Experdize Mandarin Doctor - Applied

How to play: this is a language game wearing a Mandarin 诊所. You are the 医生, and you are not running the surgery — the surgery runs itself: she walks to the couch, the monitor, the laboratory bench and the medicine cabinet on her own, and files cards at reception and washes her hands when nobody is waiting. What you do is read Mandarin and answer two questions for every patient.

Take as long as you like. There is no time limit and nothing to beat the clock to: a session is 10 questions, and it ends the moment you answer the last one. One question is up at a time, and the whole surgery stands still whenever anybody is talking — nobody walks, nobody comes in and no patience bar moves — so you can read every line as slowly as you need. If a row of answers is up, choosing one starts the surgery again; if there is no row — she says she is on it, somebody grumbles, somebody says thank you — tap the play button on the speech bubble when you have finished reading it. The stopwatch at the top counts up rather than down: it is your result, not your deadline, and your fastest run at each session is kept.

1 — What is wrong with them? A patient describes their symptoms: 我一咽口水就火烧火燎的。 — “it really burns when I swallow.” Pick the diagnosis off the row along the bottom. ⚠ Half the complaints name the illness and half only describe it, so you cannot get through by matching words alone. And the wrong answers are not random, they are the mistakes worth making once: 头疼 headache, 肚子疼 stomach ache, 腰疼 back pain and 牙疼 toothache — one word of pain and four parts of the body, so reading only the first character is a one-in-four guess. Pick the wrong one and she is not stopped: she examines for it, finds it is not that, and walks back to look again — which costs her the trip, in front of you.

⚠ And half of them are answered by a structure English has not got. Where a complaint describes rather than names, Chinese hangs the description off the verb with 得: 咳嗽得很厉害 “coughs to the point of terrible”, 痒得受不了 “itches to the point of unbearable”, 晃得站不稳 “sways to the point of not standing steady”. There is no English word in that slot at all, so a reader looking for one skips straight past the half of the sentence carrying the symptom. The pinyin does carry the tones here — which the Vietnamese original's respelling could not — so on this board the marks are help rather than the whole answer, and what is left to catch you is the shape.

2 — What do you prescribe? She examines and asks herself 病人是嗓子发炎。开点什么好呢？ — “the patient has a sore throat; what shall I prescribe?” Pick the medicine. ⚠ Six of the twelve END in the same character and the answer is the word in front of it: 退烧药 bring-down-fever medicine, 止咳药 stop-cough medicine, 止痛药 stop-pain medicine, 降压药 bring-down-pressure medicine. Chinese puts the describing part before the thing, exactly where English and Vietnamese put it after — so the useful half of the tile is the half you read first, and stopping at 药 tells you nothing. Four of the twelve are not medicines at all (输液 a drip, 打石膏 a plaster cast, 包扎 a dressing, 休息 rest).

⚠ Nobody says please, and that is not rudeness. Mandarin has no sentence-final particle carrying respect upward — no ạ to end a line with, the way the Vietnamese original does. What carries the courtesy instead is naming the doctor (医生 at the head of the sentence) and 麻烦 or 请 in front of a request. Ending a line 啊 or 呢 is warmth, never deference, and putting one there does not make a line polite.

The sessions are the words, and the waiting room is the session. They climb together. The Difficulty row is how much of each line is written: 初级 writes the pinyin and the English under every line, 中级 the pinyin alone, 高级 the characters with nothing under them. The Session row is who is in the waiting room and what can be wrong with them: session 1 is 小芳 and 阿强 with fevers, coughs and aches; session 2 brings 小明, sore throats and flu; session 3 李奶奶, cuts, dizziness and toothache; session 4 宝宝, food poisoning and allergies; and session 5 张爷爷, broken bones and blood pressure. From session 3 what was said fades a few seconds later — tap whoever said it to hear it again, free but for the time, which is the one tap left on the floor. And somebody is sent down the corridor for a blood test and comes back with the slip.

You cannot lose a session. Somebody who waits too long gives up and goes to the pharmacy instead — that costs you the care and your streak, and they say so — but nothing ends the session except answering its last question. What varies is your time and how many you got right.