Noisy tourists
(Sign in the Humble Administrator’s garden: Suzhou, China)
There is no resisting the temptation to
a) laugh, and
b) take a photograph.
There is something hysterical about language mistakes that just makes me laugh; I must take this moment to point out I make many of my own and one of the worst recently was mixing up two words at a dinner with locals. The words are completely different, but the intonation is identical so somehow I confused ‘banana’ and ‘teach’ in Mandarin. It led to me proclaiming the immortal phrase, “I banana in a school”. Needless to say I was rather embarrassed, but on the other hand, I wondered if this foolish mistake might endear me to my new-found friends…
This photograph is from a garden in Suzhou where there were tens of these signs in abundance, encouraging us not to ‘loud’ in the area. In Zhouzhuang there were signs running along the theme of ‘please do not touch’ but read ‘keep your hands off’ which I felt was on the impolite side, but at least I understood this one. There are also the obligatory errors in menus, ‘boiled rise’, ‘fried crap’ and so on which again, never fail to bring a little smile to my face.
Not evelyone engrish first ranguage.
You’ll have seen http://engrishfunny.com/ then?