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Random new word of the day


roddy

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Quarantine-related, probably guessable, and rather cute...

 

       水银    shuǐ yín    mercury; quicksilver

Referring to wikipedia, water-silver is directly analogous to the Greek 'hydrargyros', which is ultimately where the chemical symbol Hg comes from. I'd always wondered about that.

 

Quarantine-related because it seems we've all been given Mercury thermometers to use when reporting our 体温 twice a day.

 

      上报体温       shàng bào tǐ wēn         to report (body) temperature

 

Edit to add: 

 

       水星    Shuǐ xīng    Mercury (planet)

 

one of the 5 visible planets: Mercury 水星, Venus 金星, Mars 火星, Jupiter 木星, Saturn 土星
 

Possibly an old alchemical connection here somewhere...?

 

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On 10/28/2020 at 9:17 PM, mungouk said:

Quarantine-related, probably guessable, and rather cute...

       水银    shuǐ yín    mercury; quicksilver

 

Ah, you anticipated my question. Thanks. 

 

On 10/28/2020 at 9:17 PM, mungouk said:

Edit to add:        水星    Shuǐ xīng    Mercury (planet)

 

One of my haunts in Old Kunming (not only pre-Covid but in the Golden Years pre-严打) was a large luxury sauna out on the west edge of town named 水星温泉。I never looked the word up in the dictionary, assuming it meant something more literal along the lines of "water star" and was referring to how stellar their deep hot spring waters were and how their service followed suit. 

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凭吊 "visit and ponder on the past" it says here https://baike.baidu.com/item/凭吊 which would fit with the context I saw it in, one of those ones where the characters aren't obscure so you think you might know it but realise you don't. Seems to have extended slightly to include more abstract historical research/thought.

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 啊    ā    interjection of surprise; Ah!; Oh!
啊     á    interjection expressing doubt or requiring answer; Eh?; what?
啊     ǎ    interjection of surprise or doubt; Eh?; My!; what's up?
啊     à    interjection or grunt of agreement; uhm; Ah, OK; expression of recognition; Oh, it's you!
啊     a    modal particle ending sentence, showing affirmation, approval, or consent
 

This is some native level subtlety I will never master ?

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9 minutes ago, Jan Finster said:

This is some native level subtlety I will never master ?

 

I think you will, don't focus on memorizing these, but in my experience I started using most these filler-sounds quite naturally, just from imitating how Chinese use them.

And even if you don't use all of these in your speech, you will still understand what the other persons means;)

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青皮桔    qīng pí jú    calamansi (fruit)

 

This wasn't in any dictionaries I tried, but I recognised the name calamansi from when I lived in India. 


Literally green-skinned tangerine/mandarin orange.  According to wikipedia, a hybrid of Kumquat and probably mandarin orange. Very refreshing as a drink!

 

1468760164_calamansidrink.thumb.jpg.8ad53ff71a932bd8a613fc9ad38e90a2.jpg

 

See also https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/328379124285732765.html

 

 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

This innocent-looking word from the proposed HSK 3.0 vocabulary list may be defined in most dictionaries as "notebook", but don't do an image search for it on a work computer!

 

本子

 

Spoiler

doujinshiJapanese-style self-published graphic novels that often contain erotic content

 

(encountered in one of the answers to a HiNative question about sex-ed in China)

 

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