You call this a language?

English can be obnoxiously ambiguous at times. My parents and my sister went to the beach yesterday. When I wondered why Mahlet (my sister's best friend) hadn't gone with them and why I haven't heard much about Mahlet recently at all, and how Mahlet was doing cause I miss her, my dad said:

"I think she just loves us more now"

As long as you don't think about that sentence, it makes perfect sense. But once you start, you realize that it could mean pretty much anything in the world. It could mean that my sister loves my parents more now than she did before, or that she finally loves them more than she loves Mahlet, or that she loves them more than Mahlet loves them, or even that Mahlet loves my parents more now, so she graciously lets them have alone time with my sister. There's 46 other interpretations that I won't go into.

After I recovered from that soft gooey bitch-slap of ambiguity, I wondered for the millionth time how Chinese people do it. How do they ever understand who the hell they're talking about? In spoken Chinese, the pronouns "he," "she" and "it" sound identical. Not because I'm a foreigner and my ears are too big to hear the difference, but because they're all one and the same phoneme. Same goes for the plurals, "they" has three written forms - masculine they, feminine they, and undead they, but they all sound the same. This last one is only shocking until you realize that English only has one "they" to begin with, but it can help you appreciate the magnitude of the disaster that is the case of singular pronouns. Instead of he, she and it, you just have the singular form of they. And the same goes for possessive pronouns.

What this means, is that if a Chinese person is telling you a story about a heterosexual couple and their dog, you're hearing:

They says they doesn't want to get married, but they insists that they does, they just doesn't want to get married to they because they is so poor, and of course they has an opinion on it too, barking every now and then to punctuate the conversation. So I don't know what they is going to do. Maybe they will divorce they and marry that other girl.

Ha! You should be so lucky, getting that freebie at the end. Usually it's like listening to some kind of demented software interview brainteaser.