GuavaTalk Blog

Steve, our CFO, and I had lunch at Lush today, which is just around the corner from our offline school 1on1 Mandarin.  It’s a cozy upstairs cafe that is open 24/7 and serves convincing American brunch, burgers, salads and sandwiches.  I happened to overhear an older gentlemen asking about what I thought sounded like bao1 zi1. If you speak Chinese, you might understand that to mean 包子 (bao1zi1) or a kind of steamed bun stuffed with pork and perhaps leek or cabbage, which is usually a staple of Beijing street food fare–not something you would be able to find at Lush.  However, I quickly realized that he was trying to say bao4 zhi3  or 报纸, meaning newspaper.  I guess he had left his newspaper at the restaurant and had returned to collect it.  Unfortunately, when he said bao1 instead of bao4 and zi1 instead of zhi3, he had effectively asked for a steamed bun when he really wanted his newspaper back… Funny how the Chinese language works. One of the concepts our Beijing-based teachers at GuavaTalk emphasize is the importance of pronunciation and tones, especially at the beginner level.   In this enormous country where hundreds of regional dialects are spoken, local Beijingers know that their Beijing accent is what pu3tong1hua4–Mandarin Chinese is supposed to sound like.