The title of this post is never going to catch on as a jazz standard, is it?
I learned today that my brother and sister don't speak the same Chinese as me. This shocked me more than it probably should have -- I learned most of my verbal Chinese from our Taiwanese parents at home and they learned most of theirs from mainland Chinese teachers in college. But until today, I thought Mandarin was Mandarin -- people from different regions will have different accents, of course, but the words will be the same, right? APPARENTLY NOT.
My brother and sister use different words than I do for: potato, bike, pineapple, and spoon, among others. These are not uncommon words. How did I never realize this until today?
I had no idea. Are the words you both use for the same word related at all? I'm assuming their written forms are the same?
ReplyDeleteNo, COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WORDS ALTOGETHER. Like, the word for tomato is a compound word translating to "foreign eggplant" in Taiwan, and a compound word translating to "western red persimmon" in China. Different characters, different everything.
ReplyDeleteI ratted out my brother and sister to my mom and told her they were little mainland imposters. We'll see what she says.