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October I believe is the crab season on the lake and it is packed with people eating crabs, the rest of the year it’s a ghost town and all the restaurants suronding the lake are closed. The crabs are also so popular because the water is so pure, my daughter can eat a hundred of them, lol.

 

Or Jade, depending on how you say it.

 

Yep, octopus, fish, jade and rain… not a confusing language at all, lol.

 

Why, oh why, China!

 

China is so ancient that there are no answers to such queries...it just is.

 

Every country is ancient.
China has changed the official language several times during its history, even during recent history, and it has had language reforms just like European languages.
I think they are just happy with pronouncing the same word in different ways or using it in different contexts.

 

Yes, they are many different languages, we have gone out to dinner often with a big group and sometimes there are conversations going around the dinner table in 3 or 4 different languages, that half the people don’t understand, in Beijing my wife can sometimes not understand their version of Manderine and she is fluent in Manderian, Shawhanese (sp) and Cantonese. One night after midnite we were trying to catch a taxi and he didn’t want to give us a ride… he was mumbling in Shawhanese because most people don’t speak the native language for Shanghai that we were bothering him he was on a break, an insult… the taxied drivers are funded by the government and not permitted to deny service, so to his surprise my wife replied on break, OK you can have a break and she called a friend… he got a month long break. There’s also something called black cabs that operate independently over charging those are illegal and to be avoided.

 

It is always such fun when people think you can't understand their language. I get that a lot with Dutch people abroad, because I look more Mediterranean than Dutch. So they get a shock when I reply in Dutch.

 

English holds up its end:

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The English verb "set" has the most definitions in the English language, according to Guinness World Records.The word "run" also has many meanings, with 645 distinct meanings in its verb form alone.

 

Yes, AJ...but some are more venerable than others, as I'm sure you would agree. The U.S. has almost 250 years since its infancy...more than an order of magnitude younger than the hoary lifetime of the Chinese peoples an' their profound history.
We're still in diapers, not yet capable of raising our head off the floor or turning over to try crawling...but somehow have the temerity to demand a place among peoples an' nations that have been at the forefront of enlightened awareness for millennia. A nation of infants, as typified by our abysmal political landscape. I could go on...

 

The most frequently spoken word in the English language… ear!

 

As in passing a joint.. ear, lol.

 

So that you can make really good insults and look all "who me" innocent while doing so?

 

True. I've said it before, English is considered a 'poor' language because it has so few words compared to many other languages.
Of course English-speakers can express themselves just as well as speakers of other languages, they just have a more roundabout way of saying things. For instance they have to make clear which "set" they mean.
To us Dutch, with a 'richer' language, English sounds more poetic than our language, because Dutch has a separate word for almost everything we need to say.
German has even more words than Dutch. You guessed it, they are more precise, very German.

 

I was doing a little research on languages when I met my wife, there are high level and low level languages and English is a high level language, Chinese is low level not an insult to Chinese just the opposite but it was pissing off my wife until I explained the context of the words. English has fewer words because of the more easily understood contex, Chinese language seems to require long explanations to establish a context but is more precise making it difficult for my wife to translate for me I guess it is very difficult to switch back and forth and still understand and follow a conversation unless like my daughter learning both at a young age she has no issues where words in English exist to convey the same meaning.

 

For me it’s usually TV set, lol.