The plight of Hollywood Chinese

By Confused Laowai | Date: August 31st, 2011 | Category: Language

I must admit, I secretly hope for Chinese to appear in movies so I can impress my friends and smile big time, ’cause I actually understood what is being said. But not only that, but it is interesting to see how actors cope with speaking Chinese. In most cases they do a terrible job. The most recent fail I saw was of Bradley Cooper in Limitless:

Gosh that sounded terrible. Even after analysing what he is saying (lots of food names!) they got the word wrong for napkin. They used 围巾 which means scarf. They should have used 餐巾.

But alas, after seeing that clip in the movies, I got reminded of it today by a video that was posted by Live the Language. It features 10 moments of Chinese in Hollywood. Most of them bad. The video is done in a very entertaining way though! So without further ado, here is Hollywood’s Guide to Speaking Chinese:

So what do you think? Who was the worst? And who coped with it quite well?

Related posts:

Laowai Speaking Chinese on Youtube
Your Mandarin Learning Experience
Tonal Languages and Perfect Pitch
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  • Gleaves

    Popup Chinese had a good discussion of the Limitless clip. 
    http://popupchinese.com/lessons/film-friday/hell-freezes-over

  • http://niel.delarouviere.com NielDLR

    Ah, that’s awesome! Thanks for the link.

  • guest

    Honestly, number 2 sounded pretty good.

  • http://niel.delarouviere.com NielDLR

    Yeah, it seems to be the consensus among people who watched the video. I agree!

  • boldboldness

    The second video is deceptive. Keanu Reeves is just as wooden speaking English.

  • http://niel.delarouviere.com NielDLR

    Ahahaha, True.

  • OO ER

    swearing in chinese!! I like

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  • http://twitter.com/ChinaHopeLive Joel 大江

    Have you seen Serenity, or the Firefly series? They had all kinds of ‘Chinese’ in that (in the future  a US-China alliance rules everything or something like that), but most of the time I had to guess what they were going for.

  • http://niel.delarouviere.com NielDLR

    No, not yet (even though I’m a sci-fi nut!). But I’ve been meaning to check it out for some time now. I’ll try and find it!

  • http://twitter.com/PeckishLaowai Peckish Laowai

    Terrible of me – but this had me in stitches. Some of it’s really funny. Keanu’s got no flow but he’s trying to get the tones right. I’ll give him that :)
    #2 yes is the winner for me – her name is Vanessa Branch – she graduated with a dual major in Chinese and Theatre.

  • http://niel.delarouviere.com NielDLR

    I agree. Keanu is just being his usual deadpan self.

  • http://twitter.com/PeckishLaowai Peckish Laowai

    On second thought – Keanu’s pronunciation is pretty good too. 
    #2 sounds more natural I think is the only difference for me.

  • http://twitter.com/21tigermike Michael A. Robson

    Mostly because Echo is freaking obsessed wth Cooper. Ha!!