Hands, hands, two hands

Here's part of a page from a Chinese exercise book for learning English, with a student's notations added in blue ink:

The text reads:

1、 shúxī xiàmiàn dāncí 熟悉下面单词 ("familiarize yourself with the following words")

1. bus / bàsǐ 爸死 ("dad died") 2. yes / y ésǐ 爷死 ("grandpa died") 3. girls / gēsǐ 哥死 ("older brother died") 4. miss / mèisǐ 妹死 ("sister died") 5. school / sǐguāng 死光 ("death ray; everybody died") 6. pea / pì 屁 ("fart") 7. yesterday / yēsǐtādiē 噎死他爹 ("choke his dad") 8. guess / gāisǐ 该死 ("damn!; go to hell!; lit., ought to die") 9. draw / zhū 猪 ("pig"） 10. dangerous / d ānjiǎolāshǐ 单脚拉屎 ("shit on one foot") 11. five / fèiwù 废物 ("waste; garbage; refuse; junk; trash; rubbish") 10. America / Éméi 鹅没 ("goose died / disappeared" or "goose doesn't have [any]") — the part that is hidden in the center of the book might be lǐkǎ 禮卡 ("gift card"), hence Éméilǐkǎ 鹅没禮卡 ("goose has no gift card")

2、 shúdú xiàmiàn jùzi 熟读下面句子 ("familiarize yourself with the following sentences")

1. Hands, hands, two hands. I have two hands. / Hànzi, hànzi, tōu hànzi. Ǎn hái lái tōu hànzi. 汉 子，汉子，偷汉子。俺还来偷汉子。("guy, guy, steal / filch a guy. I'll still come to steal a guy") 2….

The above photograph is available on many websites. I got it from this one, where it was accompanied by the following remarks:

Shuí jiā de hái zhǐ zhème yóucài! Zhè fānyì hái liǎo dé!! 谁家的孩纸这么油菜! 这翻译还了得!!

("Whose kid's paper [sic] is so talented! This translation is atrocious / outrageous / terrible / amazing!!")

The word I have translated at "talented" is yóucài 油菜, which actually means "kale; cole; rape", but is being used as a pun for y ǒucái 有才 ("talented").

The commenter refers to the student's funny notations as "translations", but, in fact, they are transcriptions. Such use of Chinese characters to record the sounds of foreign and dialectal words goes back thousands of years. Indeed, before the alphabet came to China, this was the only means for phonetic annotation of terms from abroad or from local and regional languages. Now that the use of Hanyu Pinyin, English, and IPA are widespread in China, the situation has changed somewhat, yet I still meet people who don't know how to record the sounds of what they are saying with Roman letters, but would prefer to write them in Chinese characters, even though it often leads to radical distortion. Not to mention that, whether intentional or not, there is often semantic interference from the surface meanings of the characters, which are inescapably powerful, as in the present instance.

When my Shandong father-in-law was trying to learn English, he had notebooks full of things like this: gǒutóu māoníng 狗頭貓嚀 ("dog's-head cat's meow"), i.e., "good morning". See "How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language", section V. I have in my office an entire textbook of English with this type of phonetic annotation in characters, and in my library at home I have late imperial textbooks for the study of foreign languages that also use characters in this way.

[A tip of the hat to Anne Henochowicz; thanks to Fangyi Cheng and Cao Lin]