Using Plain Talk in Your Marketing Part 2 - Adult B2B Marketing Tip

Using Plain Talk: A Discussion Of Chinese

Tuesday I said when marketing use plain talk, like the Chinese talk. I'm going to assume that right now all you know about Chinese is kung fu and chow mien and you're probably not too interested in adding to your Chinese vocabulary. So we're going to do the next best thing: we're going to study Chinese from the outside, so to speak, and get a basic idea of how it's put together. That will then bring us a long way closer to plain English. That may sound odd to you. Chinese, to you, is an exotic language, written in weird characters and spoken in a sort of sing-song. It's true that the meaning of spoken Chinese words depends on musical "tones," which does add one element of difficulty to learning how to speak Chinese. Chinese is hard to approach; it has a sort of Chinese wall around it.

But if you look a little closer, you'd find that Chinese is actually really simple. Think of other languages and what makes them difficult: conjugations, irregular verbs, subjunctives, genders, and a whole host of other nasty grammatical nightmares. I took two semesters of Spanish in high school; it was all I could do to figure out all those dang conjugations. If you've ever studied any language other than Chinese, then you know that it's grammar that makes learning them hard.

That is the beauty of Chinese. It is known as a "grammarless" language. The list of the things it does not have is unbelievable: it has no inflections, no cases, no persons, no genders, no numbers, no degrees, no tenses, no voices, no moods, no infinitives, no participles, no gerunds, no irregular verbs, and no articles. There are no words of more than one syllable, every word has only one form, and all you have to learn is how to put these one syllable words in their proper order. To make it even easier for you, this proper order is the same as the usual order in English: subject, predicate. You may wonder how it is possible to talk in such a language so that other people understand you and maybe you think this must be the most primitive, uncivilized language of the world. It would be a common error: up to about a hundred years ago all language experts agreed that Chinese is the "baby talk of mankind." They were wrong: it is the most grown up talk in the world. It is the way people speak who started to simplify their language thousands of years ago and have kept at it ever since.

More tomorrow.

For more information SUBSCRIBE to our new weekly marketing newsletter.