204 CultureShock! China
could wait there: “Keyi zher deng (3rd dipping tone) ma?”. At
that point, consider body-language; it will usually work until
you get better with the tones.Grammar
Once familiar with the sounds of Chinese, learning to speak,
at least at a basic level, can be surprisingly simple. For one
thing, the grammar of spoken Chinese is extremely easy.
Verbs do not conjugate in Chinese, and nouns do not decline.
Putting sentences in the past tense, future tense, conditional
tense and so on is largely a matter of word order and the
addition of certain standard participles: ਛ(le) for the past
tense, ࢃ (jiang) for the future tense, and so on.
Word-order and correct use of participles (as well as
other idiosyncrasies like naming participles and counting
participles) will become important if you ever decide to make
a serious effort to learn Chinese. But most businesspeople
operating at a survival level in the language can easily afford
to ignore the whole question of grammar.Cognates
As noted above, Chinese tends to have fewer cognates
(borrowed, linked or otherwise related words) with English
than many other languages. Most that exist are words in
English originally borrowed from Chinese. Sometimes, you
can ‘guesstimate’ the Chinese word by moving backward
from the English, but it isn’t always obvious. The English word
‘tea’, for instance, comes from the Cantonese pronunciation
of the characterҶ, which in Cantonese is ‘te’. In the days of
the clipper ships, most tea traded to England (and to America,
often via Boston harbour) came from Canton, hence ‘te’
became ‘tea’. The Mandarin pronunciation, by the way, is
‘cha’, which became ‘chai’ in Hindi after the Indians learned
tea culture from the Chinese, which in turn inspired that
sweet drink now so favoured in Western coffee shops.
Some other English words are more obviously Chinese in
origin, but they are by and large words you will have relatively
little need for these days: ‘kowtow’ (ketou), ‘coolie’ (kuli) and
the like are relics of a long-gone and unlamented period in