The Bureau

One of the many jobs I did when I lived in China was working at a recording studio attached to the country's biggest audio-visual publishing house as 'token British female'.

Over the four years I lived there I must have recorded hundreds of hours of English language learning materials. These were used across China as part of the national English curriculum. Some of the materials I read were excellent - a couple won awards for innovation. Sad to report though, most were utter dross: derivative, plagiarised, inaccurate, unhelpful.

The Chinese concept of 'face' played a huge part in making most of the materials not only poor quality but grammatically, lexically and stylistically incorrect. As these texts were often written by Chinese people in managerial positions, the correctness of their English could not be challenged by the grunts in the recording studio, and certainly not by cocky western monkeys like me. After the first few months I gave up pointing out that 'no one EVER says this!' and just read it out with as much panache as I could muster. Most Chinese students who studied English in primary or secondary schools during the first half of this decade are no doubt familiar with the sound of me suppressing gales of laughter. Perhaps there are even Chinese people speaking English now with a sardonic Scottish accent - I like to think so.

When I was in Shanghai this month I went for a reunion at the recording studio and did a five-hour stint. There was less grammatical innacuracy than I remembered, but the materials were still being used primarily as a way of promulgating propaganda and outdated, factually innacurate nonsense. They were often unintentionally hysterically funny.

Some choice cuts:

A: What were Class Three students doing while Class One students were having a Chinese lesson yesterday morning?
B: They were having a lesson on the History of the Chinese Revolution.
A: What were they doing during the sports hour while many other students were playing ball games?
B: They were doing bodybuilding exercises.

A: You were preparing a new lesson around eight in the evening, weren't you?
B: No, I was reading a magazine article on shadowboxing.

Conversational tips:
Did you have any orientation programme about campus life for entering students?

Monologue:
I think playing mahjong for gambling is a bad habit. A lot of people play it very late at night, so they don't have a good rest; some people are so obsessed with playing mahjong that they don't care about their work or study; other people lose a lot of money and this lead [sic] to the break up of their family, to name just few [sic].

Fish farming promises to be a good way to produce large quantities of food. The culture of fish and shellfish is an ancient skill practised in the past mainly by Oriental peoples.

The technology to harvest the sea continues to improve. By the year 2000, experts believe that the problems of exploiting the food, minerals, and energy sources of the sea will be largely solved.

And my personal favourite:

A: What's this called in English?
B: It's called a pencil-sharpener.
A: What's it made of?
B: It's made of mental.
A: Where is it sold?
B: It's sold at the stationer's.
A: What is it used for?
B: It's used for sharpening pencils.