Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #3
临时抱佛脚
(lín shí bào fó jiǎo)
Literally: “temporarily embrace Buddha’s feet”
Figuratively: “profess devotion only when in trouble; make a hasty last minute effort”
bendan
joined 2 years ago
the death machine NEED MORE MONEY PLS MR PREZIDNT GIVE MONE
Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #2
食言而肥
(shí yán ér féi)
Literally: “eat word [and thus] fat”
Figuratively: “repeatedly break one’s promises”
admittedly a rather gay drama but w/e (word of honor)
Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #1
抛砖引玉
(pāo zhuān yǐn yù)
Literally: “throw brick pull jade”
Figuratively: “this is just my dumb ass opinion but I'm putting it out here to start the discussion, in the hopes that someone will ~~correct me~~ be inspired to say something wise”
Everyone's learning Mandarin lol. I've been on and off for a few years but should get back into it, 亡羊补牢！
I've tried to learn the Arabic alphabet a few times but I just can't keep track of the dots. Are there other ways to group the letters that help learning?
1st tone ā - a high flat tone, like singing
2nd tone á - rising, from the middle to the top, like a question
3rd tone ǎ - low tone, as low as you can, it often becomes vocal fry. (also rises a bit at the end of sentences or in isolation)
4th tone à - falling, from the top to the bottom, sounds angry
there's also a secret "neutral tone" that happens to the second syllable of many two-syllable words, or for grammatical particles. it changes tone height based on where the previous tone ended, so basically if the previous tone ends low, the neutral tone is high and vice versa. these syllables are also shorter in duration and some diphthongs are flattened.
wojak but it's 我jak and it's literally me
It's not really slang, and it translates pretty cleanly as "[you] could hardly be saying that ... ?", but I still want to give an honorable mention to Chinese 难道 nándào which explicitly indicates a rhetorical question, and it's basically the default way of asking rhetorical questions.
yeah 临时 can mean both of these and more, in any case it means that it's out of the ordinary. i tried to get the literal translations in the same order and roughly the same length as the original, and English doesn't have a neat way of saying this 🤷