This morning, while I was getting my hair washed, I was enjoying my new 3G service and merrily skrittering away.

Usually, I use that time for my self-imposed weekly newspaper reading but my preferred paper was already sold out and no copies of it were lying around the salon.

Intellectually, I know that the reason the hair wash girl is a hair wash girl is because she doesn't have that high a level of education. However, as she tried to guess what character I was going to write next based on the one I'd just written or instruct me on tone, I was still surprised just how many of them she got wrong.

I'd just written 被 and had the computerized voice spoke "bei4" and was about to write whatever the next character was when she started going "不不不不" "下一个是包!包！背包!"

Knowing how much my Chinese is still lacking and how much farther I'll have to go before I'm satisfied with where I am, it's a bit of a shock when I encounter a Chinese person whose Chinese is worse than mine.

-M

I've had a few interesting interactions with Chinese people (native and foreign-raised) while Skrittering, but I've definitely never run into a native speaker who suggested the wrong word. Actually, I've Skrittered at work (shame on me) around my kindergartners, and I've even been corrected by them before!

Haha, that's great! Then again, it's not so surprising to me, since your Chinese is so good.

I've Skrittered around children Chinese kids before and it's always nice when they don't know a character. Then again they make errors and blank on things the same way we did when we were their age learning English.

I've noticed little errors using radicals are especially common, for example:

我喜欢吃平果。

Really, that's surprising. I haven't seen that in Taiwan. I mostly find people can't visualize a character in their head like I can or can't name the radical on some characters without writing it out on their hand. Every so often I can write a few characters locals can't like 贏 or 癮 on a first try。 Maybe because people are better educated here though.

I often find Chinese people are very keen to have a go, but then can't actually use the graphics tablet and start causing all kinds of havoc. Also, they tend to try and write the characters cursively, which doesn't work with Skritter.

A Freudian slip for a hair wash girl in China? 被包

She regularly suggested the wrong word.

Sometimes the word she guessed was a reasonable one for coming after the one I'd just written and I chalked it up to her not paying careful attention to what I was doing or trying to parse raw squigs over my shoulder while in the middle of doing her job.

Other times it was a bit off and I could still come up with some way in which she might have been not devoting her attention to what I was doing such that she came up with what she did.

There were, however, enough like 被包 that just made no sense whatsoever unless she was guessing a totally wrong character.

My last remark was influenced by this article that I've read recently http://wap.wanbafang.com/yaowen/20111023/757.html . Summarizing:

Where are they: 4、发廊、按摩室、洗脚屋、洗浴房、桑拿室
What is their best hope: (2)：被包二奶

Playing Devil's advocate, how sure are you that she wasn't suggesting words/phrases that you just haven't learnt yet? As pts suggests, 被包 could be valid in the right context.

@pts ... I've just added that to a reading list since it's bound to have all kinds of characters that I don't usually run across.

@lyons ... She's a 19 year old mother of a newborn whose 20 year old husband (they aren't legally married and the baby doesn't legally exist) is also at the same salon. We're not talking well educated or well read.

Poorly educated she may be, but she's still a native speaker, with 19 years immersion in a Chinese-speaking environment. The words she's coming out may not be that advanced, they may not be the ones in your Skritter list, but are you sure they don't exist? Have you checked?

I'm not saying you're wrong - I'm just curious about the situation. It may well be that her Chinese is appalling, but by making this assumption you could be missing out on lots of useful colloquialisms.

Did you all see the photo series of people in China holding up pieces of paper with their thoughts written on them?

Some of them were farmers. One of them wrote 知后 instead of 之后, along with other errors. Also 时现 instead of 实现.

First I was impressed with myself that I could recognize the errors. Then it made me a little sad - I don't know if I could really explain why.

@atdlouis - that's why I'm tending more towards the theory that this girl wasn't trying to teach me new words.

It makes me sad too. Words are so much of my world that the idea of not having enough words to be able to effectively communicate scares me.

What is "被包" supposed to mean? I looked it up in three dictionaries - it is nowhere to be found.

Thorondor, the word is 背包, backpack. The hairdresser just thought it was written with a 被.

In the context of this thread, 包 means “hire”, as in 包车, 包飞机. That is “to lease or hire the services for the exclusive use by a single customer”. 被 is a particle that turns the following verb into passive-voice.