Posted by Jonah Lopin on Fri, Nov 06, 2009 @ 08:23 PM
I've studied Chinese for a long time. It's one thing to understand "classroom Chinese" and quite another to understand true Beijing Hua. I secretly recorded this sentence in Beijing and listened to it about 1,000 times before finally translating it (with the help of a friend). Can you translate this sentence?
You can also try to translate the sentence from challenge #1, or skip straight to the answer from challenge #1.
Leave your translation in a comment and I'll post the answer soon.
Good luck!!
Posted by Jonah Lopin on Tue, Feb 10, 2009 @ 08:45 PM
This sentence was part of a phone conversation. it's a little hard to translate things out of context, but with some help, here's the sentence.
In English, is means "All day he's had nothing but free time. Quickly beep him for me."
The pinyin is: Ta1 zhe4 yi4 tian1 jing4 xian2 zhe0 mei2 shi4r. Ni3 gan2 jin3 gei3 wo3 hu1 ba.
The characters are: 他这一天净闲着没事儿。你赶紧给我呼吧。
Note that xian2 means "free" as in "free time".
Next challenge coming soon...
Posted by Jonah Lopin on Thu, Jan 01, 2009 @ 09:41 PM
If you can translate this leave a comment. If you get it right, you have my admiration and you are a super hardcore Mandarin speaker. I'll post the translation in a week or so:
