Thunderstorm

First thunderstorm of the year!

Quite cool, besides the fact that Internet seems so much slower and more messed up than usual, that tons of rain are pouring down the sky, that it is Friday night and I briefly dreamed to go out to start enjoying the weekend (but with this weather there is no chance to get a taxi down here, in the Hefei “countryside”).

Last year the thunders had arrived a bit later, in July and then August, but earlier we had had some rain, different from this year that the weather had been extremely dry until a couple of weeks ago.

Let’s hope I won’t need a boat for going tomorrow night to the center!!

FUNNY THING OF THE DAY – Knowing it would have been an evening at home, I bought something to drink, something new.. something I will never drink it again, unless my life is on the line for it!! A friend told me the taste was interesting and refreshing.. never trust this friend anymore!! I tried a pineapple beer.. what a mistake!!

Wǒ zhī dào！

Wǒ zhī dào – 我知道 = I know

This is a very common statement. In a way though it is much more common than we could expect when compared to English or European languages.

Chinese people use “I know” even when they do not know, but they have just learnt something or how to do something. Sometimes the meaning they give to “I know” is more like “I understand“, “oh, I see” therefore intending: “now I know because you told me!”.

Now, before I did learn this, I had a couple of frustrating exchanges with colleagues, because of course when they speak a broken English they do not know many variation of a possible sentence. So once I was telling one colleague he was doing something wrong, and the conversation went as follow:

Me: “wait wait, you should not test like..”
Colleague:  “I know”
Me:  “No, you do not know!! That is why you have to do this like this and that..”
Colleague, looking innocent and nodding: “I know, I know..”
Me: “oh, you know, so how you are going to test?”
Colleague: “I do not know, can you please show me?”
Me, getting nervous and confused (I’m not the most patient person in the world!): “I was telling you, but you said you know.. ah, forget, you should do like this..”
Colleague, looking innocent and nodding: “I know, I know..”
Me: ☠☠☠☠ *bang* *nuclear mushroom* *head exploding* ☠☠☠☠

I should be patient, you say?

Wǒ zhī dào!!!

Applied Chinese!

Starting from today, I want to post a bit about Chinese language as well. Or better, I would say Chinese language “applied to real life”! So this is not a grammatical blog explaining how to learn Chinese (there are plenty already) or another kind of very useful one where a character is explained, as a Norwegian good friend is doing..

This is a bit more about sentences commonly used with very normal meaning but for us, laowai, they often end up under the tag “funny thing of the day” category.. even if sometimes they are not *that* funny.. but mainly frustrating..

Therefore I create here a new tag called: “applied chinese”, with the above explained meaning of Chinese language bits taken from real life in China. Again, like for the Chinese myths, this is only based on my limited experience..