Although, I guess you’d have to be in Chengdu and know some Sìchuān huà 四川话:

“[The panda] will be taught Chinese with a Sichuan dialect because people here all speak Sichuan dialect…For example, she will be taught the phrases for going back to the cage or coming out from the dormitory.”

I couldn’t find the sina site that was mentioned but I did find this article that gives you the phone number to call if you want to apply.

• They Don’t Understand My Chinese, What’s Wrong?
• ChineseTeachers.com – My Review
• Is China a good place to learn Chinese?
• How Old Are You on Mars?
• Language Learning is Messy II: Talk a Lot

Enough of that. Here it is (pinyin underneath):

A: kuài​! gěi​ wǒ​ jiàn​! mǎ​ shàng​! 快给我剑!
B: shì jiàn​ hái ​shì​ jiàn​? 是剑还是箭?

• The Great China Quest
• Banned. zěnme bàn 怎么办?
• Contest: Name the Book I Wrote
• MDBG Dictionary Plugin for WordPress
• I Work in a Trash Dump

Besides how amazingly easy it is to rhyme in Chinese, it’s fun that the language allows for syllabic palindromes (i.e. reading the hanzi forwards and backwards, not the individual letters in the pinyin).

Even some individual words can be read forward and backward and mean the same thing (if one seems more common to me it appears in bold). If you can rattle off this list to your Chinese friends it will be just as impressive as saying the “4 is 4, 10 is 10″ tongue twister to a Southern China native!

• jìdù 忌妒 = dùjì 妒忌 = to be jealous / jealousy
• jījiàn 击剑 = jiànjī 剑击 = fencing (sport)
• yèxiāo 夜宵 = xiāoyè 宵夜 = late-night snack
• zǔzhòu 诅咒 = zhòuzǔ 咒诅 = to curse
• shìshí 事实 = shíshì 实事 = fact

Isn’t that wild!?

Does anyone know of any others? Share, share!

Can anyone think of any in English? I don’t mean like “pop.” I mean a two WORD palindrome where “paper doll” and “doll paper” mean the same thing (they don’t, of course, that’s why that one doesn’t count). It seems like I thought of a two-word English one once but it might have been when I was just about to fall asleep and I didn’t write it down but if I had it would have seemed really stupid the next morning anyway. You know what I mean.

• Stuff You Might Be Hearing: Olympics TV
• How to Find Chinese Medical Terms
• Tomb Sweeping Festival
• Linguistic Laughingstock-a-phobia
• Learning from Others’ Mistakes

qiā 掐

[See original post to listen to audio]

Tell me it doesn’t sound like the action of pinching or maybe the cry of someone who’s just been pinched.

Qia! What are you doing?!

I kind of wish it were 4th tone, but then again that would be more severe sounding than a little pinch.

Stump the Chinese Bonus

This came up in a class when a student asked me how to say “qiā” in English. The demonstration she performed on her classmate was a pretty good clue, and I realized this is the first “qia” I’ve ever learned (I know now that there are more).

I wrote “pinch” on the board for everyone else and explained it means “qiā.” I saw heads nod in understanding and then the nervous looking around at classmates’ papers started.

I chuckled and said, “If you don’t know how to write qiā, you can just write niē 捏 if you want,” and that students nodded gratefully.

I’ve got a lot to say about the hanzi roadblock that prevented my students from getting out of their own pinch and just writing niē 捏 without getting permission from me. But instead I choose to end this post feeling good that, back when I first learned niǔniǔ niēniē 扭扭捏捏 (documented here), I clicked the scissors icon at MDBG (giving me the individual characters’ meanings) so I could offer the students an alternative to this fun little word. I can’t wait for Saint Patrick’s Day!

• Stump the Chinese: Hard Hanzi
• Gaps in Current Chinese Teaching Materials and Methods
• Tangerine Luck for the Niu Year
• Gesture Phobia
• Stump the Laowai: shuǎlài 耍赖

As my students rolled back into the classroom at the beginning of this Year of the Niu, discussion turned to Spring Festival. Rather than let them talk about what exciting times they didn’t have sleeping and playing computer games at home punctuated by inevitable overeating at the mandatory relative/friend bàifǎng 拜访 tours, I decided to let them try to explain some Spring Festival customs. I quickly discovered that a huge number of customs are pun-based. This proved problematic to them in English until I put the following on the board:

“The Chinese word for ____ sounds like the Chinese word for ____. So, during Spring Festival, we like to…”

I’ll now fill you in on the words they used to fill in those blanks. I knew some of these, but I had no idea how many there were. There are even a few “questionables” that I’ll put at the end because I think there was a glimmer in the eyes of some smarty-kùzi students who saw a overly-gullible foreign teacher standing before them and just couldn’t resist making stuff up. Hopefully someone can confirm or deny them.

OK, here we go. See if you can spot a theme besides shuāngguān 双关 (puns).

Spring Festival Customs Derived from Puns

1. “Tangerine” (jú 桔) and “Lucky” (jí 吉)

So the Chinese like to give and eat tangerines as a way of bringing good luck (and money). Dà jí dà lì 大吉大利 means “big luck big profit,” so the bigger the tangerine the bigger the luck. Our college gate has potted tangerine trees sitting in front of it even now. I suspect this is more of a Cantonese custom because the Cantonese pronunciation of the characters for 桔 and 吉 don’t just sound similar, they are exactly the same (“gat1″). Anyone outside Cantonese Land see tangerines at Spring Festival time?

2. “Upside Down” (dào 倒) and “Arrive” (dào 到)

So they hang the character 福 (fú) upside down on doors. Since fú 福 means lucky, “luck upside down” sounds exactly like “luck arrives.”

3. “Lettuce” (shēng cài 生菜) and “Make Money” (shēng cái 生财)

So they throw lettuce into a river. I think the bell rang before I could get the students to explain what the aquatic element to this ritual stands for, but I think they also eat lettuce as well as playing a veggie version of Poohsticks.

4. “Fish” (yú 鱼) and “Surplus” (yú 余)

So they like to eat fish during Spring Festival. When I said, “But don’t you like to eat fish all the time?” students started looking around nervously for the exit. Ok, ok. I’ll keep my ex post facto theories to myself. It’s still a charming custom.

5. “Year Cake” (nián gāo 年糕) and “Year Higher” (nián gāo 年高)

So they eat this cake during Spring Festival so that their salaries and luck will be higher this year. Is it just a coincidence that the cake is kind of sticky and the word for “sticky cake” sounds exactly the same (nián gāo 黏糕)?

6. “Dumpling thingys” (tāng yuán 汤圆) and “Reunion” (tuán yuán 团圆)

So they eat “tangyuan” during get togethers with classmates and family. Also, as students were quick to point out, “Tangyuan are round and money is round so it means more money.”

7. “Long Thread Moss” (fàcài 发菜) and “Get Rich” (fācái 发财

So they eat the stuff. Here’s where I started raising my eyebrows more and seeing other students in the class just as surprised as I was. This turns out to have actual, verifiable hanzi which only leave the ubiquity in question. This wraps up the non-questionable section

Questionables

? 8. “Pig hand” (zhū shǒu 猪手) and “Make Money” (jiù shǒu 就手)

So that’s why they like to eat pig hooves? First of all, I can’t actually confirm that jiùshǒu 就手 means make money. Can anyone? Secondly, when I’ve been asking around about this I get weird looks like I made it up. I didn’t, but I think that guy in my class did.

? 9. “Walnut” (hé tao 核桃) and “Reunion” (hé tao 和 ?)

What would that second “tao” be? Anyone?

? 10. “A Kind of Seafood” (hao si / hao shi ? ?) and “Good Market” (hǎo shì 好市)

10. “Dried Oyster” (háochǐ 蚝豉) and “Good Market” (hǎo shì 好市) [update from Ho Sun Yan]

[update:] “The Cantonese word involved here is 蠔豉 (simpl. 蚝豉) “dried oyster”, which differs (pronunciation-wise) from 好市 only in the tones.”

This seems to me like it’s a Cantonese tradition because the mandarin doesn’t sound that similar. For those of you that can read Yale romanization of Cantonese, 蚝豉 is read hou4 si6 and 好市 is read hou2 si5.

Maybe it’s related to “oyster” (háo 蚝) and it’s chopped into “thin strips” (sī 丝). Don’t worry that “háo sī” and “hǎo shì” are not minimal pairs. Down here in Cantonese Land, they would be (“si” and “shi” are often both pronounced as “si”). This may be another one of those in-Cantonese-they-sound-the-same situations. Anyone heard of this?

Please let us know if there are any punny Spring Festival Customs in your part of the country or if you can confirm that any of these are national standards.

• Text Message Greetings for Chinese New Year
• Tomb Sweeping Festival
• Learning Mandarin in Cantonese Land III: Grammar
• Book Contract Signed
• Wanted: Cantonese Materials For Foreigners Who Already Know Mandarin

I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard that:

Shànghǎi zìláishuǐ láizì hǎi shàng

上海自来 水 来自海上

(Shanghai’s tap water comes from on top of the sea)

I’m all in favor of fun little word games and/or tongue twisters as a way of learning new vocabulary (tap water), practicing pronunciation, and earning the undying respect and admiration of friends. Well, at least I know it works for vocabulary and pronunciation.

• What’s up with Persuade?
• Terms of Endearment
• Language Learning is Messy III: Learn What You Need
• Bù le 不了: So Simple, So Unknown to Foreigners
• Learning from Others’ Mistakes