第一百八十七天

[nnozomi]

语法
Measure words! I feel like we should take a few days over these just because there are so many, but let’s see how it goes.
https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Measure_words_for_counting

词汇
两, two (pinyin in tags) ...is there a theme today?
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-1-word-list/

Guardian:
我告诉你，我跟你都一样，只有两只眼睛，一张嘴巴的普通人。I’m telling you, I’m just like you, an ordinary person with two eyes and one mouth.
两个朋友之间，贵在知心, what is valuable between two friends is to know each other’s hearts
你又不是长生不死，我凭什么随随便便欠你一条命啊！You’re not going to live forever, how am I supposed to owe you a life like it was nothing?

Me:
如果要选择的话，我比养一条狗更喜欢三只猫(爱狗人不好意思)
生日的时候，他给了我买三支黄玫瑰。

・Following up on Zhu Yilong’s pronunciation of 聊天儿，照片儿，上班儿 etc., I made Yu-jie listen to bits of his livestream, and she laughed and said “yup, that’s a Beijing 儿化 all right!” At some point I’ll have to watch his 武汉话 movies and see how different he sounds...
・顺便来说，我之后要去考HSK呢，请你们祝我好幸运！

Comments

[grayswandir]

(In Japanese--I haven't checked on the Chinese version yet--birds are counted with 一羽、二羽, which makes sense because they have wings...except so are rabbits.)

This is strangely adorable! I'm pretty sure birds and rabbits are both just 只 in Chinese (and I just looked up 羽 and don't see any mention of it as a classifier), but the rabbit thing feels a bit like English "flock" referring to both birds and sheep, to me -- like it creates some mysterious sense of correlation. Rabbits, birds, sheep... they're all very fluffy???

On a random note re: classifiers, a couple of years ago my language partner showed me a Hong Kong game show where one of the games that came up regularly was classifier-related. The contestants would sit in a row and clap in time, and the first person would have to say a number and some kind of noun (skipping over the classifier), pronouncing each syllable in time with the clapping. The next person had to immediately repeat the same number and noun but with the correct classifier, keeping in time with the next few claps. So a bit like if in English, the first person in the game clapped out "Se·ven·crows," and the next person had to continue clapping and say "Se·ven·mur·ders·of·crows."

I asked my language partner why this game wasn't too easy, since surely most people know all the classifiers? Though of course the contestants were purposely picking rarer words to try to trip each other up, and apart from thinking of the right word and saying it quickly, they also had to remember the number. Anyway, my language partner's answer was, "It's hard enough that people get mixed up, but easy enough that it sounds really funny when they do."

My Chinese wasn't really good enough to follow along with the game much at the time, but it was amusing to watch people cracking up when someone picked the wrong measure word, and I did find it encouraging to know that thinking of the right classifier in a hurry can be challenging even for native speakers!

[trobadora]

Aw, that sounds delightful! And yep, very reassuring. *g*

[nnozomi]

Rabbits, birds, sheep... they're all very fluffy???
好可爱❤️ I always think of rabbits having big floppy ears like wings...

The classifier game is delightful! I wish we could all do that together in real time. And as you say, it's very comforting to think that even native speakers struggle with these sometimes...