I never thought I'd say that, but.... after some two weeks of enduring only Chinese presenters on CCTV9, I can't wait to see the old geezer back. (Mr Maher is a veteran Kiwi TV presenter who was brought in a few years ago to be the main news anchor on the 'international' TV channel here.) Most of the Chinese presenters seem to get their jobs through guanxi - their powerful connections within the state-run media empire - rather than through being able to speak good English or any other relevant talent. Several of them have truly dire, at times almost unintelligible English pronunciation. I sympathise with the difficulties the English language presents to the Chinese, I really do; but, for heaven's sake, you'd think that people who make a lucrative career out of speaking English in public would actually be good at it. Almost every student I've ever taught, almost every Chinese person I know speaks better English than these clowns. Pronouncing final consonants is a particular problem for the Chinese (Mandarin doesn't really have them). Double consonants can be even harder (again, Mandarin doesn't have them). And the letters 'r' and 'l' are some of the trickiest for the Chinese to say (Mandarin has comparable sounds, but they're not produced in quite the same way and are less clearly distinguished from each other). Hence, the 'ld' (or 'rld') combination is one of the toughest challenges for a Chinese speaker of English. However, I don't quite understand how the stress of confronting this challenge so often results in a mangling of the preceding vowel sound (as well, of course, as a complete failure to nail the troublesome 'l'). I am getting fed up of being told about the Woad News every day. (Or, the other day, it was a series of stories about the Woad Bank.) |
2 comments:
The anchors of Dialogue are no better than those of the 7 o'clock news. It's humiliating listening to them discussing "state affairs" with the distinguished guests with their CCTV-glish.
Actually, I don't mind Tian Wei too much: she communicates effectively, even though it does often sound as though she's choking on a mouthful of marbles.
And I can't help feeling a bit sorry for Yang Rui - he's such a pompous oaf, I find him more pitiable than annoying.
My favourite Yang Rui moment came just after the Indian Ocean tsunami. He was interviewing a Swedish guest (I think it might have been the Ambassador to China; or maybe a leading journalist) about the Swedish loss of life in the disaster. Sweden had been particularly hard-hit, with, I think, something over 2,000 Swedish tourists dying in Thailand. The guest observed that this was the largest single day death toll his country had suffered since the Thirty Years' War. Yang Rui, panicking at being confronted with his own ignorance of history, plunged in recklessly with an unnecessary intervention. "You mean the Second World War," he said, making it sound more like a correction of his guest than a question. "No, the Thirty Years War - one of the biggest ever European wars, in the 1600s," his guest explained patiently. "Sweden was neutral in the Second World War," he added.
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