Eric's Beijing Diary

The other day I thought I felt a cold coming on, so I went to the store to buy some Vitamin C. I looked up the term in my English-Chinese dictionary, and found "weitaming" as the Chinese version of the word. Well, "weitaming" is obviously a phonetic. It is not a Chinese word, but a Chinese pronunciation of an English word. I can't remember now how many people I talked to at that store, but none of them seemed to have any idea what I was talking about. Finally, I went up to a lady and pointed to it in my dictionary. She said, "meiyou," to inform me that they did not sell vitamins in their supermarket.

One of the frustrations of using transliterations is that even though they are formed from words with which you are familiar, you do need to learn them as if they were completely new. You cannot just say, "I want Vitamin C!" That is, unless you are standing in a pharmacy staring the the druggist in the face(which is what I finally did). No, you really do need to learn how to correctly mispronounce the word if you want to be misunderstood. My first experience with this was when I went to America at the age of 13. I had to learn how to pronounce Japanese words the way Americans were used to hearing them, which sounded very strange to me. Most of the time, I coudn't quite bring myself to do it.

But in this situation, I was really trying my best to say "weitaming." I don't know...it was probably the tones..but, I couldn't manage to say it correctly. I mean incorrectly. Or perhaps I should say incorrectly correctly.