Wow, this topic was cut out for me! Even though I've been learning Chinese for about 30 years, I still have a lot of learning to do, and I often get things wrong! Luckily I haven't made too many catastrophic mistakes.
I have made plenty of mistakes myself, but I am reminded of something that happened to someone else. The Chinese language is based on tones. Let me give you an example of what I mean by "tone". In some ways, the English language also has tones. For example, many people might say "How are you?", but emphasize the "you" in this way; "How are YOU?" Notice how on the word "you" your voice starts high and then drops? It's a falling tone. The Chinese language also uses a falling tone for one of their tones. In the English language, we can choose to emphasize whichever word we want by adding the falling tone. We could say, "How ARE you?", giving a falling tone to the word "are". Similarly, we could say, "HOW are you?", by giving a falling tone to the word "how". In Chinese, however, a word with a falling tone is always said with the falling tone. You would emphasize that word by exaggerating the falling tone. But you would never say it in a flat way. There are other tones as well, and each word is always said with that tone.
Most Chinese are used to foreigners not being able to say tones right. They can usually understand what we are trying to say, even if we use no tones at all. But really a mark of good Chinese language skill is to use the correct tone. When writing a Chinese character, you cannot tell what tone is used for the word. Everyone just knows what tone goes with which character. But if you are speaking, and not writing, it is really important to get the tone right so that they know which word you are using. For example, the word "ma" with one tone means Mom. The word "ma" with another tone means to scold. The word "ma" with still another tone means horse. You really have to be careful to not use the word horse when referring to your Mom!
So I heard of someone who really messed up with a whole sentence worth of tones. Instead of asking the waitress for "Yi wan shui jiao", which if said correctly means a bowl of dumplings, they accidently used the wrong tones. In asking the waitress for "Yi wan shui jiao", they said the right sounds, but used the wrong tones and asked for "A night's sleep". Those two things are hardly interchangeable. :)
But like I said, the Chinese can usually figure out what you are trying to say. One day I went to buy an external hard drive. The word in chinese for computer is "dian nao" which literally translated means "electric brain". I didn't know how to say hard drive. I told the sales clerk that I didn't know how to say in Chinese what I wanted to buy, but that I wanted to buy an external brain for my electric brain. (computer) She laughed at first, but she understood! I am now the proud owner of a new hard drive.
Probably one of the funniest mess ups I've heard, happened when I was a missionary. One poor young missionary never could get the knack of Chinese. Even at the end of his mission, he still not only confused the tones, but confused the sounds as well. It was quite humorous to hear him trying to teach about the Prophet at the head of our church, but accidentally use the word banana instead. Also not interchangeable. :D
I can't wait to find out what the other consortium members have written about this topic. Drop by their blogs if you would like to find out:
Rummuser, Anu, Ashkok, Gaelikka, Grannymar, , Padmum, Magpie11, andAkanksha,Will Knot, Maria the Silver Fox, Anki, Nema Noor Paul Plain Joe, and Rohit, Black watertown, The Old Fossil, our newest member MAXI! and last, but not least SHACKMAN! :)