Chinese - some thing's don't quite translate

Hey, I wanted to talk to you about a word I learned today, and it’s quite an interesting one. 掰 or bāi has no true equivalent in English, it actually means ‘to break something off with your fingers’ or ‘to break with both hands’ which is I suppose the action as to how you would break off a piece of Kitkat!

That’s the beauty of learning Chinese, it’s so different and you come across these words which don’t quite translate but we get the meaning. Maybe we should have an equivalent of 掰 in English?

Mandarin - It ain't so hard after all

大家好

I’ve been learning Mandarin since summer of 2006 and it’s been such an interesting journey so far. English and Chinese are so different, but surprisingly not so difficult to learn. In school I had to learn French and Spanish and didn’t get along with any of them. In many European languages the verb changes depending on the context. Consider the verb to eat:

• We want to eat
• We’re eating
• We’ve eaten
• We ate

In Chinese, verbs don’t change; it stays the same no matter what. That’s one less thing you have to learn when studying Mandarin.