Prooblem
With a multi-lingual group it's sometimes hard to tell recent events from long gone events, especially if the speaker or translator is not good at the past tense in English.
Travel Tales About Yesterday And Distant Past
In Chinese there's no past tense, just the words for time. So 'I/we went yesterday' in English becomes 'I go yesterday', when translated literally from the Mandarin.
Taxi Driver Conversation
When a Singapore taxi driver tells you, "I go London, yesterday," he could be referring to a trip twenty years ago.
I have had a few nonsense conversations in the twenty years before I learned this. I used to reply, "It was sunny/raining, yesterday."
Sometimes I said, "Were you on an early flight?" The taxi driver would reply, "Can't remember".
Author
Angela Lansbury. See my other posts on leanring Chinese and other languages.
With a multi-lingual group it's sometimes hard to tell recent events from long gone events, especially if the speaker or translator is not good at the past tense in English.
Travel Tales About Yesterday And Distant Past
In Chinese there's no past tense, just the words for time. So 'I/we went yesterday' in English becomes 'I go yesterday', when translated literally from the Mandarin.
Taxi Driver Conversation
When a Singapore taxi driver tells you, "I go London, yesterday," he could be referring to a trip twenty years ago.
I have had a few nonsense conversations in the twenty years before I learned this. I used to reply, "It was sunny/raining, yesterday."
Sometimes I said, "Were you on an early flight?" The taxi driver would reply, "Can't remember".
Author
Angela Lansbury. See my other posts on leanring Chinese and other languages.
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