Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #36

马mǎ上shàng

Literally: “on horseback”

Figuratively: “right away; soon”

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you could also just use the player hotkeys to cycle through subtitles and secondary subs

felt lazy, might post details later

Yeah I should have explained it a little more in depth, haha. It’s hard to reduce these words to simple translations. All parts are weird enough on their own.

如rú means “follow” more in the sense of “follow orders”, go along, comply, accord, be like, as if, etc. 果guǒ means fruit in a very broad sense as the “effect” of a tree or seed, think like “bear fruit”, “fruitless”, “the fruits of one’s labor”, etc. So in combination they mean, what happens if the results of a situation are according to some description.

The other variant I think is a bit simpler. 要yào means “ask for”, “demand”, “request”, “want”, “need”, “must”, sort of the inverse of the above 如rú here. So a hypothetical demands that a situation 是shì be a certain way. It places a restriction on the possible outcomes.

Sorry if this is nonsense, I might post other compounds with 果guǒ and delve deeper … whenever I feel like™ 😎

Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #35

如rú果guǒ / 要yào是shì

Literally: “follow fruit / need be”

Figuratively: “if”

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Don’t thank me, thank our gigachad devs

I have a confession to make. I am actually basedcringe cringebased.

Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #33

忐tǎn忑tè

Remember 上shàng and 下xià (up and down)? If your 心xīn (heart) was going up and down, how would you feel? Perhaps perturbed, fidgety, upset, on edge, uneasy, nervous?

This is a 2-syllable word where neither 忐tǎn nor 忑tè make sense on their own, they are strictly parts of this word. I’m also 99% sure that the characters were invented specifically for this word.

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Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #32

脑袋

(nǎo dài)

Literally: “brain bag”

Figuratively: “head” (informal)

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old mega

help i misspelled Brendan oh man i am not good with computer pls to help

’gina 😂

i can’t believe duolingo would do this to me

we have to close the doge gap

Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #19

好久不见

(hǎo jiǔ bù jiàn)

Literally: “good [long time] not see”

Figuratively: “long time no see”

Ever wondered where that seemingly English phrase came from?

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on my chinamaxxing arc

Posting neat Chinese phrases whenever I feel like #16

木已成舟

(mù yǐ chéng zhōu)

Literally: “wood already become boat”

Figuratively: “what’s done can’t be undone”

Even if you don’t know Chinese, take a look at the first and last characters and you might still be able to make out traces of a tree and a boat. (We don’t talk about the middle 2 characters 💀)

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yup: tool > technique > work > industry, and branching off into “construction” from somewhere in there

it originally depicted some variant of this but yeah the I-beam definitely helped cement* the continued use of this character

*

surely you must be aware

day after pizza (cold) > fresh pizza > day after pizza (reheated)