Eric's Beijing Diary

I accidently stuck my hand in my tea today. No big problem, except that I had to spend the next 20 minutes teaching everyone how to say, "oops!" It turns out this word is not easy to say for native speakers of Mandarin. I went over it with them several times. Its not "ops," and it's not "ups," it's "oops." But they still had trouble. One of the students was making notes, and his classmate was trying to help him. But he chided his classmate, "I know how to spell it, I just don't know how to say it!" I was surprised by the possibility that this exact sound does not exist in Mandarin. I didn't have my pinyin chart with me, so I couldn't be sure...I was trying to think of a sound in Mandarin that could compare to it. But if the sound really doesn't exist in Mandarin, then the chart wouldn't do any good. So I finally decided to make the comparison to another English word that contained the same vowel sound. I wrote the word "foot." I told them, "If you can say 'foot,' you can say 'oops.'"

Interesting how the complete absense of familiarity with a given sound makes it such a hard thing for us to produce. For example, native speakers of English have problems with certain German vowels. And of course the Mandarin "r" at the beginning of a word is all but impossible. I have never heard a native speaker of English pronounce it correctly. Doesn't stop me from trying, of course, but so far, I have never been able to get it quite right.