A little game…?

[presumenothing]

It's already TGIF where I am, so 我们来玩玩游戏吧！

Since languages are all about connections, and everyone sees different patterns in the chaos:

Post a bit of vocab below, and I (plus anyone else who wants to play!) will reply with other bits of vocab that feel related to it!

Any shape or size of vocab goes – whether a single character or an idiom, your favourite word or one you just learned.

If you're responding, feel free to add why these words seem related to you! "They're the same shape/sound", or "it's a valid answer to 接龙ing the above", or "it came up together in one line of this show"… anything goes! 放飞创意吧！

Comments

[presumenothing]

My word: 江湖!

(because Zhou Shen's 江湖觅知音 is currently set as my alarm, heh)

[nnozomi]

I went to 东京 this week and realized that China has the 江湖 while Japan had 江户...

[grayswandir]

A longer phrase with 江湖 as part of it: 人在江湖，身不由己.

[presumenothing]

Went to look up more 谚语s and heh: 人在江湖漂，哪有不挨刀

Definitely checks out against every wuxia plot ever. Also to derail completely into non-ZS music for once, 江湖笑! Such a good song.

[presumenothing]

江湖川柯南 would, safe to say, be a very different manga XD

Tangent: kinda interesting that while most/all(?) CN speakers probably know what 江 means, it's one of those words that's generally fallen out of modern use aside from a truly impressive number of names – 黄江、长江、浙江、江南、江苏…

[nnozomi]

柯南，我的天。
while most/all(?) CN speakers probably know what 江 means, it's one of those words that's generally fallen out of modern use aside from a truly impressive number of names – 黄江、长江、浙江、江南、江苏…
When I think of it, same in Japanese? 江东区, 江户川 and so on, but you wouldn't actually use it just to mean "river." Funny that Chinese went for 河 (I think?) and Japanese for 川 in general. (Why we need three different characters for "river" in the first place is beyond me...)

[presumenothing]

川 is pleasingly pictorial, though! So that's nice.

Utter tangent: all this river talk made me recall 井水不犯河水, which is a weirdly specific idiom if I've ever seen one…