Take a walk in my mind...

You know what really grinds my gears? Bad Chinglish for the sake of being bad Chinglish. So right now I'm editing a children's TV show for the Chinese market and there's a small 1 minute segment within the program that's supposed to teach children the English word for the object the characters found in that particular episode. Now, in pulling double duty, I go in and record the English work and spell it out a few times. Done. Easy Peezy.

Wrong.

Apparently, I don't pronounce it "correctly".

Case in point. One of the words is "hiccup". I pronounce it as we would back in the United States, with a soft "p" at the end that cuts off the air and ends the word.

I was told that I needed to pronounce the word as:

"hiccuPUH"

with an over exaggeration on the end of the P resulting in an extra syllable being added.

The reason why, is that in Mandarin Chinese, no words end in a consonant (except for a soft "n" that sollows certain vowels) and as such, I grew up being called "Edawada". Yes, a normally 2 syllable word was, and still is, being stretched into a 4 syllable word.

Re-fucking-tarded.