Being bovine, I have always had a soft spot for cows and buffalo.

As the Bejing Olympics draw to an end, imagine my delight when I see that the official mascot ( 福娃 fúwá) for the Beijing Summer Paralympics is a cow! :)


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Heh heh. arietty was just asking me how do you pronounce the word 'Beijing. She said:

As we've always pronounced it with a softer sounding J, but we've noticed through the games that it is more of a normal sounding J.

Hee! This always cracks me up. The article How to Pronounce Beijing sums it up beautifully when they say:

"BBC newsreaders have for ( Read more... )

I was at at art exhibition at the Forbidden City with WSJ the other day and we saw this rather cool calligraphy scroll that uses ancient Chinese script.


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I always love the fact that penguin in Chinese is 企鹅 qǐ’é.

The goose that walks on tip-toe :)


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A friend from work is hanging out with us tomorrow and at first she said she didn't want to be the "light bulb" (灯泡 deng pao). I have no idea why, but in Chinese, the word for being the "third wheel" or "playing gooseberry", is a "light bulb ( Read more... )

There's a Chinese proverb that goes: 塞翁失马，焉知非福 Sai4 weng1 shi1 ma3 yan1 zhi1 fei1 fu2

Literally translated it means "The old man lost his mare, but it all turned out for the best." The meaning is a wee bit weird bizarre:
1. a blessing in disguise
2. it's an ill wind that blows no-one any good. ( Read more... )

When I was reading all the articles about the Sichuan earthquake, I noticed that there were two main ways of describing a human body following death. The first was 尸体 shi1 ti3 which literally means a corpse body or a lifeless body. The second was 遗体 yi2 ti3 which literally means "the body that has been handed down/left behind". The former is a ( Read more... )

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I am curious and so often look up Chinese translations of random things. I was looking up the Serenity Prayer this morning. Yes I'm an atheist but I think the Serenity Prayer is very sensible in its sentiments. I was curious about how the prayer translates into Chinese. Sure enough, it was interesting - partly because the English often seems to ( Read more... )

The Canadian was describing a situation where someone (the Criticiser) was criticising/making vaguely disparaging remarks (the Criticism) about someone else (the Criticised), but was not in fact directing the Criticism at the Criticised, but rather was commenting on them to a third party (the Hapless Go Between) for the purpose of enabling the ( Read more... )