After years of eating chinese food and meticulously reading and learning the chinese words for various things from the back of fortune cookie inserts, I am happy to announce I am now fluent in Mandarin. Or at least in Mandarin words for food and food-related things. For example:
"cao mei chong zu"
...which of course means "strawberry plenty."
Or: "餠韭鉋豕詭 辷蛆肚 腓紵糺鬻 稲逢姶移 意鵜葵 卯"
...which of course means "fact-check this one if you can, Cary-san."
Sadly, none of my "lucky lottery numbers" have ever proven that lucky. Though it would help if the fortune cookie insert specified what date to play, and what state the numbers are good for, as well as which one is the "power ball."
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3 comments:
I see you once again left my lovely sister, Jill, out of the editing process. Thank you for giving me a purpose again!
1) Mandarin and Cantonese are the spoken languages while "Simplified" Chinese is the written language.
2) Cǎoméi fēngfù (caomei fengfu in case it doesn't display correctly) is "strawberry plenty" in Mandarin. It's "ichigo takusan no" in Japanese (see point four below)
3) The Chinese symbols translate to nothing since those aren't Chinese symbols - my friend told me you need to install the Chinese language pack. 事实上，这一个检查，如果可以的话，凯里山 is "fact-check this one if you can, Cary-san".
4) "San" after a persons name is a sign of respect for an elder... in Japan, not China. I'm definently not your elder, but I'll give you the respect part :)
You obviously have forgotten that I work on a trading floor filled with PhD quantitative scientists (quants) of which the two in my trading group are from China. Not that I asked them to help - I'm scared to talk to them and I would have gotten a four hour lecture on some subject matter I probably can't pronounce that involves math symbols I can't fathom the meaning of.
Love,
Your Brother In Law
P.S. If you do happen win the lottery you're absolutely and 100% correct on everything you've ever written, said, or thought about and I couldn't agree more.
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