Word Confusion II

Again, the disclaimer on this is that there may be some humor that is subject to the ‘you had to be there’ condition. But, it's a part of my China, which is validation enough.

This particular day in class, we were discussing different types of competitions— everything from academic decathlons to footraces. So while in the area of sports, skiing naturally came up. The professor was talking about the popularity of skiing in China (it really isn’t that popular), and then I became curious if water-skiing had much of a presence here, so I asked. I will relate the conversation as it seemed from my perspective.

Me: “So do many in China people water ski?

Teacher: “Only in the north really, where it is cold enough.” (That should have been a hint, but when you only get the gist of the statement, you tend to disregard incongruous statements as your own inability to understand).

Me: “Is that because not many people have boats? I mean, I imagine they’re expensive here.”

Teacher: “Boats?!”

NOTE: The word for boat in Chinese is chuán, which is certainly close enough my previous word confusion so as to be nostalgically frustrating.

Me: “Yeah, boats.” (I made sure I said the tone right)

Teacher: “How would you use a boat to water ski?”

Me: “How would…?! How else will you move on the water?

Teacher: “Are you sure you use a boat?”

Me: “Positive. Let me show you.”

I went to the marker board and proceeded to draw a boat with a line pulling a skier. Notwithstanding, the teacher stared at the picture with a perplexed look, and muttered something like, “What kind of a boat would cross snow…”

Teacher: “In China they don’t use boats to water ski. The have the two poles on both sides that they use to push along.”

I barked out a laugh, and an American classmate asked what was going on. I translated quickly, to which he replied in English, “Woman! How do you expect a man to move on the water without a boat?!”

At this point an Italian girl, Mariana, chimed in saying, “No, I understand what the teacher is saying. You don’t need a boat.”

Another Italian girl, Elena, exclaimed in animated Italian, “What do you mean you don’t need a boat? That’s ridiculous, honestly Mariana, what do you think they’re going to do, climb a mountain and go sailing down until they reach a lake and then…” At this Elena, with the whole class watching, did a demonstration of said hypothetical skier going down the mountain and then hitting the water with an expectant and eager learning forward on the skiis, like someone about to do a jump, and then proceeded to imitate someone then hitting the water and floundering.

During this whole discussion, the tone, volume, and incredulity had been increasing dramatically. We were all so confused and yet so defensive of our points that after Elena did this little enactment we all simply burst into outrageous laughter until we were literally crying. The raucousness died down and then the teacher said, “Well, this would all make so much more sense if we were talking about water skiing…”

I don’t need to detail my explosion of confirmation and ‘of courses’ that followed, but I did my best to make sure that the teacher understood that water skiing was what I was talking about the whole time.

This time the confusion was not because of tones, in fact the tones on each word are identical; it was the slight difference of vowel sounds. The translation for snow skiing is 滑雪, huáxǔe (Hwah-shweh). Húa literally means to slide, and xǔe is snow. The translation for water skiing is 滑水, huáshuǐ (Hwah-shway), which is literally to slide on water. Well, apparently I was not putting enough ‘-ay’ at the end of the word that what the teacher though I was saying those whole time was snow skiing.