Meet the Chinese Interpreters!
11 students in Chinese program will interpret at the Fall Forum.
From left to right, WANG Jingrui, LIU Chang, REN Junhan (Scarlett), Lorraine Wan, SHEN Peilan (Becky), SHEN Yingchun (Erica), CHEN Mo (April), SUN Yayuan, LIU Meng (Susan), WU Yiray, YANG Xiaoting (Gracey), SOONG Shan Chie (Grace), LI Lan (Fall Forum Planning Committee, not interpreting at Fall Forum)
Fun Fact about the Chinese Language:
Chinese is said to be among the most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn, along with Arabic, Japanese and Korean. However, it’s not really as hard as you might think!
There are none of the tenses, plurals, conjugations or genders that can make learning European languages such a daunting task. For example, instead of saying “I went to San Francisco last week”, “Last week, I go to San Francisco” is enough — as “last week” has already indicated that the action happened in the past.
The hard bit is mastering the tones. Mandarin is a tonal language, which means the intonation of a sound determines its meaning. Tones fall on the vowels in pinyin. If you get this wrong you might end up saying completely the wrong thing. For example, wǒ xiǎng wèn nǐ, means ‘I want to ask you’. Simple enough, right? But if you were to say wǒ xiǎng wěn nǐ, it would mean ‘I want to kiss you’. Oops!
In a famous one-syllable article, a form of constrained writing unique to Chinese, Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982) wrote the 施氏食狮史 (literally: “The Story of Shi Shi Eating Lions”, pinyin: Shī Shì shí shī shǐ;) in Classical Chinese. In this 92-character modern poem, every syllable has the same sound shi, only to be differentiated from one another by the four tones when read in modern Mandarin Chinese.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den