Merry mix-ups when you think local, speak global

Once I asked a Chinese colleague who visited my place: "Aren't you cold?" "Yes," he replied. So I shut the window, thinking he was feeling cold. I soon realized that he meant just the opposite as he was almost sweating.

When my colleague said "yes", he meant "I confirm the content of your question is right". But for me and other people who speak French, English, Italian or Spanish, the natural answer is "No (I'm not cold)".

Foreign friends who visit China often ask me why the Chinese say "yes" when they mean "no". Being an Italian descendant who grew up in French-speaking Quebec and spent decades in China, I couldn't help noticing the funny misunderstandings when people speak a foreign language while thinking in their mother tongue.

Once I was on a train and a Chinese university lecturer told me a story about his sister and brother-in-law. In oral Chinese, the same pronoun "ta" covers both "he" and "she". As he used both pronouns indifferently in English, I was soon mixed up, jumping from male to female. I could only make out whom he was talking about through verbs such as "to be pregnant" or "to shave his beard".

English speakers of French often find the possessive adjectives hard to remember. In "He gives his salary to his mother", the possessor of both salary and mother is a male speaker. But in French, we'd say "Il donne son (masculine) salaire sa (feminine) mre". In this sense, Chinese is as simple as English in using "ta" to say "he" and "ta de" as "his".

Westerners often find family relationship terms in Chinese the most confusing. The words "guma", "yima" and "jiuma" all mean "aunt", but the first means your father's sister, the second is your mother's sister, and the last is the wife of your mother's brother.