Poster lesson

While queuing at a cable car I saw this poster and it was striking me as a great example to underline how different Mandarin functions as a language compared to German or English. 

The poster is just a general safety note. While the upper part "安全生产宣传标语" is read in the modern way, from left to right (like most written Mandarin these days), the main content is written in the classical way and should be read from upper right to lower left. Here's a translation word by word:

安全 = Security

一万天 = lit. one ten thousand days 

事故 = Accident

一瞬间 = one blink of an eye

So, first of all, there are no spaces. This means that you have to know which characters belong together semantically. This is not always easy and actually requires you to understand what the whole sentence is supposed to mean. For example, 安 (peace) and 全 (whole, all) also have a meaning just by themselves and thus don't necessarily have to go together. The concept of a word itself is fluid in Chinese, there are widely accepted combinations of characters that create a meaning and they will usually appear in dictionaries, but for a Chinese person with an understanding of the meaning of the single characters, creating a new one or understanding a combination that's unusual wouldn't be a problem either. Now is that a word? 

Second, Chinese is brimming with proverbs and lyrical terms. Take the 万天. The first character means ten thousand, the second one days. Of course, 10 000 days is not a specific amount of time, but rather a symbol for a really, really long time. While in English people tend to use more borrowed words from Latin, French or Greek the more educated they are, Chinese academics and intellectuals would set themselves apart by using four-character proverbs over and over. To say that somebody is scared you could say 恐怖，which means exactly that. But you could also say 不寒而栗, which means not-cold-but-trembling. For reasons I don’t know myself the 4-character-expression is the gold standard of linguistic aesthetic in Mandarin and these proverbs exist by the thousands.

The mixture of a super simplified syntax with a knack for poetic but vague expressions defines Mandarin and causes headaches for foreigners trying to learn it because even though you might have learned the characters and even their meaning, you will still find yourself struggling to wrap your head around the way thoughts are expressed.

Back to the example, it literally translates as:

Security tenthousand days,

Accident in the blink of an eye.

By now, it shouldn't be too hard to guess what the poster is expressing. It's just a reminder to be attentive and careful. Though still - it doesn't entirely reveal its point. Will minding security guarantee you a long life? Or is it a concept that you always (tenthousand days) have to keep in mind? 

Maybe now you can see why it is said that Mandarin is the most beautiful language and nothing compares to its poetry, but it sucks at conveying precise information in a concise way (like say, describing a physics experiment). That is very much the opposite of German, which with its endless capability of combining nouns to super-descriptive megaterms (Krankenkassenbeitragsabrechnungsstelle = The department of a health insurance in charge of charging the contributions) has found the ultimate way of expressing complex concepts without losing words, but is not widely considered beautiful.