I was on nciku recently for the first time in a while. They’ve got a somewhat new system up to help people choose English names. Certainly better than the books most academies have on hand for such a purpose. Maybe, however, not as good as people choosing their own from a somewhat limited mental lexicon. I’m talking about you, Seven, Eleven, Coffee, Twelve, Overlord, Hitler.
According to the site, my name is Finnegan. I’m totally fine with that.
Quick survey, sans the proper survey.
I’m curious about regional equivalents of the insult “250″, usually said er bai wu 二百五. I’ve recently heard it as er wu ling 二五零, which has the same meaning but different reading. Is this regional?
Comment below with the local equivalent in your area. Other options are fine as well, e.g. Shanghai’s own 十三点, as well as any relevant discussion.
Cheers.
note: Sinoglot readers rock. Seriously. You guys have consistently provided good discussion, which is what we talked about wanting, what seems like ages ago, when we decided to put this site together. We’ve all been a bit busy these days so the posting has slowed down. To remedy that, I have a few quick posts I’m going to throw up here in hopes of getting some more discussion going. This is the first. Thanks for kicking ass.
I’ve written elsewhere about trying to talk to the elerly in China. On a trip to Henan province last year i was somewhat surprised by the fact that I could actually understand people and communicate with putonghua. I thought that this was a strictly southern phenomena, being unable to talk to anyone over 50, but today it seems to have crept further north than I’d otherwise thought.
Today I was talking to a friend of mine from northern Jiangsu province about dialects and communication. She was saying that her parents, not yet 50 years of age, cannot speak standard Mandarin. I figured it was not a big problem since it was still beifang-hua, so to test I had her run through the usual phrases I make everyone say. Not terribly surprisingly, it didn’t sound much like Mandarin. It was clearly a northern dialect but one that I’d have a hard time to understand in the context of a real conversation. Not yet 50.
A quick post during another of my few breaks these days. I just dug this up from my photos as I clean my hard drive out. No one ever teaches you how to deal with numbers when you’re getting ready to head to China for the first time. Sure, 一二三四 is all well and good, and maybe even banking numerals are covered in your undergrad Mandarin class, but 1G.P?
I worked at a place in a kind of shopping mall back in 2008. With very VERY few western foreigners in town, there was no shortage of funny English signs, and this often meant signs in public restrooms pleading for one behavioural change or another. But actually, it’s the signs in Chinese that I really appreciate. Two of the first characters I ever learned were from such a sign: 匆匆冲冲, flush quickly.
Anyway, I stopped by a private Chinese academy the other day to see a friend who studies there and saw this above one of the urinals:
走进一点儿
zǒujìn yīdiǎn’er不然我就告诉大家，
bùrán wǒ jiù gàosu dàjiā,我看到了你的一切。
wǒ kàndàole nǐ de yīqiè
“step forward a bit, or I’ll tell everyone I saw your junk”
I was trying to remember if I’ve seen any particularly poetic bathroom signs, such as you find about grass on public parks (the sleeping grass has delicate feelings, or whatever), but I couldn’t think of any.
How about you guys? Got any good Chinese language signs you’ve seen in the local public restroom?