Thursday, December 31, 2009

German Chinese Restaurant

December 31, 2009. I haven't posted anything in a while because of holiday travels (spent a few weeks in Europe). Before I resume my regular postings, I thought I'd share a particularly memorable experience: eating dinner in a Chinese restaurant in a small German village.



Here's a picture of what was on the table when we arrived: each setting included a quintessential German beer coaster and a napkin teaching Germans various Chinese phrases. Left hand column: "Guten Appetit" = 請您慢用 (qǐng nín màn yòng) - more literally, "please eat slowly." Note the German orthography here: "jon" = "yòng" since J = Y sound.



Our fortune cookies came with fortunes in 4 languages (English and German on one side, Dutch and French on the other).



Here's a picture of the spread. The duck, in foreground, was eine Haus-Spezialität (house specialty). Yum!

4 comments:

  1. I don't have a photo, but the menu was in German with (reasonably accurate) English translations underneath.

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  2. The beer coaster advertises two varieties of Räuberchen, light (blond) and dark (schwarz). The Chinese writing on the napkin uses 您 (nín), the polite form of "you."

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  3. Good stuff. I wasn't aware of how Pinyin assumes English rendering of letters (and even then not entirely the same). One thing I do miss about Europe was the sheer number of languages. I remember buying popcicles for the little one from Italy, and with 12 languages printed on it. I also miss speaking Polish with co-workers and learning French too, as well as a litlte Irish.

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  4. Interesting - I've been accustomed to Pinyin for so long that I hadn't really thought about the eccentric quality of that romanization scheme before (many letters pronounced like standard English, but some like x and c are not). I love the open coexistence of so many languages in Europe too - something you don't see to the same extent in places like Japan or Taiwan.

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