Make Like You Speak English, not French-Chinese

Standard English as well as Americanish uses many French words because the French ran England for 200 years and français leaked into the lexicon. The resident French invaders were themselves leaky:  England and English infiltrated them to the extent that, in only a few generations, they were no longer welcome in France as French; they'd become hicks and bumpkins.  Well, we all are to Parisiens.


France backed the English colonies in America during the War of Independence; I believe early Americans could have happily adopted more use of French words just to perturb the Royalists.

We now seem to use more French words in Americanish than Britons do in English. On the other hand, many Brits can actually get along in French ... and without raising their voices. Or at least they pronounce the odd word or phrase reasonably well, avoiding the articulation of ending consonants and the flat, nasal 'aaaah' of the Americanish 'a'.  Britons will say, 'Fron-ss' versus North America's 'Fr-Ants'.  

Brits recognize that the word 'voilà' actually begins with the letter 'v' (funny, that) and not a 'w' as Americanish speakers seem to think, inasmuch as they're forever saying 'wah-lah', which I believe is the name of a rather unappetizing Cantonese dish.

All this winding up leads to the real question of why you are pronouncing the name of the Chinese capital city as if you were French.  Well? 

In Chinese the letter 'j', as in Beijing, is pronounced no differently than the way it's pronounced in the English word 'jingle'.  Do you think it's cool and 'continental' to pronounce the 'j' as if it were the 'zheh' sound in the French word 'azure', meaning 'blue'?  Where did this pseudo-French pronunciation come from?

Well, I suppose it IS 'continental' sounding but it's also an incorrect pronunciation -- there is no 'zheh' sound in Chinese at all.   You'd think this mispronunciation would be especially annoying to Chinese, but they are remarkably untroubled by your linguistic provinciality, a French word, by the way.  They're probably just grateful you aren't butchering it worse by saying 'Peking' for 'Beijing'.

(Lengthy Aside: Written Chinese is not an alphabetically-written language, but in the early 1950s, China introduced a partially phonetic method of 'spelling' Chinese words, a system called 'Pinyin', to assist foreigners in acquiring the tongue.  When I spell Chinese words here, I am using Pinyin -- except for the required tonal marks written above the vowels to indicate a meaning-modifying pitch change.  Mainly because I'm lazy.

I said partially phonetic because in Pinyin there are non-phonetic, alphabetic representations of sounds, like using 'x' to represent the sound 'sh' and 'zh' to represent the sound 'j'.  

Yep, that's right, a word spelled in Pinyin as 'Zhang', also does NOT contain a sound like the 'zheh' sound of the French word 'azure'.  It's pronounced like 'Jang', with the 'a' not the 'a' of 'thanks' but of the 'a' sound in 'father'.

The word 'jing' means 'capital'; 'Bei Jing' means 'northern capital', 'Nan Jing' means 'southern capital' and 'Dong Jing' means 'eastern capital', which, by the way is Tokyo, Japan.  Sorry, there's no 'Xi Jing', meaning 'western capital', but that's likely being reserved for Washington, D.C.)

Remember, think: Bei-Jingle Bells.  告诉你的朋友 / Dites à vos amis.