Sorry to bore everyone with blog updates like this, but I have a feeling some of my readers also use WordPress and this info might be important for them.

For you email subscribers: this post SHOULD come in an email with the previous post about finding out the geneder of a Chinese person from ta’s name.  If the emails don’t go out today, something else is broken (thanks for your nàixīn 耐心)

• Wanted: Chinese Name Gender Reference
• A Facelift for the Blog
• Contest: Name the Book I Wrote
• Banned. zěnme bàn 怎么办?
• Beijing Sounds - My Review

I know it’s not the MOST important tool in the world, but still, here’s what I want: I enter a Chinese given name (míngzi 名字) and it tells me whether it’s most likely a boy’s name or a girl’s name.

I know there are some that are ambiguous, but I get the feeling that Chinese people can tell from reading someone’s hanzi name if that person is most likely a boy or a girl.  For example the inclusion of “flower” (huā 花) is a dead giveaway that it’s a girl, and “dragon” (lóng 龙) is reserved only for boys, right?  Well where’s the resources that lists all those sorts of rules of thumb?

Questions for you all (if anyone’s still reading):

1. Does something like this exist?  If so, where?  If not, don’t you think that’s unfair since English learners can easily find out the gender of most English names?

2. If this doesn’t exist, would it be possible to create (given the technical savvy)?  What would the problems be?

• Addressing strangers
• Tone Changes
• Tomb Sweeping Festival
• Is China a good place to learn Chinese?
• Mates

“Fairy Tale” (tónghuà 童话) by Guāng Liáng (光良) is very popular right now (in this part of the country at least).  It also has the added benefit of being one of the simplest (linguistically and musically) Chinese pop songs I’ve heard.

I’m trying a new format for posting the lyrics.  In addition to the “printer friendly” PDF format, I’ve got a plain text file as well.  I tried just slapping the plain text lyrics in this post, but it got kind of long.  If either of you two readers who actually look at my pop song translations have an opinion about the lyrics format, please let me know.

Lyrics (English, pinyin, 汉字)

Fairytale (printer friendly)
(requires Adobe Reader, which is available here).

Fairytale (plain text)

NOTE: To download the document directly to your computer without viewing it in your internet browser, right-click on the link and select “Save link/target as…”

• Watching the Sea
• A Simple Song
• Invisible Wings
• Chinese Family Tree
• Pinyin Chart

Which Chinese Word Should I Use?

Even though the HSK info isn’t designed to be used like this, we can use this to help us know which Chinese synonym is more commonly used.  I’m talking about “How do you say ____ in English?” when the answer could be multiple words.

For example, do a search for the English word “difference.”  There are about 27 results, but only 6 have HSK ratings.  Look for the lowest number and that’s probably the most common word.  In this case, “fēnbié” 分别 and “qūbié” 区别 come in ahead of chābié 差别.  In my experience, that’s pretty accurate.  A Chinese person will use those two before chābié 差别 when asking a question like:

“What’s the difference?” = yǒu shénme qūbié? 有什么区别?

Warning:

Just because a word has a lower rating, doesn’t mean it’s more commonly used.  Here are a few ways the HSK info isn’t useful (to those of us not preparing to take the test):

1. HSK rating has nothing to do with spoken/written or formal/informal frequencies.  For example, in my experience, computer is spoken much more frequently as “diànnǎo” 电脑 but is formally referred to (like if your major is computers in collge) as “jìsuànjī” 计算机.  Both of these words appear on HSK list 3.

2. The difference between 1 and 2 is negligible.  Vocabulary lists 1 and 2 are both covered by the Basic (lowest) test, so a word may appear on list 2 simply because they ran out of room on list 1.  For example, “yǎnjing” 眼睛 gets an HSK rating of 1, but yǎn 眼 by itself is 2.  Surely you’d know the single character before learning the two of them together.

The bottom line is: if a word has a HSK rating in the dictionary, it’s more likely to be a common word than one without a rating.  Also, if I’ve got to choose between two synonyms (that really can be used interchangeably) I’m going to choose the one with the lower HSK number.

Now, if MDBG will only add a little “sort by column” feature, we’ll be in business.

Can anyone else think of a good way to use those HSK ratings?

• MDBG Online Dictionary - My review
• MDBG Online Dictionary - Tutorial
• The Pinyin Wall
• The Informant
• The Quest for “Anyway”

Before I even start, I have to say it’s a really, really hard website name to remember, which is a shame because there are some good things on it.  This will not be a comprehensive review, but just a few of the highlights (and lowlights).

The dictionary itself is colorful, but I find it difficult to use and difficult to read.  Here are my complaints about the dictionary portion:

1. The English and Chinese are all mixed in together, which leads to a whole lot of scrolling down before you find what you’re looking for.
2. Sometimes there is no pinyin for hanzi examples.  It was only after using the site for a while that I discovered there is a mouse-over feature that displays the pinyin.  Even so, it’s often long and hard to read in a bubble-tip format.
3. Sometimes the tones don’t appear for the pinyin.
4. Mixed pinyin and English searches are not allowed.

Overall, the dictionary has a little too much geegaw and clutter for my liking (like stars and green icons).  But then again, I prefer a meat-and-potatoes dictionary display (like MDBG).

Now let’s move on to what I consider the best part of the site: the conversation bank.

Good Things:

1. Every conversation has a transcript in English, pinyin, and hanzi.
2. Every conversation has an automated text-to-speech bot that lets you hear the Chinese or English pronounced.
3. The pronunciation, while automated, is pretty good with only a few problems (see below).
4. You can browse conversations by topic or search for conversations that use a single English word or compound hanzi word.
5. The translations are pretty good.  If I had to guess, I’d say most conversations were written first in Chinese by Chinese speakers and then translated into English, but I’m not sure.
6. You can submit your own conversations.  I didn’t do this, because you have to sign up, but that’s a very cool feature.

Pronunciation Problems:

All of these occur in this conversation about feeling cold.  I suppose the developers of this site are borrowing some automated text-to-speech program, so they’re not responsible for these problems.  But I still want readers to be aware that these are some non-authentic elements of the pronunciation on this site.

1. The initial “h” sounds like a “p” to me sometimes.
2. Can’t pronounce “érhuà” 儿化, like in “bǎo bèir” 宝贝儿.  It should be two syllables but it is read as three.
3. Tone changes are not exactly correct.  For example “wǒ juéde” 我觉得  sounds like “wó juéde.”  Really, the 3rd tone before a 2nd tone should be really low, and not like another 2nd tone.  Also the 5th tone “ba” 吧 after a 3rd tone (hǎo ba  好吧) should be higher than it is after the other three tones.

Technical Problems:

1. The “Auto play” option for sound files seems to really be “auto repeat.”  But actually, if you clear the little check box, it doesn’t play at all.  Can’t quite figure out what that’s for.
2. The “Auto play” bubble often blocks your view of the transcript.  If you move your mouse so that the bubble disappears, the sound file stops playing immediately.
3. Pinyin is not allowed in searches.
4. Multiple English words in searches doesn’t show conversations containing all words.
5. Putting multiple English search terms “in quotes” breaks something.

The site’s still in “beta,” which means we’re supposed to give them a break and be patient while they work out these little issues.

It is cool to have this growing bank of conversations.  This sort of corpus is exactly what Chinese-English dictionaries need.  Does anyone know of any other sites that have conversations or sentence examples in Chinese and English?

• MDBG Online Dictionary - Tutorial
• The Pinyin Wall
• How to Find Chinese Medical Terms
• MDBG Online Dictionary - My review
• Read Chinese (NFLC) - My Review

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 about the shoes being made of plastic (which I thought was strange) and I’d say (in English), “No they’re not. The bottoms of your shoes are made of BANANAS!” The class always thought it was hilarious.

Someone would correct me and say, “rubber” and I’d make a big mockery of myself saying things like, “Oh no! Oops! I guess I made a mistake with my pronunciation!”

Now, here’s what I want to know from any Chinese reader(s):

Were my students laughing because:

1. They thought of the very subtle difference between the Chinese word for “banana” (xiāngjiāo 香蕉) and “rubber” (xiàngjiāo 橡胶)–a difference of only one tone?

OR

2. They actually imagined someone walking along the street wearing banana peels on their feet?

I know it’s asking a lot to tell me what my students were thinking. But perhaps you could just give your own response to my little joke. Which did you think of?

For us laowai, here’s the point:

Regardless of why Chinese speakers laugh (or don’t laugh) at that little joke, that’s a little taste of what it must sound like to them when we’re speaking Chinese and we get a tone wrong.

It’s not like in English when you put the stress on the wrong syllable and it’s a little harder to understand (for example saying “relatives” with the stress on the second syllable instead of the first). No. When we get the tones wrong, it’s a whole new word that could be just as nonsensical to Chinese listeners as shoes made of bananas. So we’ve got to get those tones right.

Related Posts:

• Funnest Things to Say
• Master the Tones
• Tone Changes
• Tone Wars

• Pinyin Chart
• Tone Wars
• What’s that “zi” 子 thing?
• Tone Changes
• They Don’t Understand My Chinese, What’s Wrong?

• jiè 借 = to borrow / to lend
• ràng 让 = to make / to let / to ask someone to do something

In one of my English classes last week, I ran into two that never got sorted out. Perhaps some of you can shed some light.

Jump / Dive

The student wanted to talk about the Olympic sport of diving. That seems to be:

• tiàoshuǐ 跳水 = to dive / diving (the sport)

The confusion came when I said, “Doesn’t that “tiào” just mean “jump?” Yes it does. So how would you say “jump into the water?”

The class was split. Some of them said something like:

• “tiào jìn shuǐ” 跳进水 = to jump into the water

But others insisted that tiàoshuǐ 跳水 could have both meanings. In the end, the dispute (between the students) came down to the height of the platform the person is diving from. Since I thought that HAD to be irrelevant to my original question, I was reduced to drawing pictures (for which I’ll substitute shamelessly-stolen Google Images here) and saying:

1. If your head touches the water before your feet, that’s diving.

image source

2. If your feet touch the water before your head, that’s jumping into the water.

image source

So how do you say number 1 in Chinese, and how do you say number 2 in Chinese? There still wasn’t agreement. Anyone like to add your opinion?

The Olympic Torch

I was infinitely confused when my students told me that the Olympic torch was in Guangzhou on Wednesday and from there went the top of Mt. Everest on Thursday. The reason this confused me was other students were insisting it was in Huizhou Thursday (many hundreds of miles from the top of Everest). I asked, as anyone would in such a situation, “So you mean there are two torches?”

I was shouted down with a resounding, unison, “NOOOOOO!”

Rather than trying to figure out why they seemed offended at the idea of two torches, I decided to focus on how the torch seemed to be violating the nature of the universe and existing in two places at once. I got nowhere until, again, I drew a picture.

image source

They immediately seemed relieved and eagerly cleared up the misunderstanding.

1. shènghuǒ 圣火 = sacred flame / Olympic flame (which there is only one of)

2. huǒjù 火炬 = torch (which there are two or more of)

And I should have left it there. But I had to ask, “So when I originally asked ‘Are there two torches?’ what word, in Chinese did you think I meant?”

Some tried to deny it, but they all had to admit they thought I was saying huǒjù 火炬.

“So WHY did you say there was only one, but now you’re saying there are multiple huǒjù-s ?!?!?!”

They couldn’t answer that and kept muttering things like, “It’s a cultural difference” and “It’s a language difference” and I simply gave up and went on with the class.

If anyone would like to attempt to explain either of these two confusing convergent concepts to me, but especially what in the world happened in the torch discussion, I’m all–um–eyes.

• Banned. zěnme bàn 怎么办?
• Master the Tones
• Learning from Others’ Mistakes
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• Top 10 measure words to know

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 see at the end) I ended up documenting some bona fide “tone fudging” by a real, live, Chinese native speaker. So, don’t touch that dial!

First, here are some things that roll so nicely off the tongue that I’m constantly looking for excuses to say them.

Top 4 Favorite Things to Say in Chinese:

Tech support note: If anyone is having trouble playing these audio files, please let me know and I’ll try to figure out what’s going on.

4. guàibude 怪不得 = No wonder

[See original post to listen to audio]

Of course you can also say, “nánguài” 难怪, which may actually get used more by real Chinese people, but where’s the fun in that?

3. chàbuduō 差不多 = more or less, almost, nearly

[See original post to listen to audio]

In addition to helping you accomplish all your equivocating goals, it’s useful with an added “le” 了 to mean:

[See original post to listen to audio]

chàbuduō le 差不多了 = That’s about enough (stop giving me rice / time to go home now, etc.)

2. suàn le ba 算了吧 = forget it / never mind

[See original post to listen to audio]

Here’s an example where you could use it with or without the “ba” 吧:

A: yǒu méiyǒu hóngsè de? 有没有红色的? = Do you have a red one?
B: méiyǒu 没有 = No.
A: suàn le (ba) 算了(吧) = Ok, never mind / forget it then.

Now, “méi guānxi” 没关系 also means “never mind” but it can also mean “it doesn’t make any difference.” If you really only want a red one (let’s say a lamp) then “suàn le ba” gets you out of buying one. But if you say “méi guānxi” it may imply that the color isn’t that important and you might still be interested in a white one.

But, as if our lives weren’t bitter enough, here’s an extremely confusing situation where “suàn le” 算了 means the opposite:

A: zhège duōshao qián? 这个多少钱? = How much does this cost?
B: wǔshíwǔ kuài 五十五块 = 55 yuan.
A: wǔshí kěyǐ ma? 五十可以吗? = 50, ok?
B: suàn le, suàn le 算了算了 = Ok, ok (it’s a deal).

The best way I can think of to explain this is: if the buyer says “suàn le” 算了, it means he doesn’t want it. But if the seller says “suàn le” 算了 to a price, it means it’s acceptable. I’d love to hear someone else take a crack at clarifying why that is.

1. niǔ niǔ niē niē 扭扭捏捏 = to be fake shy / to hesitate

[See original post to listen to audio]

While opportunities to say this are rare, it’s got to be the most fun thing to say in Chinese I’ve found so far. It literally means “twist twist pinch pinch” (again, someone please explain why).

To use it to scold your students for taking too long to decide who’s going to speak first in a dialog, you can add the imperative “don’t want”:

[See original post to listen to audio]

bú yào niǔ niǔ niē niē 不要扭扭捏捏 = don’t pretend to be shy

BONUS: Tone Fudging

You may have noticed that “niǔ niǔ niē niē” becomes “niú niǔ niē niē.” That’s codified. The ol’ “two 3rd tones becomes a 2nd and a 3rd” rule. But did you notice what happened to the “bú yào”?

When I recorded my informant saying the above phrase, I noticed a very interesting little phenomenon: she doesn’t say “bú yào” 不要 with a second and fourth tone like we’ve been told we’re supposed to. Instead, it sounds like “bǔ yáo” or maybe “bú yáo.”

I asked her if I heard that right and she said she could also do it the other “standard” way, but that the tone of voice (yǔqì 语气) would be different (she explains it all at the end of this post).

Here’s the standard way:

[See original post to listen to audio]

bú yào niǔ niǔ niē niē

Now, let’s listen to the first way followed directly by this “standard” way:

[See original post to listen to audio]

1. bǔ yáo niǔ niǔ niē niē

2. bú yào niǔ niǔ niē niē

And just for kicks, only the “bu yao’s” in isolation, repeated to really shine the spotlight on the phenomenon (sorry the “n” of “niu” is at the end of each–it sounds like “bu yaon” but we can deal with that, right?):

[See original post to listen to audio]

1. bǔ yáo

2. bú yào

Here’s her explanation of the difference:

[See original post to listen to audio]

“bǔ yáo niǔniǔniēniē” jiùshì bǐjiào kǒuyǔhuà de.
“不要扭扭捏捏”就是比较口语化的.
“[the first way]” is relatively colloquial.

yǔqì méi nàme zhòng.
语气没那么重.
The tone of voice isn’t that serious.

“bú yào niǔniǔniēniē” jiùshì yǒu yìdiǎn shēngqì de gǎnjué.
“不要扭扭捏捏”就是有一点生气的感觉.
“[the second way]” has a little bit of an angry feeling.

So there you have it, straight from a native speaker’s mouth. It opens up a whole new discussion called, “Well, how do we know what tones can be fudged to express feelings?” The short answer: we don’t, only they do.

I can’t help but think that this would have been called “Zhonglish” if it had come from a foreigner. But since it’s from a native speaker, it’s bona fide, acceptable Chinese. I’m sure there’s a lot more tone fudging going on with native speakers than we know about. I hope to get some more examples. Maybe I’ll start a whole new post category on it! Regardless, this is the first empirical evidence that what I wrote in Tone Wars isn’t as cut and dried as I originally thought.

• Tone Wars
• Where do I put the tone marks in pinyin words?
• MDBG Online Dictionary - Tutorial
• Tone Changes
• Master the Tones

Culture

1. First year for official holiday. While Qingming Jie is thousands of years old, this is the first year (2008) that it has been an official, government holiday from school and work. I asked my students to theorize why that may be. They sited the following possible factors:

• The May holiday has been shortened to one day (from three previously) which has freed up more holidays to be given to other festivals.
• “Korea has stolen Dragon Boat Festival” and the Chinese don’t want to see that happen with any other rightfully Chinese traditional holidays. (here’s an article that touches on the conflict which seems to have something to do with World Heritage listings).

If anyone else has any theories, I’d love to hear them.

2. For boys, not girls. While some towns allow girls to participate, the tomb sweeping responsibilities are usually for the men of the family.

3. More important in South than North. Apparently, some of my students from northern China didn’t even know what Qingming Jie was. Can anyone up north confirm or deny that this is a trend and not just my students?

Vocabulary

If you talk to any Chinese people about their home town’s traditions for Qingming Jie, you may run across some of this vocab. These are words I was asked “how to say…” so often that I actually learned the Chinese for them in the process.

fénmù 坟墓 = tomb / grave

mùdì 墓地 = cemetery (which sounds exactly like mùdì 目的 = “goal”)

sǎomù 扫墓 = to sweep tombs

bài zǔxiān 拜祖先 = to pay respects to ancestors

shāo xiāng 烧香 = to burn incense

shāo zhū 烧猪 = roast pig

gānzhè 甘蔗 = sugar cane

fàng biānpào 放鞭炮 = set off firecrackers

If you want to know the significance of these things, you’ll have to ask your Chinese informants (or find an article online). If there are some other useful (and confirmed by a native speaker) words I’ve left off, please feel free to share them with us.

• The Curse of the Convergent Concepts
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• Banana Shoes
• Is China a good place to learn Chinese?

At 7:39 in the MP3 file, Jenny and John have his exchange:

Jenny: John, nǐ jīngcháng zhèiyàng làngfèi dàjiā de gǎnqíng, shì ba?
你经常这样浪费大家的, 感情?
John, you often waste everyon’e emotion like this, right?

John: xièxie.
谢谢.
Thanks.

Jenny: (laughing) Búguò, wǒ juéde jīntiān de duìhuà hěn yǒu yìsi. wǒmen zài tīng yì biān.
不过, 我觉得今天的对话很有意思. 我们在听一遍.
Anyway, I think today’s dialog is very interesting. Let’s listen again.

I had to ask a Chinese friend to confirm that’s what Jenny actually said because it’s reduced to what sounds like “buo.” But there’s no doubt: that’s what she said, and that’s what she means. I’ve added “anyway” as a definition for “buguo” in the online dictionary.

If you want to know what all that talk about “wasting emotion” is, you’ll have to listen to the whole Chinesepod lesson.

I can’t wait to go out and start saying “anyway” all the time in Chinese.

• Read Chinese (NFLC) - My Review
• Funnest Things to Say
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• Tone Wars
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