Engrish, it's a funny old game

Yesterday when I was waiting for a bus at Epping Station, I was looking at a 'housemate wanted' flyer stuck to a post that had obviously been written by an international Macquarie Uni student (Is there any other type of Macquarie Uni student, by the way?) which had a delightfully incorrect piece of punctuation. Essentially it just had a comma where it should have had a full stop, and vice-versa. But the unfortunate result was that the final sentence read thus: "Non-smoking student wanted, including electricity and gas."

Although I can understand that getting a student who didn't come with gas would be quite irritating, it's obviously not what the author of said flyer was aiming for. Anyway, if there is a clearer example of what a silly and unforgivingly confusing language English is, I can't find it. Just two little symbols round the wrong way, and you get a sentence so hilarious some idiot who'd just had a long, hard, hot day at work would memorise it and use it as the basis for a blog post. What pathos.

I have realised lately though how much it would really suck to have to learn English because there are a million and one rules governing it, and a million and one exceptions to every single one of those rules. I mean it becomes quite apparent when walking through Lakemba on a Friday night which I do very often that half the people who were born here can't even speak a bloody word of the language. The other day I even said, totally accidentally (for once), said "more better" and I have no idea why - although the flagellation I gave myself as a punishment will remind me never to do it again.

But this has also been striking me a lot lately because I've resolved to learn to speak a basic level of the Chinese language - not just because Bec is Chinese but also because I deal with innumerable customers at Myer who are Chinese and some of them have a really very tentative grasp of English (Today I spent twenty minutes explaining the benefits of a Sunbeam Cafe Ristretto Espresso Machine to a nine-year-old kid because his Dad didn't speak a word of English - and like a nine-year-old would appreciate the benefit of a 15-bar pump system) so I thought it would be really quite handy if I could communicate to a basic level with them without having to resort to weird, pancultural body language (One lady's frantic and exagerrated hand symbols about a week ago were hilarious, although not quite as useful as the phrase "Excuse me young man, could you please direct me to the locale in which you keep your hand-held body massaging kits?).

To this end, I have learned a full one phrase in Mandarin, albeit the most helpful one in the world of customer service, "Can I help you?" Naturally, the most useful one in the real world is "I sorry, I doonut speeky dee Mandarin" but we're saving that for Advanced Mandarin lesson 1. The amusing part of the story however, is that when Bec got me to 'try out' this line on her mother (who, by the by, actually pronounces the word as "Engrish" which I think is really cute), I sort of mispronounced one word the slightest bit which changed the meaning from "Can I help you?" to "Can I hug you?" which is far more amusing - for me, at least - in hindsight than it was at the time. At the very least though, apart from being ample payback for all the times Bec and I have laughed secretly and maliciously at her Mum's pronunciation of difficult words, it made me realise yeah, language is weird. I mean, I can't even imagine now how hard it's going to be to learn a language in which tone is phonemic (That is, a different tone changes the meaning of a word) when the slightest pronunciation error so radically changes the meaning. Much like my friend 'David' who wrote the flyer mentioned at the start of my post might discover if anyone were ever pedantic enough to bring it to his attention.

However, with all of Engrish's little ambiguities, subtleties and downright silliness, I still can't figure out what the people in that Korean restaurant in Capitol Square were trying to say when they called their dishes "Sexy Chicken" and "Passion of the Eel". Can anyone help me with that one?