Laowai Chinese 老外中文In the United States, the charming southern accent is all about vowels that get swapped around or changed. I still remember this great game of Catch Phrase where the southern belle mother gave this clue “It’s long and thin” and someone guessed “pin!” She was delighted and passed the thing to the next player (her […]
Pronunciation
A: “Dude! Have you ever wondered if what I see as ‘red’ is the same color that you see as ‘red’?” B: “No dude! It’s scientific. ‘Red’ is just a label for a certain wavelength on the spectrum.” A: “I know, Dude. But how do we know what our brains ‘see’ when our eyes perceive […]
True Story from Yesterday (names changed to save my face) Me: So, are you and Jenny…you know…an “item” now? Tommy: Oh yeah. You didn’t know that? Me: I just heard from Edgar. How long has that been going on? Tommy: Hmm…I guess since about May. The moral of the story (of my life) is: I’m […]
Similar to my astonishment at the previously-discussed Chinese proclivity for stating the obvious, I’ve often been struck by how much of what I say in Chinese gets repeated right back at me. At first I was a little annoyed, and then I realized “Hey, I can use that!” I’m convinced the hardest thing about speaking […]
Chinese words are made up of so few possible syllables that it’s almost hard NOT to rhyme. For example, Wang Lihong has a song called “Can you feel my world” that has the following rhyme scheme: A A A A A etc. Just to clarify, that means that every single line in the whole song […]
A few weeks ago in my English classes, I was doing lightning safety (it was stormy here, ok?). I ended up using the following joke in each class. One of the tips from the students would inevitably be: “Always wear shoes if you’re outside.” I would follow that up by asking why. They’d say something […]
DISCLAIMER: In case I have a Chinese reader, I should tell you “funnest” isn’t a real word. This post started out innocently enough as a fun way to test the new audio plugin (thanks to Beijing Sounds for the tip) and celebrate the joy of speaking a foreign language. But in the end (as you’ll […]
Let’s face it people: Those 4 (actually 5) tones in Mandarin Chinese don’t really play by their own rules. Sure, if Chinese people are saying one word by itself, and if they’re saying it really slowly, then the tone will probably sound like the textbook says it should. But most of the time they’re not […]
If you’re writing a lot of pinyin on the computer, and you’re not good with the numbers, you may want to try using something I call “diǎndiào”点调 (dot tone). It uses periods in lieu of tone numbers, like this: dian…diao…. = diǎn diào As opposed to: dian3 diao4 Sometimes, in a chat, or an email […]
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