Laowai Chinese 老外中文

I now offer you a slice-of-life just exactly as it was told to me by one of my Chinese students. The thing that’s so interesting about it is that both people in the story are native speakers of Chinese, speaking Chinese to each other, ABOUT Chinese vocabulary. Lara goes to the copy center to make […]

A friend just came back from Taiwan where he (somehow) met a local bear expert. The man told him: “On the mainland they call pandas ‘xióng māo’ 熊猫, but here in Taiwan we say ‘māo xióng’ 猫熊.” Regional differences are common in the Chinese-speaking world (e.g. spoon). But what’s notable about this example is the […]

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 wǒ […]

[Update: June 26, 2014. Julie Tha Gyaw at Yoyo Chinese just wrote an excellent related post: How Chinese People Want to Be Greeted] 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 […]

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 with a tennis […]

As promised, here’s a little bit about how you have to be careful where you put your bù (不). There are some tricky things that can throw you for a loop if you’re translating English into Chinese (which is what we all do when starting out learning the language). I’m talking grammar (word order) today, […]

As I finished these measure word posts I had to ask myself (again), “Why does Chinese have all these darn measure words?” Is it like the tones, which seem to exist only to keep foreigners from learning Chinese? As I mention here, the “measure words ” (liàngcí 量词) don’t really serve any linguistic purpose usually. […]