I actually found it interesting, reading Missee Lee and also Jack London's Cruise of the Snark, which has an interesting discussion about the pidgins used in South Pacific islands vs mainland Asia, *after* I had started to learn a bit about Mandarin. My Mandarin-speaking colleagues would not pronounce Oxford's rival school as 'Camblidge' but a lot of the language's structure really is reflected in both the mistakes people make and in the pidgins that come from it.

(My friends here say "he" when they mean "she" all the time - Mandarin uses "ta" for both and also for "it". I haven't yet been able to test my theory that they won't make that mistake in writing, because Mandarin does have separate characters when "she" or "it" is specifically intended.)