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”
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.
help i misspelled Brendan oh man i am not good with computer pls to help
Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #21
森林
(sēn lín)
Individually: “[lush] [milieu]”
Combined: “forest”
Remember 木 mù “wood”? Well here are some more of them! Both 森 and 林 can (at least could once upon a time) mean “forest” on their own, but their other meanings pull in different directions: 森 towards thick, dense, dark, strict, and 林 towards grove, circle, group.
better not spill it!
Why settle for 1 when you can have 3:
张三、李四、王五
(and if you're wondering why they start indexing at 3, all I can say is it's a bit 乱七八糟)
the death machine NEED MORE MONEY PLS MR PREZIDNT GIVE MONE
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bendan
joined 1 year ago
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