About the level of English of my seniors: To practice for their IBT test we (my darling mother and me) considered trying some standardized National English tests, used in Dutch high school. Well, that's not going to work... With my seniors, the vocabulary isn't particularly the problem. The problem lies with the pronunciation is. They can provide a good enough answer, but the question remains if you can also understand what they are saying. Something for me to work on.

It's called Chinglish. It's sort of a form of pronunciation where they use the Chinese sounds to speak English. H becomes ge, th becomes s (where, in Dutch, it becomes f, which is somewhat more similar) and (humour!) I (as in high) becomes e (as in bell) as a result of which this sense: 'when the lady smiles' becomes: 'when the lady smells' ...

Furthermore, Chinese people do not appear to use their mouth for pronunciation, they tend to use their tongue, especially in the front of the mouth. (I'm no expert, correct me if I'm wrong!) In English this results in some strange sentences, but mostly its makes for a language difficult to understand.

The Chinese also have a different method of sentence construction. Past tense? Just say it like this: I run to the market yesterday. Why deal with difficulties like conjugations and irregular verbs? The Chinese simply don't seem to bother. I have not yet discovered any other differences, as I have just started to learn Chinese, but perhaps some people visiting this blog (Sven?) can provide some more information (or corrections...).

Moreover, pausing in a sentence, for example at a comma, is difficult, because the Chinese base their rhythm on syllables. In a sentence, for example: dao e shi yi shi ji da sha, all the words have the same length, like: - - - - - - - - instead of ___ - - ____ - - - -, like the Dutch would do. Humor and sarcasm does not really work for my seniors (yet), because timing is difficult...

My seniors therefore do not really compare to high school students in the Netherlands. The Dutch seldom have many problems with the pronunciation (apart from our prime minister...), because the languages are quite similar. In China, quite a large country, there are so many different dialects that I suspect that Chinese in the North and the South of China are as similar (and as different) as Norwegian and Spanish. A common origin, but after that it diluted a bit. Fortunately (well, not that it helps me very much...) the characters have been sort of standardized.

Time for me to get ready for my next class...Let's see if I can get anything done today...