Laowai Chinese 老外中文

My One Friend

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Here's a little trip down grammar lane, trying to get to the bottom of how the English word "one" can be translated so many different ways in Chinese. It might surprise you how the Chinese say: 1. "one of my friends" My first impulse was, of course, a sort of word-for-word translation: yí gè ...

Posted in Explanations | 9 Comments »

Nǐ hǎo 你好: A Very Fake Greeting

Monday, February 8th, 2010

I was waiting for my turn at the ping pong table the other night, when an older teacher started walking past me. I'd seen him several times before and even played ping pong with him once. "Nǐ hǎo 你好," I said. He stopped his walk and said, in all sincerity that most ...

Posted in Explanations | 38 Comments »

Tennis Players and Drummers

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

As I'm sure my English-speaking readers would agree, the agent marker "-er" is tough for Chinese learners. We use it all the time in English (3 times in the previous sentence) but it's not so readily available in Chinese. Example 1: Tennis Player Imagine I see a girl walking down the street ...

Posted in Explanations | 5 Comments »