r/ChineseLanguage • u/[deleted] • Dec 07 '18
Translation Translation Request Starterpack
[deleted]
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u/Demortus Dec 07 '18
"我不知道。我不会说中国话。"
Please let that be a real tattoo
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u/Fuji_Yoko Dec 07 '18
Are there any other motivations here beyond alcohol and supremely arrogant idiocy?
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u/tentrynos Dec 07 '18
Seems quite funny to me.
"What does it say?" "I don't know, I don't speak Chinese".
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u/Levellerrr- Dec 08 '18
Why 中国语？ i'm learning chineese at university and we learn it as 汉语 or if we include linguistics and some history it's 中文
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u/Demortus Dec 08 '18
You're right, 中国语 is not a standard way of saying 中文 or 汉语。My guess is that the person giving the tattoo didn't know Chinese and was copying words from a bad machine translator or a dictionary.
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u/sreache Dec 07 '18
The only English phrase that my reception lady can say is "I can't speak English"
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u/Retrooo Dec 07 '18
"Hi, my grandfather is Chinese and when he passed, they found this 500-page genealogy book on his shelf. Really curious what it says. Can anyone translate?"
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u/pr0sp3r0 Dec 07 '18
and now all my chinese colleagues want to look at my phone to see what i was laughing about so hard (which means they one by one come over and stare at my screen from one inch away for 30 secs)
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u/kungming2 Dec 07 '18
At least there are fewer translation posts on this sub now since I implemented the AutoModerator rules and the weekly sticky. It would be even fewer if we also had more active mods, but oh well.
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u/Iyion Dec 07 '18
Not only Japanese, but Korean too. It's stunning how many people can't distinguish Hanzi from Hangeul and ask me what "those symbols" mean.
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u/Balcil Dec 07 '18
Japanese I can understand if it is kanji because many of the same or similar characters are used. Ex. Numbers are the same characters in Chinese and Japanese.
If I see a bunch of circles, it is probably Korean or Thai. Tiny circles at the beginning/ end of a stroke in a very curvy alphabet >>> Thai. Bigger circles >>> Korean
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u/TaroLovelight Dec 07 '18
Has anyone posted that one art piece by Xu Bing yet? That would be kinda hilarious.
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u/yuemeigui Dec 07 '18
The text on my tattoo is all from that. A surprising number of people try to read it. A ridiculous percentage of the ones who ask me where it is from refuse to believe that it's actually unreadable.
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u/Babypeep Dec 07 '18
Classical chinese is so difficult. I once had a classmate non native speaker only 6 years under their belt of intermediate level Chinese say they were fluent in classical chinese... Give me a break. Us Americans are so pompus in our skills. It's so hard my friend who's a native speaker struggles.
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u/juckele Dec 07 '18
What about random unicode. Like, literally random bits that happen to be 50% hanzi, hanja, and kanji?
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u/im_an_actual_dog Dec 07 '18
You forgot all the ones that are upside-down.
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u/Drpalindrum Dec 07 '18
My grandparents keep sending me stuff that’s either in Japanese or is written so stylistically that I can’t make out the characters. They’re asking for translations, I can’t lie about it of course, but with all the things they’ve sent me which are totally unintelligible, they probably don’t even believe I speak Chinese anymore