I have a Chinese oral exam tomorrow and I am really not ready for it. My school, being the grade-inflated, student-pampering school that it is, gives us all of the questions that will be asked beforehand. What this means is that we can simply memorize all the responses we need to give. Not only that, our answers don’t even need to be true! The upshot for me is that I get by only needing to know how to say the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, and 10 in chinese. I wake up at 8 am, go to class at 10am, have lunch at 12, and eat dinner at 8. My parents are 48 and 44 years old, my grandparents 88 and 82. There are 2 children in the family, totaling to 4 people in the house. Added bonus for plentiful powers of two.
The sad thing is, is that even with all this help, I have a lot of trouble. I’m just bad with languages in general. Only those that have had Spanish class with me has learned just how badly a little bit of education can butcher the phrase “Me llamo Eduardo.” And Chinese? I am Chinese. My parents speak it at home. Plus, I went to Chinese school for 7 years. Sometimes, the noodle just doesn’t stick to the wall. (Clearly, my command of the English language is here!)
In preparing my answers for this test, I stumbled upon this website: How To Say In. It’s a pretty neat website, I suppose—a mix of education, wiki, and web 2.0. After finding the particular phrase I wanted translated and searching gratuitously for the term “lol” in various languages, I found the link to the top 100 popular searches. You should really visit this yourself, but if not, here are some highlights:
The first few are expected. The first one is “I want to have sex with you” followed by several more endearing ways of saying arguably the same thing. (just kidding!) Aside from #5 (“go to hell”), the top 9 are about what I’d expect. Shortly after, the internet starts kicking in. #10 is “do you have nuclear warheads” followed by a very nerdy, “hello world.” I can only hope that #14 “I don’t want to die alone” and #61 “I had sexual intercourse with your horse” are correlated. And one I find particularly intriguing is “lion” at #39, beating #69 “please”, #67 “no” and #66 “sex.”
Also, although the list is the “top 100,” there are in fact 101 entries.
Hopefully I survive my finals and go back home for the holidays. I should just be thankful I won’t be needing to translate: “i love you and i cant wait until we can move to maryland and start our new life.” For you Chinese speakers,
我爱你，我不能等到我们可以搬到马里兰州，开始我们的新生活
Maryland sounds terrible.
大声笑