Category: Chinese

WOTD: 葱爆羊肉

Home cooking

葱爆羊肉 (cong1 bao4 yang2rou, “Exploding Onion Mutton”) is a Northern Chinese dish, bountiful in flavor and surprisingly easy to throw together at home. The hack is to pick up thinly sliced mutton/lamb from the grocery store freezer aisle. Though intended for hot pot (火锅 huo3 guo1), you can easily throw it in a wok with some sliced 大葱, 孜然, and 香菜 (Chinese onion, cumin, and cilantro, respectively).

葱：local “Chinese” onions are basically just divided into big and small. The small version being what we’d call shallots or green onions. “Regular” white, round onions are marked as foreign, i.e. 洋葱 (yang2 cong1, “ocean onion”), though my supermarket lists them as 葱头 (cong1 tou2, “onion head”) and red onions are purple in Chinese (紫葱 zi3 cong1).

“爆” (bao4) means explosion and in this dish name refers to a cooking technique: 爆炒 (bao4chao3), though how it is different than regular just stir-frying eludes me.

羊肉 (yang2rou4) refers to lamb or mutton per the general construction of animal + meat = edible.

Is Chinese hard (to learn)?

Read in Chinese

The short answer is no, or at least, it shouldn’t be. Sure, the presence of tones in the phonetic system can be confusing and the tens of thousands of characters (hanzi) in existence is certainly daunting, but it is a mistake to overly fixate on these pain points.

In truth, tones and hanzi are not really problems for learning Chinese. Firstly, tones do not actually do as much work as the textbook examples suggest they do. Certainly, it would be embarrassing to create confusion between “horse” and “mother” (ma3 and ma1, respectively), but a surprising number of Chinese syllable segments have a restricted number of tones to choose from. For example, “te” has to be “te4”, so even if your pronunciation is off, the listener will apply their implicit knowledge of Chinese phonological system and automatically correct. Once context is introduced, the inclination to listen over “mispronunciations” is even stronger. Finally, the majority of native Chinese speakers were not brought up in perfect standard Mandarin, meaning that their version of Chinese is likely to have some variations in tonal pronunciation. There is even a common saying to this point: “天不怕，地不怕，只怕广东人讲普通话:” (Tian1 bu4 pa4, di4 bu4 pa4, zhi3 pa4 guang3dong1ren2 jiang3 pu3tong1hua4). “There is nothing to fear in heaven or earth except a Cantonese speaking Mandarin.”

Regarding hanzi, though they are many and have complex internal structures, the threshold for competency has been vastly lowered in the technological age. We don’t need to overly concern ourselves with stroke order and proper calligraphy techniques when writing hanzi is a matter of hitting a few keys and selecting one from the IME provided list. Of course, one still needs to put in the effort to recognize hanzi, but to a certain degree, learning hanzi is the critical element of learning Chinese. One’s vocabulary is directly proportional to the number of hanzi in one’s tool bag. Furthermore, given the fact that Chinese does not have the inflections, tenses, and cases of other languages and that the main grammatical points can be boiled down to special cases of a number of hanzi, it is not overly reductive to equate the task of learning Chinese to learning hanzi.

So, all told, as Chinese is “simpler” than some languages and the so-called most difficult part is the essence of learning, it really isn’t a hard language to learn.

Note: Obviously the thesis “learn characters –> learn Chinese” has some logical fallacies. To get going, one needs to learn the basic patterns of sentence construction, clearly differentiate vocabulary from characters (and build up a sense of morphology), and practice speaking and listening as a separate set of skills. Nonetheless, the main effort of progressing from beginner to intermediate and to advanced is in building up a large knowledge base of characters.

WOTD: 寻猫启事

“Lost Cat”

Mischief Managed

So, this isn’t exactly a word that you would find in the dictionary or a text book vocabulary list, but it did happen today. The typical formulation is actually 寻人启事 (xun2 ren2 qi3shi4; “search person announcement”), though it works to substitute other nouns for the missing. For example. Pleco uses 物 (wu4 “material stuff”) for a general posting about missing items and dog lovers should keep their eyes open for 寻狗启事 (xun2 gou3 qi3shi4). The massive BCC Chinese corpus only lists 寻人启事 as a lexical item.

“启事” itself is an interesting construction and not the usual term for notice/announcement (including: 通知 tong1zhi1, 布告 bu4gao4, and 海报 hao3bao4). The 启 morpheme typically signifies opening, starting, or enlightenment, while 事 is one of those super productive characters in Chinese, but can generally be glossed as matter/affair.

WOTD: 借酒浇愁

Randomly picking a word (uniform distribution) from my database list brings us a fun little chengyu about self-medication.

The literal construction means “borrow alcohol to pour on worries,” though Pleco renders it much more poetically as “to drown one’s sorrows.”

Though “borrow” and “lend” are the main meanings of 借 (jie4), a less frequently used gloss of “by means of” is being utilized in this expression. 酒 (jiu3) is straightforward. The use of 浇 (jiao1) is quite interesting because it is most commonly used in gardening contexts with 浇水/浇花 (to water), thus evoking stronger imagery of pouring alcohol on one’s worries. There is a variant of the chengyu where 浇 is replaced by 消 (xiao1, meaning “disappear”). Finally, 愁 (chou2) can function as a noun or a verb, but usually pairs with 发 (fa1) as 发愁 to mean “to worry.”