BEIJING - I have passed another language milestone: today I ordered an entire meal at McDonald's in Chinese.
They don't teach too much of the necessary vocabulary for ordering in an American chain restaurant in the Tsinghua classrooms, so I've largely had to figure out how to say the necessary things on my own.
Sprite I learned a couple days after arriving, when my Malaysian roommate woke me up at 3 a.m. to announce it was snowing. "Snow! Snow!" he said, incredibly excited. Having just come from Siberia, I was less than impressed, but used it as an opportunity to learn that snow is 雪，also the first character in Sprite.
Hamburger probably came first, I think I might have even learned this on one of my trips to China three years ago. The Chinese way to say it is "HAN-BAO-BAO," an adaptation of the English word that's distinct enough that a person behind the counter in Chengdu or Guilin might know that you're talking about the round bun with the piece of meat in the middle.
Then there were the French Fries, which I just put together today. In class I recently learned that "条" is a word to count long, skinny things. Roads, rivers and dragons all qualify. It makes sense that a french fry would also be in the word, so when I saw it as the second character on the McDonald's menu, I wasn't suprised. But I was a little taken aback at the character before it: 薯. We'd just learned that in class too.
So there it is: 一个中雪碧， 两个汉堡包， 一个种薯条.
That may be some pretty busted Chinese, but at 3:00 p.m. on April 22, 2007, it got me a pretty tasty lunch at the Wudaokou McDonald's.
