Culturally appropriate

The surgeon I’m working with today is in a good mood. He has two senior registrars with him who are doing most of the work. They are both of Chinese extraction, although from Malaysia, and my surgeon has decided he’s going to learn a few hundred words of Chinese that will be useful in theatre over the next six months while these two are with him. It’s going to be a hard job, because even if he isn’t going to try and write any of the characters, google translate can only do so much. Tone and pronunciation make a huge amount of difference in the meaning of what you say, and our European ears just haven’t been trained to appreciate the difference in how things are said. Good on him for trying, I say. Today’s two phrases are “What do you think you are doing??” And “Are you finished yet??”