Posts by Sam Duncan

Eating dinner last night, someone pointed to a dish containing snow peas and said, “You know how in China we call them Holland beans? [荷兰豆 hélándòu] In Holland they call them Chinese beans!” I expressed my opinion that this was unlikely to be true, but promised to ask a Dutch friend of mine.

He got back to me quickly and said that in a way it is true, because while technically snow peas are called something else, certain species of green beans are indeed called Chinese beans in Dutch. I wonder how that happened.

Tadpole is 蝌蚪 (kēdǒu). I find this interesting because both characters seem to only mean tadpole, but are never used alone, and also because they both consist of the same meaning radical, 虫 (chóng) – often referred to as the “insect radical” – with a different phonetic radical. In the first character the phonetic radical is 科 (kē), and in the second it is 斗 (dǒu or dòu). You may notice that 科 also contains 斗, but in 科 it is not a phonetic radical, but a meaning radical along with 禾 (hé) – which may or may not be the reason 科 is said kē. This is why I love Chinese.

When I saw the word for bra, 胸罩 (xiōngzhào), for the first time I giggled “chest mask, hehe”, as I had only seen 罩 in 口罩 (kǒuzhào), which is a surgical or face mask. Looking it up I was a little disappointed to see that 罩 actually means “cover”, making the word quite logical and somewhat less amusing. Then I came across another word for bra, 文胸 (wénxiōng), the first character meaning “culture” and the second “chest”, which is stranger still.

I finished The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan a couple of days ago, and it was a great read. Even Howard Goldblatt’s English translation had me reaching for my dictionary and searching on Baidu though, as the book contains a lot of directly translated expressions and idioms.

My favourite would have to be 丑媳妇总得见公婆 (chǒu xífù zǒngděi jiàn gōngpó), translated in the novel as “The ugly bride has to meet her in-laws sooner or later."

So jealous of this robot. H/t Chinese Hacks.