How to say good morning in Chinese, already

Flag of China.

I went to a bilingual Mandarin-English toastmasters club in Singapore. I heard the convener saying what sounded like, 'knee how?' and everybody replying, 'How!'

I asked what that meant and a new friend told me, "It is a greeting. 'Knee how' is 'you good' and 'how' is 'good'."

What was easy to understand and remember. It stuck. the equivalent of the English, 'how are you?', and the reply, 'fine, thank you,' or, 'good, thank you'.

This week I met a Singaporean lady who knew Mandarin. I said to her: "Good Morning. Knee how!"

She replied, "Woe how!'

Ah! I remembered that wo means I in Mandarin. Chinese sentence construction is very simple and succinct. Chinese is hard to pronounce with unfamiliar words, but a little vocabulary goes a long way.

I noticed that when she spoke to me in English, she kept ending sentences with the English word already. I thought, that must be a direct translation from Mandarin. Shopkeepers often say, "No more already" when an English shop assistant would use the phrase, "Sorry, we've sold out,' or, "We're out of stock''. So I reckoned that already is a handy word to either use of recognize, because it crops up so often.

Wo how means I good.

English - Chinese (Mandarin)
I - wo
you - ni
good - hao
how are you - ni hao
I am fine (thank you) - wo hao
I put the thank you in brackets because it is not in the Chinese, so a direct translation would not include the thanks. but if any Chinese readers wants to know the correct English, they should be aware that it sounds polite to add thanks, and rude to fail to do so.

Mandarin - English
wo - I
ni - you
hao - good
ni hao - how are you (literally 'you good?')
wo hao - I'm fine/well/good

Good morning
morning
already

早上好
早上
已经

Zǎoshang hǎo
zǎoshang
yǐjīng

The z in when said by my new friend 'Maggie' sounded like sz, like Suzie without the u.
The first time I repeated the word as sow-shang, she told me, "If you say it like that, people won't understand you."

So I repeated the word, more like Z at the start.
better. but she repeated the vowel.

I adding the dipped vowel sound, a bit like asking "really?", with your voice going low and then up at the end of the word.

That seemed to do the trick. Once you know the sound to listen for, you can listen to other people talking. or practise with every person you meet, until the pronunciation becomes automatically correct.

If I were to learn just one word a day, that would be about 300 a year. After three years I would know 900 word. In ten years I would know 3.000 words.

Chinese is spoken in China, Taiwan and Singapore. (Hong Kong, more Cantonese.)


Flag of Singapore.

Just 150 words learned if we are stuck at home for 6 months. Or stuck at home for 14 days and get in the habit of learning a word or two every day. The same applies to any other language you care to learn.

With many people stuck at home because of the coronavirus, a great opportunity to learn a language. So that when we are able to travel, we enhance our enjoyment with our command and understanding of another language.

Useful Websites
google translate
duolingo

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Teacher of English and other languages

Are Malay and Indonesian the same?

We thought that Malay and Indonesian were almost the same. So when we opened our meeting of Braddell Heights Advanced Toastmasters club in Signapore, I thought it would be welcoming and a novelty to open with greetings in Chinese and Malay.

The Malay was to honour our installing officer (installing the new committee) who was from the bilingual English and Malay speaking club, Jauhari toastmasters. By now, you might already be a bit confused, as I am.

Let's start with the flags.
The Indonesian flag is similar to the Singaporean flag. Red band on top, white band below.

Indonesian Flag


Singaporean Flag
Red and white with a white crescent and five five point white stars. Like a mixture of East and West - European.



Malay Flag
Red and white stripes. Yellow crescent and multi-point star in yellow on blue background.


US flag
Red and white stripes and white 5-point stars on blue for the states.




Now let's look at the languages. British English and American English are similar. 'two countries divided by a common language.'

The Malay language and Indonesian have a huge amount of shared vocabulary. If you know one you can get by in the other.

But the words for good afternoon are different. As we discovered at Braddell Heights Advanced Toastmasters on July 20 2019. Our installing officer was Muhammad Nurhakim from Jauhari Bilingual Toastmasters, which is a club in Singapore whose members speak English and Malay.

English - Malay
good afternoon - selamat tenga

English - Indonesian
good afternoon - selamat sore

Under Google translate the translation for selamat is congratulations or safe or secure.

Useful Websites
https://www.facebook.com/groups/polygotcommunity/
https://www.google.com/
translate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Standard_Malay_and_Indonesian

Author, Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.

My last Malay Language Post Goodbye and thank you

Problem
I like learning Malay because it's an easy language. All phonestic - what you see is what you say. Many words look like English, simplified English. I hear Malay on the MRT underground trains and stations in Singapore. However, I am now a spnsor of a bilingual club in Singapore, Italian and Chinese. It is being started by a Chinese woman who has married an Italian. Their common language is English and they attend an English language Toastmasters International Club to which I belong. (My club is Braddell Heights Advanced.)

I have been learnign Malay-Indonesian daily. However, I now realise that either Italian or chinese or both would be more used to me in the new club. So you can expect to see much less Malay-Indoneisan on my blog, and more tips on learning Chinese and Italian.


So here are some last words in Malay

Malay - English

Selamat jalan - goodbye / bye
termimah kasih - thank you
jumpa lagi - see you later

English - Malay



Goodbye - bye / selamat jalan (the e is not prounounced).
Thank you - terimah kasih
I am sorry - (saya -I) maaf.
See you later - jumpa lagi (not jumper but lagi is again, joompa is see you).

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker

Learning Spanish The Easy Way

Problem
How do you find something short and easy to read and already translated?

Answer
I've tried translating ingredients on products I buy, reading the small print. I have looked at bilingual in-flight magazines on aeroplanes.

But the easiest and shortest messages are those from bilingual Toastmasters clubs.
For example, Spanish and English club in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, promoting meetings on Meetup.

I am now on their mailing list.

https://www.meetup.com/phoenix-bilingual-club/events/

https://www.visittheusa.co.uk/USA

http://www.spain.info/en_GB/

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker, teacher of English and other languages.

Languages & Translation: English, French, Chinese

I am hoping that I can find enough interest in both London and Singapore for a Toastmasters International Club provisionally entitled Multi-Lingual Translators' Club. London has clubs for French speakers, Spanish speakers, and German speakers.

Singapore French and Chinese Clubs
French Club
In Singapore I have attended meetings of the Francophile French-speaking club in Singapore, entirely in French. I thought I spoke fluent French. However, the rat-a-tat machine gun speed of the speakers was a challenge.

 Then I was baffled by the Table Topic. (That is an impromptu speech, called a table topic because it was a originally on a subject chosen from face down cards on a table).

Chinese Speaking Clubs
 I want to one Chinese club where nobody spoke English, so I had trouble even asking for directions to the toilet in the interval. (I followed one man but he was going to the telephone box. Another went to the Gents, which had a urinal, but I could not see the Ladies toilet.

Finally I found the bilingual English and Mandarin Club who members mostly speak both fluent Chinese (Mandarin) or another Chinese dialect such as Cantonese of Hokkien. Some of the speeches were entirely in Chinese, evaluated in Chinese. This made voting difficult as I could judge only by ticking the number of laughs from the audience, and the gestures and facial expressions and animals and enthusiasm.

At the time I declined to vote on the Chinese speakers. At one point the Chinese speakers were voted for separately.

At conferences you have simultaneous translation. Speakers are asked to pause after every sentence or two, at most three, to allow the translator to remember and translate that section of the speech. Usually a handout is provided with a translation of the speech.

French Translation
In Delhi I translated a speech from French into English. (I think it was for a Belgian lady at a conference on international law). This took longer than you might imagine. First she rehearsed what she planned to say in front of me. I spent hours writing it down in longhand. Even if I had had a tape recorder, it would have taken longer still to type it up (I've done that with other recordings) as you keep having to rewind every two or three words to type it up and search for the next piece.) Nowadays I imagine you could do it with SIRI voice recognition which comes built in with the software package you can buy to go with an iPhone Plus, which may be built into the price, or offered   at a discount.

On a second occasion I attended a motoring weekend in France, travel for journalists sponsored by a car manufacturer, which involved seeing the city and attending an afternoon of speeches describing the development of that year's new car model. This involved a lot of technical terms. Luckily many were the same in English and French.

In the first session things went well for the talk on the city, a welcome by the tourist board. A second session on cars was a real challenge.

In the interval I was able to go out and ask in advance what the next talk was about. As the speaker chatted away, I wrote down several challenging technical words she used. After that the translation was much easier, especially as I had the guest of the talk. The car had three new features, something like the speed of the engine, the choice of colour of leather, the new modern styling, more curvy, less boxy. At this point the main challenge was to translate quickly enough before the speaker started talking again, to make sure I did not miss the first sentence of the next session.

Vote of Thanks
I was also able to translate a vote of thanks from the English motoring and travel writers and photographers into French. To help amplify my vote of thanks, I added the name and title of each English journalist and what they had said.  So Mr Monsieur Smith of a North Of England newspaper had praised the architecture of the city, a great family destination for tourists from the UK, and the style of the car, which many would want to buy, or hire, for business or pleasure.  Mr Brown of London motoring magazine had enjoyed the generous French food and wine, which would interest his gourmet readers, and he admired the luxury of the new car, which would appeal to his discerning readers who sought something special.

I addressed everybody by name. Then I made sure to say a sentence in English first, to collect my own thoughts, and keep the English listening and not talking amongst themselves. Then the French translation.

This year I was sent an email from a French translation organisations which sells books. The newsletter outlined five reasons which you find trouble understanding spoken French, even though you can read it quite easily.

The first reason is that you don't understand common proverbs or metaphors. If that's the case, they can sell you a book. (In theory you can look things up on the internet, but it's always handy to have a book.)

A second reason is that you need technical vocabulary. So you immerse yourself in websites, films, conferences and book, as you probably do to some extent anyway, but plan your year, week, and day ahead to be constantly immersed.

If you are interested, the newsletter is from here:
https://fr.frenchtogether.com/francais-oral-problemes/

Angela Lansbury, travel writer, translator.

Word of the day - one or double? English and German

For years I've been making lists of foreign words when I travel. Or read a newspaper. Or the label on a dress, or a battery or a box of chocolates.

Sometimes I see one useful word and wonder what to do with it. One word is not long enough for a list to start a post on a blog. Today I had an aha moment. Word of the day! Yes, I can use that in a bilingual Toastmasters International Speaking club, or when talking about them. I could keep a word of the day in my diary when learning Spanish. That's 365 words a year. Enough for a short, friendly conversation. As Oscar Wilde says, take your diary on the train in order to have something exciting to read on the train.

My word of the day

German-English - doppelgänger (same in English - or just double)

You can try using this in a short English or German sentence. It's a great conversation opener and way of making friends. You have a doppelgänger - my friend ......

If all blonde girls, or tall guys, or Americans, or Germans, or Asians, seem alike to you, easy to turn this into a plus point. My friend has the same blonde hair, is about as tall as you are  ... your doppelgänger.

Black Forest Toastmasters - Toastmasters Belgium

https://sites.google.com/.../b1toastmasters/clubs/.../black-forest-toastmasters-...

Black Forest Toastmasters of Brussels is a German-English bilingual club, founded in 2006: We use both languages to an equal degree ...


PS
Words of tomorrow and yesterday:
delicatessen 
kindergarten

So now you know a word of today doppelgänger. And what is the German for double? Doppel?