Useful Chinese Phrases
Knowing a few Chinese phrases is helpful when dealing with people like this salesman on the Great Wall of China!
Chinese is a very difficult language to learn. There are up to 9 different tones a spoken sound can have, resulting in 9 words with completely different meaning. For example, depending on what tone you say the sound “mah”, the resultant word could be either “mother” or “horse” (or another meaning). There is a reason Chinese sounds so musical (often cacophonous)…
The written language, of course, is even more difficult to learn. Unlike western languages, there is no alphabet, and each written word takes the form of an arbitrary character. So to write 1000 different words, you need to memorize how to write 1000 different characters!
That all said, here are a few phrases that may come in handy (ask a Chinese friend how to say them correctly, because I don’t know the proper tone for them):
- nee how: how are you
- sheh sheh: thank you
- bull sheh: you’re welcome
- bull yow: I don’t want
- ching: less force?
Unfortunately, that’s about all of the Chinese I learned/used!