Say Hello (again)
Posted on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Micro Summary
How to say ‘Hello’ with the new phonetic system you just learned.
Post Content
An artistic masterpiece, I’m sure you’ll agree.
This is going to be a short post…
Now that you know how to to pronounce mandarin correctly, it’s time to do something practical with your sparkling new language skills. We’ll start by learning how to say ‘Hello’ in mandarin. “Huh?” you may wonder. “Didn’t we already do that?”. Yes, you did, sort of. You learnt that ‘knee how’ is how to say ‘hello’. But actually, ‘k-n-e-e h-o-w’ is not how we’re going to write Chinese on this blog. We’ll be using the combination of bopomo symbols and my own pinyin system detailed in the previous post. Using this system the Chinese word for “hello” (你好) is pronounced as follows:
ㄋㄧ nee
ㄏㄠ how
Literally, “ㄋㄧ nee” means “you”, and “ㄏㄠ how” means “good”, so saying “hello” in Chinese is more like asking “how are you” or “you good?”. I guess this is the reason that Chinese people seldom ask “How are you?” after saying “hello”, as it’s kind of like saying the same thing twice.
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4 Comments
On Sun 16th Dec 07 @ 4:11 pm Lori said:
The greetings here centered around “food”. So don’t be surprised if someone ask you if you have had lunch or dinner. That is a hello!
On Wed 19th Dec 07 @ 6:11 pm admin said:
I’m not totally sure I understand, Lori. Care to explain?
On Fri 15th Feb 08 @ 7:25 pm ceng said:
I think it makes sense.
On Sat 23rd Feb 08 @ 4:37 am MW said:
Sorry for the confusion, Roger. I was saying that when Taiwanese asked you if you had eaten, that was a sign they were saying “hi” to you. So next time if someone ask you that from this culture (esp. the older generation), you can say, “yes, I have, and you?” I am sure they would be happy to hear that. Now, if you want to be honest with them and say, “no, I haven’t,” they may want to invite you to dinner or lunch. If so, you can politely say “no, I have to take care of something now” without worrying about offending them.