Claire felt really embarrassed about refusing the old woman’s price for tea; and we quickly gave that interpreter the boot.
Over-the-phone interpreters
These interpreters can prove to be indispensable: almost always available on your mobile phone, and ready to answer your call when you need them.
Over-the-phone interpreting is such a simple system for visiting China with confidence, and it’s a system that’s also used by Westerners who live and work in China. I know several American and European expats who have lived in China for decades, who speak reasonably good Mandarin, yet they still depend on phone-interpreters for just getting about; the unexpected happens on a daily basis in China, and it’s very comforting to have a natural-born Chinese linguist on the other end of your phone.
The over-the-phone interpreter system is child-simple: when you have a communication problem, you simply speed-dial the service and an interpreter answers your call. You just explain to the phone-interpreter what it is that you want to communicate to the Chinese person you are with, and then pass your phone to that person, and your phone-interpreter will speak for you, and to you, and usually sort everything out for you.
Most of the time you’ll use your interpreter for simple questions and advice such as: telling your taxi driver where you want to go to; telling a shop assistant what size you wear; ordering your meal; finding your way about town; negotiating better bargains at the market; finding a bank or ATM; the list really is endless......
Phone-interpreters are priced by the second, or by the day.
The by-the-second system is just like using your phone at home, except you pay a credit to your account in advance, and each time you call the interpreters you’re charged about US$1.50 per minute. When you use up all your credit you need to pay them more money to continue the service.
The by-the-day system is also paid in advance, but the big advantage is that you pay a flat-rate per day, which will not vary, so that once you pay for it you can forget about additional demands for payment because there aren’t any – it’s a fixed budget that you know before you go. This system works out at about US$15 per day, regardless of how often you use the service.
If you know enough Mandarin to do whatever you are going to China to do, then the by-the-second system will possibly be the more cost-effective option.
If your Mandarin, is basic, (or less than basic), (or non-existent), then I’d recommend the by-the-day flat-rate system.
You’re right to think that calling a phone interpreter on your usual mobile phone is going to be expensive. But there’s a very simple solution for this: when you arrive in China buy yourself a SIM card and mobile phone from one of the thousands of specialist phone stores. A basic phone and SIM card is very affordable, and the calls on a Chinese network will cost you almost nothing.
Language
Grammatically, Chinese is really quite a simple language. Yes, seriously.
Its numbering system, dates, tenses and plurals are much simpler than European languages. However the spoken word is tonal, so that a slight variation of a vowel accent or an incorrect emphasis will completely change the meaning of a spoken word, and this is what usually screws up your attempts to speak Chinese.
To compound this difficulty in pronunciation, there are wide regional variations in speech. Even an expert linguist can have difficulty trying to make themselves understood; only a local can truly negotiate the language with confidence.
It would be easy to rely on an interpreter to speak for you, but you should try some Mandarin – after all, the Chinese try (when they can)(and when they can’t) to speak English.
Many Mandarin systems are easier than European languages such as: days of the week – day 1, day 2, day 3, etc; and months of the year – month 1, month 2,… you get the idea. So if you can count to twelve, and say day and month, you’ve got it. And [for example] where we have a wine glass, beer mug, milk jug, tea pot, scrap bucket, etc, the Mandarin is: container for wine, container for beer, container for tea, container for milk, container for scraps; so that once you know the word for container you’re half way there.
You can buy many great little books with translated phrases, (my favorite is the Lonely Planet pocket-sized Mandarin Phrasebook), but you can’t pull a book out every time you want to communicate with someone, so here is the list of words that I use most often (written phonetically the way I say it):
Everywhere, all the time
•Hi ~ Way said very quickly
•Hello/How are you? ~ Nee-How
•Thank you ~ She-She
•I am lost ~ Wow Me Low-La
•Water ~ Sh-Way
•Lager ~ Pee-Joe
Shopping
•How much money does this cost? ~ Dow- (sounds like cow) Sa-Chien (chien sounds like the name Ian), Dow-Sa-Chien ?
•Too Expensive ~ Tie-G’way-La
•This [thing] ~ T’suka
•That [thing] ~ Naga
•I don’t want it ~ Boo-Yow
In a taxi
•Go Right ~ Yo-G’why
•Go Left ~ Zo-G’why
•Go Straight on ~ Eejit-So
•Careful ~ Shaow-Shing
•Wait here ~ Deng-Sha
•This will do (stop here) ~ Daow-La
Numbers
Once you learn 0 to 10 you can easily count to 99.
This is how I memorize 0 to 10:
•0 ~ Ling (rhymes with nothing)
•1 ~ E
•2 ~ R (like an Irish or American ‘R’, not a polite English one; R as in ‘arse’), (just think of one & two as an emergency: ER. Or the 1st British Royal: ER)
•3 ~ San
•4 ~ Sir (again think of 3 & 4 together, San, Sir, sounds like ‘censor’)
•5 ~ Wu (wow, you’re half way to ten)
•6 ~ Le’O (think of Leo the Lion, think of six lions’ faces, and their tails sticking up behind like the top part of the 6)
•7 ~ Chee (sounds like the first part of the word ‘cheese’, so visualise a circle of cheese sliced into segments shaped like 7)
•8 ~ Ba (think of
