Free Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows

circle game into a bit of an English pronoun lesson. Each one had to tell the age of the kid sitting next to him: “This is Ming. She is twelve years old.” Or “This is Liang. He is eleven years old.” The kids caught on right away, but when one would confuse “he” and “she,” the rest, like vultures, would home in screaming mercilessly “HE! HE!!” or “SHE! SHE!!”
    Mixing up he and she in English is a classic error among the Chinese. I came to expect that even the most fluent Chinese speakers of English would eventually say something like “Your son looks just like your husband; she is tall and handsome!”
    This confusion never occurs on formal occasions, like speeches or presentations. I never see it in print. But the he/she mix-ups regularly show up in everyday conversation. “Oh yeah, my wife does that,” two different Americans with very fluent English-speaking Chinese spouses told me. A Chinese woman who spent time abroad and speaks with an easy American accent told me, “I hear myself talking and the wrong word just pops out before I know it!”
    What is going on here? The simplest answer—that he and she are both said as tā in Chinese—is tempting, but it is not enough. The concept of gender is simple, and the Chinese commonly master much worse sticklers in English, like verb tenses. Certainly they could master this, especially considering tā he and tā she are represented in their written forms by two different characters: tā he is and she is .
    I was chatting about tā and the characters for writing it with a calligrapher in Xizhou one day. (Chinese chat about things like this!) He told me that the character for she is a new arrival, created not even 100 years ago, in the 1920s, during one of the many periods when the Chinese were debating about their writing systems. Should they simplify some characters? (Mao did this later.) Should they use a phonetic writing system? (There have been several; Pinyin is now taught in schools.) Should they create a new character for she to distinguish it from he? Arguments raged, and eventually the character was accepted, although a brief flirtation with introducing a new way of pronouncing as yī got no traction. The new character for she/ tā would seem logical to Chinese speakers, since the left-hand part of the character is the character for woman.
    A further explanation about the confusions with tā is that the Chinese aren’t as smitten with using pronouns at all, including tā , as are speakers of most Western languages. Pronouns just aren’t that important to the Chinese, and they omit them frequently. A good rule of thumb for Chinese would be: unless you really need to use the pronoun to clarify the context, or highlight the antecedent of the pronouns, or otherwise draw attention in some way, just leave it out. From the Chinese point of view, I suppose they might say that the rest of the world litters its speech with unnecessary pronouns.
    An example in one of my grammar books illustrates how frequently “I” and all the other pronouns can easily be omitted in Chinese. Try to read the following (translated) passage without saying any of the words that appear in parentheses:
That day I went to see an old friend. (I) knocked on the door (but) nobody answered. (I) thought that he must have gone out, (and) so (I) left a note (and) pushed (it) through the letter box in the door indicating that (I) would come back another day. (I) also said that as soon as (he) comes back, it would be nice if (he) could drop me a note. (I) never expected that a few days later (I) would receive an anonymous letter saying that he had already moved out. 15
    During my early days of trying to speak Chinese, when I still fell back on word-for-word translations from English, I grew to be self-conscious about saying wǒ, wǒ, wǒ (I, I, I) all the time. “I’m afraid I’m late.” “I’m hungry.” “I’m terribly lost.” I knew this wasn’t quite right, but it felt