Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #1: Are You Nuts?
February 2nd, 2009 | View Comments
My grandma is fluent in Chinese and Japanese and was thrilled when I told her I was studying Japanese. She gave me a trilingual phrasebook with accompanying CDs to help me along with my studies.
The cover advertises 1500 essential travel phrases. One of those essential travel phrases is, “I’m a jazz addict.”
Another one: “Are you nuts?”
你是笨蛋嗎?
Ni3 shi4 ben4 dan4 ma1?
あなたはバカですか?
Anata wa baka desu ka?
Both the Chinese and the Japanese actually ask if you’re stupid, not if you’re crazy. If you wanted to ask if someone was crazy in Chinese, you’d ask:
你的頭腦壞掉了嗎?
Ni3 de5 tou2 nao3 huai4 diao4 le5 ma1?
Literally, “Is your brain broken?”
This concludes the first installment of Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook. Check back every Monday at noon (Central Time) for more “essential travel phrases”!
P.S. You would not believe how long it took me to translate the front cover of the book, scouring Zhongwen.com for the characters I didn’t know. Clearly I need radical/stroke count practice.
Yvonne posted this on February 2nd, 2009 @ 12:00pm in Chinese, Grandma's Crazy Phrasebook, Japanese | Permalink to "Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #1: Are You Nuts?"
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American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
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