The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[DG97EEB]

A funny example - in Indiana Jones movie an American lady tries to sign in Chinese. From the comments you can learn that it is totally impossible to understand for the real Chinese speakers and someone did a hard, detective work to get what she meant to say 

Well, I remember my wife trying to order 'a cup of tea' in England, using her phonetical interpretation of what English sounds. They just could not understand what she wanted.  She was then pretty amazed  when I asked for the tea saying what, in her mind, sounded exactly the same... and the tea came to the table.

Morale: a phonetic transcription of a foreign language will be, at best, an incomprehensible mess, unless one knows a lot about phonetics.

I have this with a French friend.. I say something in French, he corrects me and repeats the exact same thing back... It's maddening... Our favourite word is Mile Feuille... He explained that Feuille should be pronounced like a plastic ruler being sprung against a desktop...