Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #31
庸人自扰
(yōng rén zì rǎo)
Literally: “mediocre person self disturb”
Figuratively: “worry about nothing / create trouble for oneself”
bendan
joined 9 months ago
Chuck in shock, choked on chunky junk
Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #30
上 + 下
(shàng + xià)
Iconic characters: one “arrow” up and one down! And if you feel some sense of déjà vu from last time, that’s because we’re doing more time analogies. If you had to choose between “up” and “down” to mean past or present, which would you pick? In any case, Chinese settled on ...
spoiler
up = past, and down = future. The way I’ve had it explained to me is that in writing, earlier events are on the top of the page and later events at the bottom, but I don’t trust this since it assumes widespread literacy historically. If you know a better explanation please advise!
bonus! tongue twister
下个星期见
(xià gè xīng qī jiàn)
[ɕja⁵¹
kɰɤ⁵¹
ɕɪŋ⁵⁵
tɕʰi⁵⁵
tɕjɛn⁵¹]
“see you next week” (down [one] star period see)
Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #29
前 + 后
(qián + hòu)
The pair “front” + “back”. While of course both interesting in many ways, I want to focus on their time meaning. In modern English, we usually think of the future as in front of us and the past as behind us, but it’s the opposite in Chinese, and get this, in historic English as well! We can see traces of this in the words “before” and “after”!
Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #27
无产阶级
(wú chǎn jiē jí)
Literally: “[un-] property class”
Figuratively: “proletariat”
产 is sneaky as it usually means “production”, but that’s obviously not the case in this context.
阶级 is in turn composed of “stairs” and “rank”, respectively.
Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #26
分手
(fēn shǒu)
Literally: “part hands”
Figuratively: “break up [romantically]”
Remember 分? Allow me to quote myself from 过分:
分 is perhaps even spicier, also an essential grammar word. Even if you don’t know any Chinese you should be able to see that the character depicts a knife parting something in two parts. That’s the core meaning: Part! And from that flows: divide, fraction, component, portion, cent, minute, allotment. Some of those are read fēn and some fèn. Oh and don’t ask about 份 lol
Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #25
电脑
(diàn nǎo)
Literally: “electric brain”
Figuratively: take a guess!
spoiler
“computer”
Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #24
石油
(shí yóu)
Literally: “stone oil”
Figuratively: “petroleum”
There are plenty of words like this where I’m like “huh, what a neat way to name this, the Chinese really got language figured out” and then on a closer look I find out that the English word has the exact same structure, only obscured behind layers upon layers of Fr*nch, Lat*n and Gr**k. You’d definitely be forgiven for not knowing that Latin petra + oleum also means “stone oil”. In Chinese, I cannot emphasize enough how transparent these words usually are.
ඞ