Speaking Asian

Back in the states, I used to tell my Asian friends that they were “speaking asian” when they would do things like forget to pluralize nouns (I ate three apple) or conjugate verbs incorrectly (I’m eaten already). I’ve noticed a similar (albeit reversed) thing happening when I speak English lately. In Thai and Japanese, it’s very common to soften your comments by adding a bit of uncertainty to them. For example if you ask a starving Thai person if he’s hungry, his reply will generally be “Ohh, I could eat but no rush”. I was talking with a Japanese friend recently and broke out laughing when he said to me “yeah so this friend of mine sort-of maybe died, I think”.

Where I have noticed this uncertainty appearing most is in teaching yoga, I’ll say things to students like “yeah, it might be better if you moved your foot forward some” which literally means “you’re doing the asana wrong, move your foot now”. I’m not totally sure why it’s creeping into my teaching; it could be that I’m use Thai so much in class and when I use English, my brain is still stuck with Thai grammar patterns.

This all brings up an interesting point about translation issues. In the example about being hungry, were that dialog in a Thai movie, translating it into English could be tricky. If the two people were speaking in Thai, they would understand that “Ohh, I could eat but no rush” means “Yes, I’m starving” and the plot could continue along (in which case, the English subtitle should read “Yes, I’m starving). If one of the speakers was not native Thai, there is a chance he would misunderstand the implied meaning, in which case it wouldn’t be so obvious how to translate into English.