Category: Chinese (vocab, phrases, etc.)
-
A little mouse in an email address
In my previous post on punctuation, I left out perhaps one of the most interesting, creative, and perhaps most relevant to the internet, symbols: the @ symbol! When you ask people for their email address, they’ll often answer you with: name小老鼠gmail.com At first this completely threw me off–until I thought it out and realized how…
-
The Art of Punctuation in Chinese
There is a certain art to Chinese punctuation, and as a graduate student, writing papers with proper pronunciation is exceedingly important. 「知漢字者智。知標點者明。」-Me, breaking traditional poetic structure. A Little History of Chinese Punctuation Chinese traditionally had no paragraphs, no spaces and, especially, no punctuation. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did punctuation…
-
“You sold me out!”
A staple of any good mafia movie is when one of the guys rats out someone for fun and/or profit. And guess what? Chinese has an awesome phrase for a situation like that, too! 你出賣我！（nǐ chūmài wǒ） 出賣 is actually a set phrase which, aside from meaning quite literally “to sell”, also means “to sell…
-
A Crash Course in Chinese Numbers
This is a pretty simple post, but hopefully it’ll give you a quick and easy introduction to Chinese numbers–which can be rather intimidating at first the larger they get! But as you’ll see, it’s pretty easy to figure out once you know a simple little trick.
-
Addressing an Envelope in Taiwan – Horizontal
Now that we’ve looked at how to address envelopes in the more traditional vertical style, let’s take a look how to address horizontal envelopes! Horizontal As for the horizontal envelopes, the post office yet again gives us some great instructions: 收件人地址、姓名書於中央偏右，寄件人地址、姓名書於左上角或信封背面。郵遞區號書於地址上方第1行，郵票貼於右上角。 Breaking this down, we get the address and name of the recipient (收件人地址、姓名) in…
-
Addressing an Envelope in Taiwan – Vertical
Since we’ve got our addresses down, on to envelopes! In Taiwan, there are two ways to write the address on the envelope: the more traditional, vertical, way or the more Western-style horizontal way (all depends on the type of envelope you have and how ambitious you are). In this post, I’ll be taking a look…
-
How the Taiwanese Address System Works
Mailing letters is admittedly a long and arduous process, what with the fancy emails and instant messaging these days, but it’s still quite a necessary part of life abroad! In this post we will be looking at the (relatively) easy addressing system in Taiwan!
-
Quick Vocab: App Updates
Just a quick little post about some app related Chinese! 修正iOS 5相容性問題: Corrected iOS5 compatibility issues. 修正（xiūzhèng）： to revise / to amend / fix 相容 (xiāngróngxìng): compatibility Made up of: 相容 (xiāngróng): compatible 性 (xìng): -ity 問題 (wèntí): problem / issue 修正部分已知bug: Fixed some known bugs. 修正（xiūzhèng）： to revise / to amend / fix 部分…
-
Driverless Car
The future, today! According this article from the New York Times, driver-less cars could change the shape of cities in the future. From the title: 無人駕駛汽車將怎樣改變未來城市生活？ The most exciting vocabulary bit is driver-less car in Chinese, which is 無人駕駛汽車: 無人駕駛 (wúrénjiàshǐ): unmanned (literally no [無] person [人] drive [駕駛]) 汽車 (qìchē): car As for the rest of…
-
Johnny’s Walking
Caught this great image from Facebook and decided to share some Chinese creativity with Johnny Walker! See if you can figure out the puns, and check below for the answers!
En Route To Fluency 