Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #3: Don’t Stand on the Desk!
February 16th, 2009 | View Comments
I chose this week’s essential travel phrase because it’s really handy for those times you’re going somewhere and then find yourself kidnapped to Never Never Land and forced to play schoolmarm to the Lost Boys.
“Don’t stand on the desk!”
不要站在桌上!
Bu2 yao4 zhan4 zai4 zhuo1 shang4!
机の上に立たないでください!
Tsukue no ue ni tatanai de kudasai!
The Chinese is pretty straightforward; the word order follows pretty closely with the English: 不要 = don’t, 站 = stand, 在 = at or on, 桌 = desk or table, 上 = up or top.
Japanese grammar structures the sentence completely differently: 机 = desk, の = of, 上に = on top, 立たない = don’t stand, で = on, ください = please (the Japanese are unfailingly polite that way).
In last week’s phrase, the Chinese characters and Japanese Kanji for “problem” matched exactly. This week, we have something a bit different. The Chinese character for desk or table is 桌. In Japanese, desk is 机. But in (simplified) Chinese, 机 (機 in traditional Chinese) means “machine” or “engine”. So the correspondence between languages isn’t exact.
As a random aside, there was a popular teenage clothing chain selling t-shirts with 桌 on it a while ago. I wish I’d gone in the store and asked them what they thought it said.
Yvonne posted this on February 16th, 2009 @ 12:00pm in Chinese, Grandma's Crazy Phrasebook, Japanese | Permalink to "Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #3: Don’t Stand on the Desk!"
American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
E-mail Yvonne
nerissa
celiviel
yvonnekao
Korean-American girl who blogs under a Spanish pseudonym because being culturally confusing is fun. Native speakers say that she has outstanding Spanish (which is a definite compliment) and outstanding German (which is most assuredly not).
Elenita
American-born, Taiwanese guy who took five semesters worth of German and ended up with a major in Linguistics.
Subscribe
Trendy shirts lost in translation go both ways. I saw a shirt in Taiwan that said, “Love, Flower, Jumping Kiki”. Who is Kiki and why is she jumping over a rainbow?