Random observation
I've recently undertaken a side project to improve my Chinese in order to fight the ABC/twinkie syndrome, with some success and much frustration. If any of you are wondering why, let's just say that the more scientists/engineers one encounters (or really, the higher up in education one goes), the more likely one is to meet someone from some East Asian country. Usually to them seeing an ABC in the U.S. is like one of us going to Africa and finding an American who only speaks Bushmen. After a while I feel like doing something so that they don't give me one of those horrible looks which stare straight into my soul!
Anyways, I've noticed the more I study Chinese, the funnier the Chinese on Firefly sounds. Not only is this because they use really unwieldy elaborate curses (i.e. think of how in English people usually use a much more succinct "fuck you!" instead of "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"), but one can also tell that whoever they hired to teach the cast tried to teach them using pinyin, but the poor hapless actors and actresses tried to pronounce it as it would phonetically sound if you said it in English, and not the mandarin pronunciation.
Then for some reason they completely make up their own romanizations in official Firefly compendiums, presumably to throw the rest of us off.
I suspect that non-native speakers like me would be a lot more likely to pick up on this than native speakers who just know this stuff, and who tend to go, "you rely on romanization? Sissies!"
Of course I can't really blame them. After all it took months of our 1st-year Mandarin teacher correcting us at every turn and generally pulling teeth until our class sounded even vaguely right (I still wake up at night screaming from the memories), so it would be next to impossible to expect them to get it right without lots of hard practicing.
Anyways, I've noticed the more I study Chinese, the funnier the Chinese on Firefly sounds. Not only is this because they use really unwieldy elaborate curses (i.e. think of how in English people usually use a much more succinct "fuck you!" instead of "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"), but one can also tell that whoever they hired to teach the cast tried to teach them using pinyin, but the poor hapless actors and actresses tried to pronounce it as it would phonetically sound if you said it in English, and not the mandarin pronunciation.
Then for some reason they completely make up their own romanizations in official Firefly compendiums, presumably to throw the rest of us off.
I suspect that non-native speakers like me would be a lot more likely to pick up on this than native speakers who just know this stuff, and who tend to go, "you rely on romanization? Sissies!"
Of course I can't really blame them. After all it took months of our 1st-year Mandarin teacher correcting us at every turn and generally pulling teeth until our class sounded even vaguely right (I still wake up at night screaming from the memories), so it would be next to impossible to expect them to get it right without lots of hard practicing.