Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

After you can read a bit of Chinese, a lot of times you find you’re still reading language-neutral stuff in your native language.

(Yep, “you” means “I” — see here for a parallel far from English)

For example, I mentally read…

143,000 as ‘a hundred and forty-three thousand not “shísìwàn sānqiān” (十四万三千)

2+2 as ‘two plus two’ not “èr jiā èr” (二加二)

$3.52 as ‘three dollars and fifty-two cents not “sān kuài wǔ máo èr” (三块五毛二)

But how to learn this stuff? This is a case where dictionaries can be counterproductive: you might translate in a word-for-word manner rather than the way native speakers would say it. What you really need is some real native speaker examples.

I’ll try to keep a running list on this blog entry, starting with a first-grader’s math homework.

1-1+5=5

As you can hear from the recording, I have it on good first grade authority that the typical way to say this would be

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一减一加五 [pause] 一减一加五等于无
yī jiǎn yī jiā wǔ … yī jiǎn yī jiā wǔ děng yú wǔ