni masarazuni. Or "that's too bad" is Sore-wa okinodoku-desu-ne. Even if it wasn't Ok you'd just say Ok to get the matter over and done with. Especially with my Alzheimered mind... you've got to delete a word to add a new one in. And here's a phrase that i would have to purge an entire chapter for: Motto yukkuri hanashite-itadajemasu-ka, which means "could you speak more slowly?". Now i don't know about you, but if i could say that, then i'd probably be bloody fluent already! Again with "We can't speak Japanese"...Watashitachi-wa nihongo-ga hanamasen. What's wrong with "no speaku Japanesu"? Afterall, you do chekku-auto from your hotel after you have slept in your beddo.

It drove my good friend Dave Barry to despair. "I wanted to scream, HOW CAN YOU NOT UNERSTAN ENGLISH WHEN ALLAY LONG YOU LISTEN TO 'DO-WAH-DIDDY DIDDY DUM DIDDY DO?" he wrote in his masterly tome, Dave Barry Does Japan. (Note to editor: Hmmm, maybe we should call this book "Col. Ken Does Asia." What do you think? It worked for this Barry guy.)

I always love hearing conversations which rattle on in local lingo then all of a sudden there is an English word in there as if it's the most natural thing in the world. Like "rinkydinkydadudinkdinkdink transfer interrupted, rinkydinkydadu modem connection." Love it! Then you nod you head as if you're following the conversation and they say, "Oh, you understand?" and you say "Sure you're having a bit of a problem with your computer," and they go, "Waah, you understand velly good."

Bahasa Malayu is a bit like that too... well, not the formal language, but the way it has been adopted for modern usage. It's quite handy because now you can simply catch a teksi to the kustoms kompleks and get your visa stamped at imigresen there.

Speaking of catching cabs, did you know there's no Thai word for gonorrhea and syphilis? Pete the pornographer, sorry, photographer told me. but i've always loved the fact that the Thai word for "liver" is tab. It's like cause and effect... if you pick up the tab too often, you'll get liver damage.

That's what i like... practical languages. Unlike English.

♥ Clarisse ♥