Being a Banana
I bet everyone know what is on that picture. It’s bananas, obviously. Yellow, soft and sweet tropical fruit, sold quite cheaply in Malaysia and freakingly expensive in the United States and Europe (as I know).
So, what does bananas have to do with my entry today? As I know, there’s people tend to call a chinese who doesn’t speak and write chinese a banana. I can speak mandarin and hokkien, a little cantonese (due to TVB Drama), but I cant write or read in chinese. My classmates in school call me a banana. I’m used to that. I know my chinese education is just up to the kindergarten standard. All I can read and write is words like ???, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ? and so on. Pathethic, don’t you think so? X/
Due to the banana-ness in me, I search up and down in the internet and discovered a great tool that could translate all chinese text from the internet to English. It’s the Google Translate.
A while ago, my friend posted something in her blog. AND IT’S IN CHINESE!! Damn it… I’m so curious what she wrote so I decided to translate what she wrote in her blog. This is the translation I got. By the way, italics are words that is not translated, that’s what she type.
Removed. I’m sorry
Result? Im totally blurred. I don’t even have any idea what the hect is that Google translating. Actually I wanted to ask her what she write, but after I got the translation saying, “Any person looked this blog. Hopes you do not have again to ask”, I guess I will just keep quiet.
Bah~ I regreted for not learning chinese in the first place.. Maybe this holiday after my SPM, I will learn chinese.
She read my blog. She’s worried that people she knows read this post, and know she’s the one writing it. I decided to remove the translation. I’m sorry.
Popularity: 1% [?]
October 19th, 2005 at 9:56 pm
Bananas are damn expensive in Melbourne. A$3.50-A$4.50 for a kilo. I can even get them free in Sibu.
I learnt Chinese from primary 1-6 only. So i guess i’m semi bananatic. But i can read some, and i converse well. Hmm.. what’s the benchmark of a full banana i wonder.
October 19th, 2005 at 10:06 pm
then, I am quarter bananatic then. I have friends who can’t even converse in chinese, AT ALL!!! they speak english at home X/
October 20th, 2005 at 1:58 am
Haha. I can read enough to understand certain para.
Went for off-school tuition when I was little. But quitted halfway, and it was Malay-school all the way. Still speak at home, tho – Mandarin and other dialects.
NJStar is very useful to help “decode” some characters to its pinyin. (To Chinese-literate dudes and dudettes: yes la i know, damn pitifying la have to resort to such measures).
I use NJStar often. “Radical lookup”. Enter the strokes, to get the pinyin
Have to do for each character la. But we know some of the words already mah, rite…
October 20th, 2005 at 12:38 pm
Hmm… i never tried NJStar before. I didn’t know NJStar can decode those characters to pinyin… Looks like the chinese learning process won’t be that hard after my SPM. Use Google Translate to get the meaning, use NJStar to learn how to read.. X/
Man, i still feel pathethic…
October 20th, 2005 at 3:58 pm
i guess i’m a little better, at least i can read and use my computer to write some chinese and partially read the newspaper and understanding what its trying to say…
October 20th, 2005 at 7:35 pm
hey, i’m a banana too eheh 8).
October 20th, 2005 at 7:45 pm
Great Subkiller! I don’t think you’re a banana at all!!
Phoebe, you’re not a banana. You’re not even chinese leh… X/ You’re mix
A non-chinese who doesn’t know chinese is not banana. A chinese who doesn’t read/write/speak is banana.
And me? Semi-bananatic, since I cant read/write but speak chinese X/
October 20th, 2005 at 11:43 pm
huh?banana??what does that mean??
err..now learn chinese??wil that be too late??ahah…nevermind lah..in chinese “huo dao lao xue dao lao” 
all da best! 
October 21st, 2005 at 10:47 am
but i do consider my self quater-banana…lol…since i’m still poor in my chinese
October 21st, 2005 at 8:28 pm
hehe, guess what? Actually, we’re both not bananas. I did some ‘research’ on the term banana and i found out that it actually means asian people who think that they are more european/american than asian. Banana,
October 21st, 2005 at 8:35 pm
oh yah, and by the way, there is also another term for banana. i think, it’s eggman or something. basically, it refers to the chinese who were raised in america. you know the ABC thing, ‘american born chinese’. so these chinese abandon their own heritage and adopt the western culture…something like that X/
October 22nd, 2005 at 12:10 am
aaah… i see, i see… At least I still speak chinese, in a way I still remembers that I’m still a chinese.
Ok, I’ll change the term. I am cina sesat then. X/
October 23rd, 2005 at 12:19 pm
then i prefer banana more than the word sesat…
October 23rd, 2005 at 12:44 pm
wait… no need call anything la.. Proud to be chinese
October 25th, 2005 at 12:39 am
Uh-oh… Google still caches your “translation”…
Perhaps you might want to add this in your meta tags:
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />October 25th, 2005 at 12:55 am
thanks for the tip, Azmeen.