Chinese Bloopers

Learning any language is, of course, difficult, but I feel that it is a fair assessment to say that learning Chinese ranks near the top. I have two amusing stories from the past week to demonstrate this fact.

Last Friday, one of the other teachers in my office brought in passion fruit popsicles to share. I was a big fan, and when mentioning them to Tsuili on Monday, she proposed that we make our own. She would bring in the ice, and I would bring in passion fruit. So Tuesday morning, I stopped by the outdoor fruit market on my way to school to purchase passion fruit. Thinking I knew all of the needed Chinese to arrage such a transaction, I had a lovely little conversation with the fruit stand lady, and departed with roughly ten passion fruit (we were making popsicles for the whole office). Now, I realize that I am probably a very clueless American, but I have never seen a live passion fruit before. I have had passion fruit juice (and popsicles, clearly), but never eaten an actual passion fruit. This means that I have no idea what a passion fruit looks like. So I arrive at school with what I think are ten passion fruit. When I get to the office and proudly show everyone the fruit, they all start laughing at me. What I had wanted to ask for was bai2 xiang1 guo3 (百香果), but somehow, I asked for bai2 xiang1 guo1 (百香瓜) instead. So instead of passion fruit, I arrived with 10 white melons... Neither of which is readily available in your typical American supermarket, so I really feel that it was an understandable mistake to make. On the positive side, white melons also make great juice, so my failure was not debilitating. :)

My other funny story happened the next day in the office. We were again making juice (the fruit in Taiwan is amazing, which consequently, makes the juice here equally incredible). This time, we had a fair amount left over, so we were trying to think of more people to whom we could give some. I thought it would be nice to run some over to the principal's office across the hallway. So I tried to ask Vicky (history teacher in my office) if I should bring some over to our "xiao3 jiang4" (小將 - principal). She gave me an odd look, so I tried again with a different tone. This time she bursts out laughing. So now I just give up and say it in English, at which point, the entire office is again laughing at me. Apparently, I had asked her if we should give some of the juice to xiao3 zhang1 (小蟑), the little cockroach.