I finally watched Everything Everywhere All at Once and there was one scene at the beginning that perfectly captures a snippet of life in a Chinese-American immigrant household.

It's the pronoun scene. The main character keeps referring to her daughter's girlfriend as "he" and gets visibly frustrated when the daughter corrects her that Becky is a "she."

First, the bilingual dialogue is spot on! It happens so fast that it's hard to keep up with the subtitles, but if you understand Mandarin, you probably laughed at the exchange.

You might notice that Chinese immigrants are terrible at #pronouns. This is because in spoken Chinese, there is only one generic pronoun, "ta" which translates to "that person"

Any child of Chinese immigrants knows the embarrassment of correcting their parents in front of their friends when they keep calling male friends she and female ones he. It only recently occurred to me why this is.

I love this scene for bringing this to the fore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr4kJuZGQPI

Everything Everywhere All At Once, pronoun scene

YouTube

Now, there is a twist to this pronoun story and it's more fun if you experience it for yourself.

Go to Google Translate and type in "him" in an English to Simplified Chinese translation and press the audio button to hear the word spoken.

https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=zh-CN&text=him%0A&op=translate

Now change it to "she".

Keep going, change it to "it".

Whaaaat?

So there actually are gendered pronouns in Chinese. They're written differently, but are pronounced exactly the same! Is that wild or what?

No wonder why native Chinese speakers get completely flummoxed by pronouns. Look at where they're coming from.

That Abbott and Costello "Who's on First" skit ain't got nothin on Chinese speakers and their struggles just trying to refer to the person next to them.

Do you mean him? Ta!
Or her? Ta!
It? Ta!

This quirk may apply to other East Asian languages too, but I can only speak Mandarin (and not very well).

#pronouns #funny

@sysop408 Interesting! It is the complete opposite in Spanish, where everything is gendered. Things are gendered.

There is "el", masculine. And "la", feminine. There's also "ella" for feminine, that's used when referencing a living being.

But that is why you have El Niño and La Niña. And which pronoun you use is based on the end of the noun. For the example above, "o" is masculine, and "a" feminine.

This sort of thing trips up everyone when learning Spanish for the first time, understandably.

@fourjuaneight @sysop408

There are enough exceptions to that "o" and "a" business to warrant some study.

La mano. Dame la manita.

El día: Buenos días