Grant and I have had our fair share of awkward moments during our time in China, but I think the one today might just top the list.
English: We should ask.
Pinyin: Women yinggai wen.
Characters: 我们应该问。
Sounds simple, right? (And yes, I realize there should be more words in the sentence because it doesn’t totally make sense if you just leave it off there; something grammatically correct would have been more along the lines of 我们应该问他, or “we should ask him”) but that’s besides the point.) But if you get the tone of wen wrong, it doesn’t mean “to ask.” It means “to kiss.”
We should kiss. We should kiss!! Talk about the struggles of learning a tonal language. That one tone changed the entire meaning of our sentence.
It was no wonder our laoshi started laughing hysterically when she overheard our conversation.
Wen is one of the words I always remember, so I guess I should remember for future that another wen means kiss!
Incidentally is it ok to comment here? The site’s been in my feed reader because of your using it for writing some time ago.