dytabytes:
You know the stupid thing I think about the Ching Chong joke that always gets to me?
I’ve always wondered “what the hell dialect are you trying to mimic?”
Because here’s a fact: Chinese isn’t a language.
See, China is made up different groups of people and each one speaks a different dialect. The top dialect is Mandarin, but as you can see on the map, there are a lot more than that. And, here’s the thing, the dialects all sound different.
This isn’t some accent crap, like “British English vs American English”. No, when I say different dialects, I meant that these are pretty much mutually unintelligible languages. If someone speaking Mandarin tries to talk to someone who speaks Yue, good luck at getting mutual understanding going on, because it ain’t happening. The two languages use different words for the same objects, and I’m not even going to start on the tonalities.
So when you say “ching chong” and say that it’s fake Chinese, what you’re doing isn’t just doing a bad impression of what you think the stereotypical Chinese person sounds like. You’re also vanishing the diverse cultural background of the Chinese people and merging them into one blended language that doesn’t exist. On top of that, you’re telling us that we all sound the same to you, even though we speak a variety of completely different languages, which implies that you don’t even care to listen to us speaking before you try to mimic our words.
It just… it really boggles the mind that someone could be so unspeakably racist and self-centered as to think that they can take a country as huge and diverse as China and assume that they can mimic “our language” using two syllables repeated over and over.
You mentioned in tags you cut out swearing before you posted; hope you don’t mind I added my own.
1. Toast is a badass motherfucker for putting together this quick tutorial for calling “the fuck is wrong with you” on the racist shit from that how to pronounce tumblr post because THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU.
2. THIS ENTIRE GODDAMN POST FROM TOAST. Consider this a requirement in basic, non-fuckface human interaction to know this.
3. I actually knew quite a bit of this from a couple of different sources, including a friend who speaks fluent Mandarin and will gladly explain the linguistic differences between the dialects and how THEY’RE NOT THE SAME THING OR NEAR IT. Oh, and also, I have, on more than one occasion, JUST ASKED PEOPLE WHO KNOW LIKE TOAST. BECAUSE THEY ARE THERE. And if I’m gonna come off like a fuckface jackass, I will always aim to do it while trying to become LESS of a fuckface jackass.
4. I also know that there’s MAJOR differences between Traditional and Simplified Chinese, which is a written language, not a spoken language, and that Simplified Chinese is not universally used in China. And I know this from ONE CLASS I TOOK ONE TIME. I can’t speak it. I can’t write it. But it literally took ONE CLASS to realize there are major differences, and the only reason I didn’t just Google that shit to find out was because before that class, I hadn’t thought much about it. And now, because of that class, I ask LOTS of questions about language usage in my day job to make sure I’m not inadvertently fucking something up.
What I’m saying is this: Toast has taken the time to write a really great, informative post that you can learn a lot from, but the fact that some fucking assholes with internet access still can’t GOOGLE THAT SHIT because racism is the lazy way out makes me want to drink until I can’t feel feelings.
Thank you, Toast. You went above and beyond to make this post, and I really appreciate it. I don’t know if anything I’ve said has added to the very well-written point you made, but thank you for posting no matter my ranty THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU response.
