Did you know that they don't say "x 个钟" in Mandarin? They just say "x 个小时" My Chinese supervision partner was soo confused when I was trying to say that I worked for 6 hours at the Churchill ball on Friday. He was like, "so how long did you work?" right after I said how many hours. I mean, my supervisor understood but yeah. The more I think I know... sigh. The sad thing was, I kept saying "x个钟" 因为粤语是这样说的。 有时候我觉得粤语根国语太不同了。讲普通话的侍候， 我常常要用英文想，根本就是在翻译， 不是在说中文。以为用广东话会好一点，原来不是，更多问题。真麻烦！
Anyhow after that I talked a bit about how we say the time in Cantonese and how we don't really use the "分钟" and just use the big numbers. Both my supervisor and supervision partner were really surprised and interested. Glad I can contribute to at least one of my supervisions... Sigh. I also told them about mascots in the US. They don't do mascots here either. So sad. I wore my O-high 2005 sweatshirt which has Willie the Wildcat on it and my supervisor was like, "Is that your high school? And is that a cat?" So I told them about Tim the Beaver as well. May more days be filled with more cultural exchanges such as these...
1 comment:
it's all about location and dialect. i think in the south of china, you say zhongtou and people understand. and mascots, i think they have some sort of emblem, like for the school i went to for the summer, it was an ancient bell/gong. yeah, they don't have mascots.
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