Chinglish

@IngramWu (194)
China
October 14, 2009 3:41am CST
Now more and more people understand and use some Chinese English, for example, 'No time no see' 'good good study, day day up' if you are not a Chinese, can you understand it ?
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1 response
@owlwings (43915)
• Cambridge, England
14 Oct 09
Some of these phrases are used in England. I think they come from the times when England traded with China and were brought back by the sailors who spent time in Hong Kong and the other sea-ports. You can quite commonly hear 'Long time no see' and my mother used to say 'chop chop' when she wanted us to hurry. 'Confucius he say ...' is sometimes used to give an air of wisdom to an otherwise trite saying or truism, very often as a joke (for example, one of the less rude ones is: "Confucius he say: Passionate kiss like spider's web ... soon lead to undoing of fly." Most of them introduce a pun (which is a persistent but not generally highly regarded kind of humour - in the above quotation, there is a play on the word 'fly' which means both the insect and the zip of a man's trousers.) Many of them, of course, started out as mockery of the poor or limited 'Engrish' which the sailors encountered but they are mostly not used (at least consciously) in that way today. I have to say that I am puzzled somewhat by both of your examples. 'No time no see' sounds like a variant of 'long time no see' and, if I heard it used, I would take it to mean something like 'I have never met him/her' (or 'I don't ever want to meet him/her again'!) 'Good good study, day day up' makes little sense to an English speaker. I imagine that it is a literal translation of Chinese idiom (where duplication of a word enhances its meaning). Does it mean 'If you study well, you will have a good day'? I once met an Englishman who read Chinese novels, even though he couldn't speak a word of Chinese. He knew the meanings of the characters, of course, but had he read the book aloud, he would have used the English words and, possibly, the Chinese syntax which, unless one was familiar with it, would sound very odd - even incomprehensible - to an English ear. English, like Chinese, is a very rich language and can easily accommodate variations such as 'Chinglish', 'Frenglish' or 'Fronglais' (a mixture of French and English) or 'txtspk' (where words are shortened to one or two letter) but these things are no substitute for good English and, if they are used indiscriminately instead of standard English, tend to debase the language and show ignorance on the part of the speaker.
@IngramWu (194)
• China
28 Jun 12
long time no see !