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15 Chinglish Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
The purpose of this post is to explain some of the most common errors made by Chinese students writing English, as well as students translating into English from Chinese, who perhaps have trouble creating natural English expressions when at the mercy of Chinglish words and structures. I hope translation students and Chinese ESL students find […]
8 Words for Popular in Mandarin
I’ve often pondered about how many words really exist in Mandarin for “popular” and so I’ve done my research and come up with what seems to be a pretty definitive list. For the purposes of this post, there is a distinction made between “popular” (known by many people) and universal (“affecting everyone/everything”), the latter of […]
Top 11 Mandarin Speech Particles
Criteria: common enough to be known by most native speakers, but special enough to only be used in specific situations. 1. 哼 hēng – “humph!” – cute, feminine, expresses disagreement in a pouting (撒娇) tone – 哼，有什么了不起！— Humph! What’s so special about that? 2. 咳哟 hāiyō – “heave-ho!”* – 咳哟，这货物怎么这么沉呢？— Heave-ho! How can these goods […]
Top 20 One-Character Adjectives in Mandarin
Here’s my favourite one-character adjectives in Mandarin. Big thanks to Bo and Jee for their help with explanations and translations. 1. 牛 niú. Original meaning: cow. New meaning: awesome. Derives from the common online slang expression 牛逼 niúbī (“cow’s vagina”). 2. 土 tǔ. Original meaning: dirt. New meaning: unsophisticated, especially of rednecks, hicks, bogans, etc. […]
222 English Emotions Translated into Chinese
Here’s my piece pièce de résistance: a masterlist of English emotions, faithfully rendered into Chinese by me and my fantastic friends Yangyang and Bo. A lot of these definitions and explanations you won’t find in the dictionary because they have been tailored specifically to an emotional context. I’ve also included English definitions so it’s clear […]
Clichés, Stereotypes and Euphemisms
Let me start off by saying that clichés, stereotypes and euphemisms have always seemed to me to be quintessentially “Western” concepts; it’s for that reason that I’ve been using them as foundations for lesson plans in my ESL teaching. These words, I believe, evolved after centuries of critical theory in linguistics, sociology and other fields, […]
33 Proverbs that Translate Well Between English and Mandarin
Following on from 23 Actually Useful Proverbs (谚语), I have come up with a list of proverbs that have some kind of equivalence between Chinese and English. I look forward to reading your comments, additions and criticisms! 1. There’s no use crying over spilt milk. 覆水难收 fù shuǐ nán shōu (“Spilt water is hard to […]
Translation Challenge: “as…as…”
How does one tackle the challenge of translating the highly versatile and meaningful English construction “as…as…”? Find out as I break the structure down into its most common variants and give you translations with pinyin along the way.
25 Ghost Words (“鬼词”)
I’m particularly fond of affix characters in Chinese, and what more vibrant an example than 鬼 guǐ (“ghost; devil”)? 魔鬼 móguǐ (“evil devil”) – demon 懒鬼 lǎnguǐ (“lazy devil”) – lazybones 酒鬼 jiǔguǐ (“alcohol ghost”) – alcoholic; drunkard 醉鬼 zuìguǐ (“drunk devil”) – drunkard
74 Switch-Around Words in Mandarin
One unique phenomenon that learners of Chinese occasionally face is the accidental “swap-around” of double-syllable words when talking (and sometimes writing too). Because the vast majority of words in Mandarin are formed using two different characters, our brains will sometimes remember the word well enough but have trouble remembering which character goes before the other. […]
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