In Hunan, my name is "You La"

This probably doesn’t interest many of you, but I find it quite interesting. Yesterday I talked to a boy from the Hunan province. He couldn’t pronounce the letter ‘N’ very well. Instead he said ‘L’. The funny thins was that he didn’t realise it, or hear the difference? He thought that when I said ‘niu nai’ (=milk -牛奶) and he said ‘liu lai’ it sounded the same?!

The funniest bit was with my name. My Chinese name is ‘You Na’ （友娜）. When he said it, I became ‘You La’. And while I went on and said: ‘not La, NA… You Na Na Na….’ He repeated it: ‘You La La La!’

(Note: ‘la la’ = Chinese slang for lesbian. Anyone wanna know more go to the night club ‘La la land’ in Shanghai).

Except for this little thing I must say that this Hunan boy’s pronunciation was very easy to understand. Much easier than the ‘Suzhou hua’ (= the local dialect in Suzhou) that I am trying to get my head around (Suzhou locals don’t use the ‘sh’ sound but simply the ‘s’… So it’s very hard not to mix up ‘shi’ (ten -十) with ‘si’ (four -四) because when they say ten it sounds like ‘si’ (four) ). And the way he described Hunan to me it sounded so nice that it made me wanna pay a visit. Also, my favourite Chinese restaurant in Shanghai is a Hunan restaurant, so the food over there must be delish: spicy and hot!