Yin and Yang

Yin and yang are no strangers to English speakers. The dark and the bright. The cold and the warm. The chaos and the order.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: yang sounds like “young”. An a in pinyin always sounds like aah. Pinyin wasn’t designed with English in mind.

The concepts of 阴yīn and 阳yáng come from Taoism, a philosophy that has tremendous influence on the Chinese languages and cultures, but that few today actually understand. A typical Chinese person might not know much more about yin and yang than a typical Westerner, but they will know these words that involve this dual concept:

太阳tài yang

太阳 is the sun. 阳 is usually reduced to a natural tone, but when enunciating or in a theatrical setting, it might still be read in the second tone.

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Bilingual chain: a game | 双语链条：游戏开始

Here’s how this game works. I start with a word in Chinese, and I translate it into English. The English word will have multiple meanings, so I’ll translate it into a different Chinese word. The Chinese word will have multiple meanings, so I’ll translate it into a different English word, and so on and so forth, until we reach a word so specific that it can’t be translated in two different ways.

游戏规则：从一个汉语词开始，地二把它翻译成英文。这个英文词有多个含义，地二取其中一个译回汉语。这个汉语词又有多个含义，地二取其中一个译回英语，如此往复，直到找不出多义词为止。听上去有些困难，但是汉语和英语多义词都很多，而不同语种的两个语言，每个词的外延经常不完整覆盖，所以形成一个长链条其实很容易。

This may sound a bit difficult, but both Chinese and English have lots of homonyms, and their definitions rarely overlap exactly, so it’s not entirely challenging to form a reasonably long chain. What better word to start with than game:

游戏yóu xì

游戏 is the most straightforward translation of game. It goes with 玩wán; to play a game is 玩游戏. A word game is 文字wén zì游戏, which, without context, typically refers to the dishonest practice rather than the innocent fun. Board games are often abbreviated to 桌游zhuō yóu, and video games are called 电脑diàn nǎo游戏 if played on a computer, or 街机jiē jī游戏 (lit. street machine games) if played on an arcade machine.

既然是做游戏，那就从“游戏”这个词开始。游戏一般翻译成 game。桌游叫做 board games，文字游戏可以翻译成 word games。汉语里提到文字游戏，一般是指咬字眼纠细节那种不诚实行为，但是诸如成语接龙等文字类的游戏也可以称作 word games。电脑游戏，一般叫做 video games（很少叫 △ computer games），但 video games 也指在游戏厅玩的那种街机游戏。

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Italics in Chinese

Western languages often make use of italics to convey certain intonations. If you haven’t noticed before, italics is a separate font, and not just a mechanical tilting of the upright letters. (Mechanical tilting does exist, and it’s called oblique.) Compare:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

In case you see something different in your browser, this is how it appears to me:

Notice the “a” and the “g” which are now completely different, and the rounded “v” and “w”. Other letters are subtly different too (do you see how the middle of the “e” is now curved?).

Now, here’s something that lots of foreign companies don’t pay attention to in their translated user manuals and web pages: italics doesn’t exist in Chinese. The “italics” button usually just turns Chinese characters into oblique (mechanical tilt); it looks ugly, and it’s the sign of a poorly typeset piece of text.

What does Chinese use instead? It depends on what you are using italics for.

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Reading Math Out Loud | 数学公式的英语读法

This will be a bilingual post. 本文双语。

When multiple readings are possible, the most commonly used ones are listed on top. 有多种读法时，最常用的读法排在前面。

For Chinese learners
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英文读法在这里
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Basic arithmetic | 四则zé运yùn算suàn

1 + 2

一加jiā二

一加上shàng二

one plus two

add two to one

1 – 2

一减jiǎn二

一减去qù二

one minus two

subtract two from one

one takeaway two*

* takeaway 稍不正式，一般是教小孩子做减法时这么说。

1 × 2

一乘chéng以yǐ二

二乘一

one multiplied by two

one times two

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Waterproof your house before it rains

未雨绸缪

A good doctor cures an illness; a great doctor prevents an illness. When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all. There’s no shortage of similar sayings in any language, yet we keep coming up with new ways to say it because we keep thinking “it’s fine at the moment” and fail to plan ahead. Case in point: <gestures broadly at everything>.

How long ago do you think humans first had this thought? At least 2,700 years ago, according to today’s chengyu. Egyptians were still making sphinxes then, and China was in one of its earliest recorded dynasties.

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Silver linings have linings too

塞翁失马

Did you know that “silver lining” comes from the phrase “every cloud has a silver lining”, which in turn comes from a John Milton poem written in 1634? Milton wrote:

Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night?
I did not err; there does a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night,
And casts a gleam over this tufted grove.

Now, I have no idea what a tufted grove is, but I know Mr. Milton only went one level deep. Want more plot twists? Our chengyu today has you covered. (“Sable” means dark.)

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Jishi or jishi?

Open up a pinyin IME and type in “jishi”. You’ll see a large amount of options:

A list of words all pronounced "jishi". — That’s not even all of it

Most of them are pronounced with different tones, and those with the same tones are usually different enough that, in context, people will have no trouble understanding which one you mean. Still, this is a comical amount of options even for Chinese. Shall we take a look at some of them?

记事 👩‍💻 👨‍💻 📝

(jì shì) take notes; lit. “record events”

Modern Chinese words often have a “2 + 2 = 2” pattern; that is, combine a two-character word with another two-character word, and you get a new two-character word. Here, 记录 (jì lù, to record) and 事情 (shì qíng, things, events) combine into 记事, meaning “to take notes”. A notebook is called 记事本 (běn, small books).

The emojis… well the Apple IME shows you related emojis when you type a word, so I thought to include them here. Could be a good memory aid.

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Who moved my sword?

刻舟求剑

I was a kid when Who Moved My Cheese came out. I don’t remember much about the book; I think there was some cheese and cheese-loving mice, and one of the mice got upset when the cheese disappeared and demanded (to no one in particular) that the cheese be returned. I remember thinking “it’s ridiculous”, not appreciating that the ridiculousness was the point of the story. The other half of the moral — that we often behave like this fool of a mouse in real life — was completely lost on me.

There’s a chengyu based on a similar story. Only there’s a sword instead of cheese, a man instead of mice, and it was written not twenty years ago, but two thousand years ago. And more ridiculous.

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Like a fish found water

如鱼得水

They say you’re not supposed to like your work and that’s why they pay you a “compensation”, but every other autobiography begins with “I’ve dreamed of doing this since I was nine.” I envy the people who’ve found their life’s calling, and I admire those who let nothing stand in the way of pursuing it.

Still, opportunities come in different sizes. The ideal job might not have come along yet, but occasionally, at a party or by the water cooler, you might be challenged to do something, and you’re thinking to yourself, I’ve spent my whole life preparing for this.

How would you describe such a situation? There’s a chengyu for that.

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A tale of fences and barns

亡羊补牢

The horses have bolted. Do you fix the barn door? The idiom didn’t tell us not to, but it does tell us it’s too little too late. Don’t let it happen in the first place, was the moral of the story.

The sheep have escaped. Do you fix the fence? This Chinese saying is almost identical to barn-horse one in English. Only, it takes a glass-half-full point of view: let sunk cost be sunk cost, and focus on what we can do to mitigate the loss.

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