Moutain Pear sour metal
Whenever I come home, I always try to read some of the Chinese magazines my parents subscribe to. My mother gets regular subscriptions to the Chinese version of Reader's digest 读者 (but more mainstream and contains a wide variety of poetry, short essays, and interesting articles). This trip home, she strongly strongly recommended that I read an article about food preservatives.
To be honest, reading the article makes me feel incredibly stupid. There's so many Chinese words I don't know, particularly because they use Chinese names of so many chemicals that its hard to keep up. The first read through, I understood nearly nothing even though I probably would've known the names of every chemical if it was listed in English. So, getting off my lazy ass, I decided to check up some of the chemical names on Chinese Wikipedia.
It was amazing. To find that complex names in Chinese means such simple things.
亚硝酸钠 = Sodium Nitrate.
丙三醇= 甘油 = glycerine
大豆蛋白 = Soy Protien
And the best one of all: 山梨酸钾. To me, who knows nothing about chemistry in Chinese, this means "Mountain Pear sour metal" but in English, it means Potassium sorbate.
I find it hilarious that an article that was incomprehensible to me made sense thanks to wikipedia and google translate. My years of being a bio major is not wasted after all. I really wish I had the time to learn biology again, except in Chinese. It would be so awesome =)
To be honest, reading the article makes me feel incredibly stupid. There's so many Chinese words I don't know, particularly because they use Chinese names of so many chemicals that its hard to keep up. The first read through, I understood nearly nothing even though I probably would've known the names of every chemical if it was listed in English. So, getting off my lazy ass, I decided to check up some of the chemical names on Chinese Wikipedia.
It was amazing. To find that complex names in Chinese means such simple things.
亚硝酸钠 = Sodium Nitrate.
丙三醇= 甘油 = glycerine
大豆蛋白 = Soy Protien
And the best one of all: 山梨酸钾. To me, who knows nothing about chemistry in Chinese, this means "Mountain Pear sour metal" but in English, it means Potassium sorbate.
I find it hilarious that an article that was incomprehensible to me made sense thanks to wikipedia and google translate. My years of being a bio major is not wasted after all. I really wish I had the time to learn biology again, except in Chinese. It would be so awesome =)