Al Roker Needs ChinesePod!

hankfdh
August 19, 2008, 01:33 AM posted in General Discussion
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calkins
August 19, 2008, 01:53 AM

Ha ha, that's hilarious Hank!  Some of the announcers have really butchered Chinese as well.

I was watching the women's badminton final between Zhang Ning and Xie Xingfang, and the announcer kept saying Zhang like Zhong (as in Cheech and Zhong)...it actually sounded much worse than that.  It was driving me crazy because he said her name every 10 seconds!

You would think these announcers would get at the very least a brief introduction to Chinese pronounciations...or at least have someone tell them how to correctly pronounce athlete's names.  Should be part of their job.

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xiaohu
August 19, 2008, 02:03 AM

I couldn't agree more!

Al Roker is teaching everybody to say "Gong Xi" like "The Gong Show" Gong, and (if you want to be extremely nit-picky) "Xi" pronounced like our English word "She" instead of with the flattened tongue sound.

I don't expect for them to get the "Xi" part totally correct, they can say it like the English word "She" not a problem, BUT...I really think that if you're going on National television to teach everyone how the Chinese say, "Congratulations" then you should at least get the pronunciations CLOSE. 

For God's sakes, anyone who listens to Al Roker, then goes to their local Chinese restaurant to tell the Chinese people "Gong She"...is going to be met with a bunch of blank stares!

Besides that, I was also thinking AT LEAST since China is the host country, the announcers should be required to take a few weeks course in Chinese to learn the correct pronunciations of the athletes names.  If the games were hosted in Germany, Russia, Japan, Armenia, Vietnam, Thailand, WHEREVER, I'd expect the same.

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lordstanley
August 19, 2008, 06:03 AM

At least Roker almost pronounced Beijing correctly, which is more than can be of said of just about anyone else on NBC. Where in the world did the pronunciation "Bei-zhing" come from instead of "Bei-jing". It's not pronounced that way in Chinese, it's not Romanized that way in Pinyin, "zhi" isn't common in English. Do people think it sounds more mysterious that way? I'm especially disappointed with Bob Costas, the worst offender in my opinion. I didn't mind him when he was a baseball nerd because I'm a baseball nerd too so I enjoy the way he pores over trivia, but it's shocking that he doesn't pay the same attention to detail in learning how to pronounce the host city after NBC spent a gazillion dollars on the rights. It grates on me everytime I hear Costas say it, that pretentious twit.