Public figures the world over are known to cite ancient Chinese wisdom when making their case – US Supreme Court Justice Kennedy recently cited Confucius in the ruling legalizing gay marriage there, while then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton used a Chinese proverb from “The Art of War” during one visit to China. But Chinese humor, often derived from its vivid imagery, is usually left in the vernacular. The following are seven Chinese idioms which aren’t commonly used in English — yet — but should be, on topics ranging from infidelity to snobbery.

1. 脚踏两条船 (jiǎo tà liǎng tiáo chuán) “To stand with one’s feet on two different boats” – This is the Chinese phrase for someone who is in relationships with, or leading on, two different people at the same time. The closest idiomatic expression might be “two-timing,” but it lacks in imagery. It’s much easier to visualize some chump trying his hardest to balance with one foot in a canoe and another in a fishing boat before falling, some minutes later, into the icy lake of karma.
2. 睡得像死猪一样 (shuì de xiàng sǐ zhū yīyàng) “To sleep like dead pig” – A clear winner over its closest English equivalents, “to sleep like a log” and “to sleep like a rock.” The pig is dead. Don’t bother setting an alarm clock or calling it seven times to ask “Why are you late for the 10:00 am sales meeting??!?”
3. 有奶便是娘 (yǒu nǎi biàn shì niáng) “Whoever has milk is mom” – Opportunism, anyone? To my knowledge, there is no similar English idiom describing the attitude of shameless benefit-seeking in which the subject is willing to do anything for a Klondike bar, so to speak.
4. 一粒老鼠屎坏了一锅汤 (yī lì lǎo shǔ shǐ huài le yīguō tāng) “One piece of mouse shit spoiled a pot of soup” – This is the Chinese equivalent of “one bad apple can spoil the bunch.” Other variants of the saying have the mouse shit spoiling porridge instead – my guess is it doesn’t improve the flavor or nutritional value of either.
5. 挂羊头卖狗肉 (guà yang tóu mài gǒu ròu) “To hang up a sheep’s head but sell dog meat” – A slightly sneakier version of the “bait and switch.” You have to hand it to this culinary twist on “false advertising.”
6. 狗屎运 (gǒu shǐ yùn) Literally “dog-shit luck” – this phrase actually describes a great, not terrible, turn of events. This is a throwback to the days when, in rural China, people used excrement for fertilizer and there was not enough supply to meet demand. Dog shit could be sold for cold hard cash or used to grow crops, and either way, accidentally stepping in it was a source of joy, not sorrow.
7. 掉书袋 (diào shū dài) “Drop a sack of books” – To embellish one’s writing or speech with erudite references in order to seem smarter. The person engaged in this action probably thinks that his allusions to other authors are carefully contrived, but they’re more likely to be perceived as clunky and awkward – like an actual sack of books. This is also perhaps the best phrase to wrap up this listicle, lest readers be tempted to show off their knowledge of Chinese dog-shit idioms at the next cocktail party they attend.

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First an article on Hacking Chinese came to my mind: You might be too lazy to learn Chinese, but you’re not too old. Olle reminds as that even though it’s easier for children to master the pronunciation of a new language , we adults are much smarter and thus are much better at learning. What we should learn from kids though is that they don’t give up and they aren’t afraid to make mistakes.

We adults often expect results way too quickly and get frustrated when we don’t learn a new skill right away. Remember that learning anything new takes time and effort, so does Chinese, and don’t be afraid to make lots of mistakes along the way.

Speaking of confidence, a blog post from Sinoplice, Confidence and Tones, reminds us how important it is to be confident in your studies. The perfect balance is with having the correct information (knowing the correct pronunciation) and being confident enough to open your mouth and say those words out loud. Children aren’t afraid to speak up so we should definitely learn from them!

I didn’t learn the Chinese pronunciation well when I started. Our teacher just made us listen and repeat after a CD recoding for hours and hours, without explaining why we were learning this way. She didn’t explain where and how all these new sounds should be pronounced in our mouths. She didn’t correct our tones enough and let us get away with bad pronunciation.

When I came to China I noticed that it could take me 5 minutes to try to order yì bēi shŭi one glass of water just because my pronunciation was so terrible. During the years I’ve noticed plenty of foreigners complaining how the Chinese don’t understand their Chinese, I felt the same way at first. But then I realized that it’s my fault, my pronunciation just wasn’t good enough to allow the listener to easily understand me.

Learning Chinese pronunciation is tricky, it takes lots of time and effort, but the good news are, that after you master it (or become good enough), learning Chinese becomes much easier. At first it may seem like that you never learn those difficult initials like j, q, x or zh, ch, sh, but that’s not true. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, study hard and you will notice how native speakers start to understand you.

It may take a while to get that first feeling of accomplishment, but trust me, it feels great! One day you realize the taxi drive understood where you were going, the waitress got your order right and you just said your very first spontaneous Chinese sentence without translating it first in your head.

John from Sinoplice describes learning Chinese in 5 stages, starting from “Ching-chong-ching”. At this first stage Chinese seems something completely alien to you. How could these sounds be learned? And how is it even possible to recognize the different tones, do they even matter? After learning Chinese for a while, with a good teacher, a learner will gradually realize that Chinese is a language just like any other language (Stage 2). You start to understand that for the Chinese the difference between mā with a first tone and mà with a fourth tone is as big as the difference between A and B letters is for us.

I wish that my students don’t make the same mistakes as I did and think the tones or correct pronunciation doesn’t matter. Yes, Chinese will understand your Xièxie (thank you) and fāpiào (invoice) no matter how poorly you utter them, just because these are the two words they are used to hearing from a foreigner’s mouth. But try something else and you find yourself having communication trouble.

We also have difficulties with non-native speakers of our own languages if their pronunciation is way off, and it’s the same with Chinese. English and Chinese just happen to be quite different languages so it takes a bit more effort to nail the pronunciation. So let’s make it easier for us and for the listener and learn those new sounds. Just like a kid, don’t be afraid to make mistakes!

Now after learning Chinese for more than six years I finally understand how valuable it is to listen to the advice or advanced learners like Olle from Hacking Chinese and John from Sinoplice. They have gone through the journey, made the mistakes and are sharing their wisdom on how to avoid those mistakes ourselves.

As a final word for this not so coherent blog post, I would like to say that don’t give up. No matter how hard it might seem in the beginning, you can learn to speak Chinese. No matter if it’s your first or fifth foreign language, you are never too old to learn new things. Advance on your own speed, but take an advantage of the tips of other learners.

Good luck! Study hard!

The post You’re Never Too Old to Learn Chinese, But It’s Going to Take Some Work appeared first on The Nanfang.

As a Chinese learner for more than six years and a Chinese teacher for a year, I’m extremely eagerly awaiting this new dictionary, backed with years of research, that will explain Chinese characters.

Co-founder Ash Henson explains that the roots of the project go back to 1993, when he started learning the language. In 2005 he moved to Taiwan to pursue his passion and enroll in a PhD program for teaching Chinese as a second language, and later continued his research in the Chinese department.

Ash met Christian Schmidt and John Renfroe, both equally crazy about the world of hanzi. After years of research they decided to re-package their academic knowledge into a dictionary that would be easy enough for beginners to use as well.

So how does Outlier Dictionary of Chinese Characters help learners to master characters?

It helps us to understand the characters as a system, how they actually work. The main framework for understanding characters are the four types of functional components that are introduced in the dictionary. These are the building blocks of characters and Outlier dictionary shows us the building blocks that a particular character is composed of.

For example, have you ever wondered why the character for beautiful 美 includes a sheep 羊 on top? Did the ancient Chinese regard sheep as beautiful animals? The Outlier dictionary explains that 羊 here is actually an empty component; it used to be a headdress made of feathers. So the real story behind 美 is that it depicts a person wearing a headdress, thus making it beautiful.

What is even better is that the new dictionary will be published on Pleco, which is already the most widely used Chinese dictionary app for learners. Pleco includes both free and paid dictionaries that you can download according to your own needs, and next year Outlier Dictionary of Chinese Characters will be one of them!

To make the dream come true, the Outlier team started a Kickstarter campaign that has already reached 63 percent of their goal. If the goal of $75,000 is reached by June 12th, the dictionary will be published in the first quarter of 2016.

Me and many other Chinese learners and teachers are super excited of this project and can’t wait to get our hands on it!

For more information check out https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnrenfroe/outlier-dictionary-of-chinese-characters

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Chinese customers waiting outside an Apple store in New York.

When it comes to Apple’s iPhone 6, there is nothing Chinese won’t do to get their hands on one including, but not limited to, queuing day and night, sleeping on the sidewalk, or renting out a girlfriend to raise money for the phone.

Instead of waiting in line with fully-charged Apple devices like other Apple fans in Melbourne, Australia, many Chinese were seen getting by with a uniquely Chinese pastime: mahjong, Tencent News reported. Squatting on small chairs, nothing seemed to disturb those eagerly waiting from shuffling their mahjong tiles.

Interestingly, the report acknowledged a lot of Chinese faces waiting in the queues worldwide. Almost everywhere the iPhone 6 is available, including the U.S., Hong Kong and Australia, a sizeable number of Chinese – young, old, men, and women – made up large portions of the lines. This of course fuels speculation that Chinese buyers are scalping the phones to clients in China, where the phone is unavailable, at a significantly higher price.

In a six-minute video by Casey Neistat, Chinese were documented selling their newly acquired phones to other interested buyers. He claimed the Chinese lining up for the phones in the city were organized and managed by Chinese mafia groups.

We don’t know if there is any truth to Casey’s claim; but, if there is, judging by the dedication Chinese buyers have shown so far for the phone, the mafia were doing a good job keeping them in line.

See the photos below for more evidence of the Chinese love of the iPhone 6:

Chinese playing mahjong outside an Apple store in Melbourne, Australia.

Chinese customers waiting in line in California.

Several Chinese customers waiting outside an Apple store in New York broke out in a fight.

Scalpers selling iPhone 6 to other buyers in Hong Kong.

Photos: Tencent, Reuters and AFP

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But when it comes to buying luxury real estate, do the super rich in China have the same taste and requirements as their counterparts in the developed world? The recently published “Sotheby’s International Realty Luxury Lifestyle Report” shows Chinese preferences are basically “same same, but different.”

The report surveyed affluent consumers in the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil and China.  Compared to the developed world, there are more high net worth individuals in China and they are more likely to purchase a “lifestyle” property as their primary residence.

Among the Chinese surveyed, 98% want a lifestyle property while 74% in the US said the same.

Among those Chinese, 54% want waterfront property.

There was also a big difference in other demands:

A whopping 93% of affluent Chinese consumers surveyed said they would like to make a “legacy home purchase”, which is a property intended to remain in the family or be gifted to children, while only 64% of Americans said the same.

The Affluent Chinese Consumer

Ninety-six percent of affluent Chinese consumers surveyed said they’d bought a property within the past three years.  Wealthy Chinese are not only investing in property, they consider themselves part of the investor class.  Eighty-two percent of Chinese luxury real estate purchasers consider themselves “investors”, while only 67% of Americans think the same.

Here are some additional stats on the priorities of Chinese property investors:

You can read the full report here.

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The smartphone app market is full of Chinese translation apps, but not all of them do it well — and not all of them offer a differentiating feature that stands out from the crowd.

Now Waygo, a freemium iOS app on the iPhone, has added a useful new feature with its 3.0 update (along with a design overhaul). As well as translating Chinese characters when you hover your smartphone above them, Wagyo will now also show you the pinyin to help with pronunciation.

Waygo secured $900,000 in funding in July to launch an Android app and continue building out its product. Before that, in June, it won the “Most Promising Startup” award at Echelon in Singapore. It certainly looks like one to keep an eye on if you’re living in China.

You can trial Waygo for free on a basis of 10 translation per day, but if you want to do more than that you’re going to have to pay $6.99. However, with of so many free high-quality translation apps available, would you hand over your hard-earned cash for this feature? Let us know in the comments.

In other Chinese language app news, highly-regarded Pleco has recently updated its iOS app. It’s a complete revamp, and also includes optical character recognition.

At the end of October, The Nanfang reported on a pair of augmented reality glasses that can translate a Chinese menu into English.

Photo credit: Lee Yiu Tung
Story via: TheNextWeb 

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It seems that in China today money can buy anything. But can it buy love? That’s a hard question to answer. It will, however, buy you a 20-year-old Chinese wife — assuming you have a spare 300,000 yuan (US$49,200) lying around.

A 20-year-old Guangzhou woman, only identified as Li, posted an offer on her microblog at the end of October stating that she would marry the man who covered her father’s enormous medical bills: he has been diagnosed with leukemia and requires a life-saving bone marrow transplant.

An elementary school teacher and Art graduate, Li has so far managed to find a rather impressive 200,000 yuan (partly thanks to loans from relatives), leaving her 100,000 yuan short of the total sum.

“I have no other way to turn. I hope it can raise awareness and bring help,” Li said, according to a report by Want China Times yesterday.

In reply to her plea, a man claiming to be a “professor” essentially told her to sell sex instead, because he would “rather pay for sex services” than a wife.

Good luck with that, prof.

Photo credit: Memecenter.com

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To provide a glimmer of hope, a recruitment fair was held at Jinan University over the weekend to give final year students a chance to enter the “ant race.” On Saturday, the university’s Shipai Campus held a job fair for students hoping to work in fields related to finance. Then yesterday, another was held for students of humanities subjects, according to Southern Metropolis Daily.

Meanwhile, the Guangzhou University of Technology will host a recruitment fair this coming weekend (November 24-25). Saturday will be devoted to fields such as I.T., construction, and direct selling. Sunday will be for students who do science subjects.

These recruitment fairs are known in China for seeing huge crowds that the Chinese describe as “People sea, people mountain.” Here is a picture of a 2008 job fair in Shenzhen (hat tip to Chinasmack)

The China Liby Company has already received 10,000 Resumes this year, about half of which were instantly rejected before four rounds of interviews to choose a candidate.

Good luck kids.

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When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey – which is an island off the coast of Sicily – it was weird, disconcerting and alienating to not be white – and I hated it. I hated having the name that no one could pronounce and everyone made fun of. I used to look at the ants on the trees and feel jealous that they were homogeneous (despite their harsh working conditions). I wished I could be white. I wished I could understand baseball and rock music and had fluency in American pop culture. I wished that I could eat hamburgers or pizza at home (we almost never had anything other than Chinese food). I didn’t want to learn those ridiculous characters that I would never use! Seriously, when would I ever need to use Chinese?! I guess that’s why many of my friends were Indians, Jews, or Arabs. We were outsiders. Even in my 20s there was the feeling that there was, still, a glass ceiling that Asians couldn’t get beyond – not to mention how difficult it still is for Latinos and African-Americans to this very day. Growing up near Princeton provided a front row and center seat to one of the redoubts of WASP culture in America.

The 2008 election of Obama changed that, but it was very much a crystallization of how American culture and society and demographics were changing. Of course, this change provoked a backlash from the culturally irredentist right-wing, from Donald Trump to John Sununu, who were obsessed with proving that Obama wasn’t American or needed to learn how to be American. And Mitt Romney never did much to combat that during his campaign, never really took a stand against the virulently xenophobic edge of the Republican Party, sometimes going so far as to crack birther-themed jokes at rallies.

I will always have that lurking feeling that I’m not American enough, because I haven’t been to a pro-sports game in my entire life, never watched much TV in childhood, didn’t understand Jesus and Christianity, and worst of all, nearly joined the Democratic Socialists of America. There was always a question mark in my heart, even as I traveled the world with an American passport. Eleven years in China exacerbated that. Four years ago, Barack Obama’s election allayed those fears, somewhat – but the subsequent backlash proved that no, I wasn’t being paranoid.

Last time, in 2008, I was on the verge of tears, but held back because I was in public. But we did drink a lot. This time, alone at home in Shanghai, everything seemed even more emotional than it was four years ago. I was overcome when the networks called Ohio for Obama, handing him another four years. Thinking about it now, a few hours later, I realize it wasn’t just joy, it was relief, catharsis. US election campaigns, fueled by our polarized 24 hour social media+cable news cycle, are akin to what we call “cruel and unusual punishment”. It was no longer the jubilation of electing a black president so much as it was the relief and reprieve from burden.

I know that Obama and the Democrats are not always truthful, but in recent years and in this campaign in particular, the GOP has gone to such lengths to disseminate such invidious propaganda that I began feeling that this election was a battle, not for the White House or Congress, but for something much bigger than that. We were fighting for the role of facts, numbers, evidence, and critical thinking – intellectual qualities that make for good science and good journalism and good politics.

Much of the malarkey is a result of Citizens United, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch Brothers, Karl Rove and the super-PACs, who have left such a bad and bitter taste in my mouth over the years. Every time they put something in the news cycle, or were themselves part of the news, I felt angry, frustrated, helpless. Billions were spent on this election. Adelson shelled out $40 million of his own money. Why? So we could implement the Ryan plan and cut Medicaid and throw more of the poor to the wolves? No matter how many fig leaves the plutocrats buy, they are still fig leaves. So you can understand the immense psychological relief I felt knowing the forces of ignorance and obfuscation would not win the day, and that religious nutters like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock as well as Allen West, Joe Walsh and other Tea Party acolytes would feel the sharp rebuke of the electorate. And as for Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, and their ilk – a bad clown show, at best – they deserve all the public obloquy they have received. They should shut up when the adults are talking.    It reminds me of that famous line from the UK satirical TV series Nathan Barley, where they say “the idiots are winning”. Maybe the idiots will win, but they didn’t on election night. The rebels beat the Empire that night. Now we must make sure we do right by ourselves, as well as by the many others in the world affected by our policies.

The penchant, deep in American culture, for anti-intellectualism, jingoism and political solipsism are part of the reason I’ve never felt very culturally American. How can you drink that Kool-Aid if you’re not even sure that you belong, that people will accept you for what you are? However, I’d like to believe that no matter how alienated I am from all that, there is a core of me that is quintessentially American. I like to think that the very way I think – the regard for facts, numbers, critical thinking and historical analysis – and the willingness to use those to fight for a cause one believes in – are values inculcated by my American education, from kindergarten all the way to graduate school. There was no chabuduo (a common Chinese phrase meaning “not off by much”) in my physics or math classes, or even in my history and literature classes. Ideas matter. Values matter. Arguments matter. Specificity or generality, being able to see the forest and the trees. Those are intellectual values and political values that do not just hold in the ivory tower. They matter immensely in shaping our politics and lives. All the time. You live in China for 11 years, and you’ll appreciate the contrast and the difference.

Much has been said about the nerdiest celeb in the US, New York Times statistician extraordinaire Nate Silver. While his calls were impressively accurate, and made “gut feeling” pundits look foolish, we should not glorify Silver because he beat the house like those MIT folks in Las Vegas. It isn’t just about #winning. It’s about using math as a tool to serve humanistic ends – to help us “perfect the union”, incrementally, measure by measure, bill by bill, law by law, to the best of our abilities. It’s about elevating the sophistication of political discourse. It’s about clearing out the “noise” of super-PAC sponsored attack ads to find the “signal” of actual positions and policies, to be persuaded by tenability instead of merely being swayed by likability. We need more wonks and math, because we simply cannot let lies carry the election, and we cannot allow any candidate pull a fast one on a benighted or anxious public like George W. Bush or Romney. That’s just bad for all of us. It lowers us, all of us. The Age of Stupid should be the like the Stone Age. We cannot, must not, ever go back there.  And that’s why I felt such relief when Obama won.

What a relief to know that the ridiculous politics of the lowest common denominator and its appeal to the so-called “low information” voter did not swing the election. I don’t ever want to see a candidate get up in front of millions of people and say, per Romney, “Five studies show that my ideas are better than yours. Of course the math adds up! Jeep is shipping all of your jobs to China!!” Please, don’t insult our intelligence. Your lies will catch up with you, the truth come out – and now faster than ever. Pundits will perhaps be more circumspect, less prone to bombastic prophesizing about landslides and such, and not a moment too soon! I hope this functions not just as a future disincentive against blatant lying, but also as a strong incentive for creating more nuanced and intelligent political discourse. Still, I was on tenterhooks the whole time, nightmarish images of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld awash in my mind, cackling diabolically. Karl Rove smoking his pipe in bathtub full of cash. When the networks called Ohio, it was very much like the feeling you get the instant you wake up from a bad dream, and the gratitude you feel as the molecules of reality push the nightmare world to the back of your mind, at least for another day.

And speaking of reality – wow. A few states took the brave step towards the legalization of marijuana, the affirmation of marriage equality, and the rejection of Citizens United. There are now a record number of women in the Senate (20) and an all-female congressional delegation in New Hampshire. These were all great victories for what Paul Krugman called the “real real America” – the only America that I ever have a chance of fully belonging to. Hey GAP, we don’t need those “Manifest Destiny” T-shirts, but we could use some more Optimism, Math, Facts, Intelligence and Tolerance T-shirts. Those are the keys to whatever destiny this republic might have. The New Deal and the Great Society weren’t meant to be one-offs, they were meant, like all social contracts, like all deep promises made between peoples, to have their vows renewed and improved with each generation – and it is time do that again.  As Obama said, echoing Lincoln – we must “perfect the Union” – where ‘perfect’ is a verb, a perpetual state of becoming. It feels good to be an American, again.

The post Why Obama’s re-election matters to one Chinese American appeared first on The Nanfang.

The Shenzhen Universiade has become the latest victim of a rather high-profile English gaffe.  The Universiade Cauldron Tower in Nanshan has displayed the terms “1th”, “2th” and “3th” since the games took place a year ago, which any native English speaker will tell you are incorrect.  In fact, many people have contacted the Shenzhen government and Universiade to point out the error, but their complaints have been dismissed.  Why?  Well, Shenzhen says those terms are a Universiade convention which have been used at all the games.

The International University Sports Federation (FISU), which organizes the Universiade, has finally chimed in to say, no, that’s not the case.  Indeed, those are English mistakes that have nothing to do with the Universiade itself.  This, according to a report in the Shenzhen Daily:

The Southern Metropolis Daily first reported the issue last August, quoting an unidentified person in charge of the Shenzhen Universiade’s opening and closing ceremonies as saying the incorrect numbers were, in fact, a convention of all Summer Universiades. The person told the paper that the style was used according to an FISU guidebook, and Chinese Foreign Ministry staff had been assured by FISU officials that the style had been used by Summer Universiades for the past 50 years.

But in an e-mail to Shenzhen Daily on Wednesday, FISU spokesman Christian Pierre acknowledged that the numbers are grammatical errors.

On FISU’s official Web site, the first, second and third Universiades are listed as “1st,” “2nd” and “3rd.”

The issue raises the question of whether there was a communication problem between Shenzhen Universiade organizers and FISU regarding the spelling, or if Shenzhen officials intentionally used a nonexistent “Universiade custom” as an excuse to cover up a simple mistake.

Our bet is on the coverup.

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