Personality disorder
I was in a shop in China, and wanted to haggle for something that I considered too pricey, I decided to use a bit of paper to write the numbers on and haggle rather than struggle with Chinese numbers. I went up to a shop assistant and asked her for a pen in Chinese: Ni bi ma? The assistant looked at me terrified and shook her head without saying anything. I repeated my question several times but with no result. In the end I walked away bemused. After about 5 minutes I realised my mistake and walked back into the shop and sheepishly asked the same assistant: Ni you bi ma? Instead of asking "do you have a pen?", I've initially asked her "are you a pen?" I didn't buy anything.
Sent by: Jamie
Comments
Indeed, bi and ma together sounds like a bad word in Chinese, especially when the tone was not pronounced correctly, I think that's the reason she got terrified
There are 31 Chinese characters pronounced 'Bi' used in daily life. Depends on its tone, it can mean 'to force', 'nose', 'pen', 'currency', 'close (v.)' and even 'killed'. So there is a lot of fun to learn Chinese Mandarin! When talking about pen in Chinese Mandarin, you need to be quite specific, say fountain pen, ball pen or pencil, otherwise it is quite likely to cause embarrassment, even when a Chinese pronounces it with a local dialect.
If pronounced correctly, or in this case, incorrectly, "ni bi ma?" could mean "Have you been told off?"
The shop assistant could have looked terrified because bi said with the first tone in Mandarin corresponds to a less than polite way to say female genitalia! I speak from experience of being misinterpreted in this way!
Yes, you are totally right. Bi, when pronounced with the 1st tone, can mean female's private body area, also, it can mean that a person is stupid. But this bi got these meanings in the last several years, you can consider it as a Mandarin slang. But be cautious when using it, if not 100% sure, ask people for help. They will tell you a lot a words with bi so that you will learn.
What Dave said was right. Maybe she thought you were talking about the female private part in the public.
The reason for the assistant looking terrified was because the word bi depending on the tone you used could mean force.
Christina's point about using more specific words is a good one. In general, single-syllable words are extremely likely to be misinterpreted, even if you use the correct tone. To get an idea of why, you can use (free) MDBG dictionary website (www.mdbg.net) to see how many possibilities there are for any syllable. Most Mandarin words nowadays use two syllables (except for very common words like have or me). It's a bit like prefixes and suffixes in English. You build usable words out of the meaning syllables. So, although it looks like a good idea to learn the simplest (ie shortest) word for something, actually, it's not.
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