Mandarin Loanwords: 咖啡, 沙发, 巧克力 and the Words You Already Know
Coming to Mandarin from a European language, you lose a crutch you may not have known you were using. There are no cognates.
Spanish hands an English speaker información for free. French hands over nation, spelled identically. Mandarin hands over nothing, because the two languages share no ancestor and almost no history of contact until the last century or so.
What Mandarin does have is loanwords, and there are more than you would expect. They come in two kinds, and the difference matters.
Borrowed by sound
Mandarin picks characters that approximate the foreign pronunciation, and accepts that the characters will mean nothing sensible.
| Mandarin | Pinyin | English | What the characters literally say |
|---|---|---|---|
| kā fēi | coffee | nothing, both invented for the job | |
| shā fā | sofa | sand-send | |
| qiǎo kè lì | chocolate | skilful-overcome-strength | |
| jí tā | guitar | lucky-he | |
| shā lā | salad | sand-pull |
Do not look for meaning in these characters. There is none. 沙发 is not a comment on sofas; it is two syllables that sounded about right. This trips up learners who have been correctly taught that Chinese characters carry meaning, because here they deliberately do not.
Sound-borrowings cluster in a few places: brand names, foreign place names, food and drink, and a handful of early imports.
Borrowed by meaning
Far more common, and far more useful. Mandarin translates the idea part by part and builds a new word from characters that already mean something.
| Mandarin | Pinyin | Literally | English |
|---|---|---|---|
| diàn nǎo | electric brain | computer | |
| diàn huà | electric speech | telephone | |
| diàn yǐng | electric shadow | film | |
| huǒ chē | fire vehicle | train | |
| fēi jī | flying machine | aeroplane | |
| shǒu jī | hand machine | mobile phone |
These are easier to remember than anything in the sound-borrowed list, because the parts explain the whole. Notice how much work 电 (diàn, electric) is doing: brain, speech, shadow. Learn one character and three words come with it.
It also means Mandarin technical vocabulary is frequently more transparent than the English equivalent. You need Greek to unpack telephone; you need only two very common characters to unpack 电话.
What to take from this
You cannot decode Mandarin the way you can decode Spanish, and it is worth accepting that early rather than waiting to be disappointed by it. But you can do two things:
Recognise a sound-borrowing when you hear one. If a word sounds vaguely foreign and the characters make no sense together, say it out loud and see whether an English word falls out.
Mine the meaning-borrowings for characters. Every one of them is a free lesson in two or three characters you will meet again elsewhere. 电脑 teaches you 电, and 电 then unlocks a dozen more words.