CHINESE SLANG: [was: "You are very motorcycle!"]

Language Learning Chinese
41

I’m with Da Brotha on this one. If used for guys it would give some kind of gay feeling, I think.

My girlfriend once did an impersonation to illustrate the concept of 38 and it was truely remarkable.
I should have caught it on video, so every foreigner could get an impression as vivid as mine…

42

I’ve usually taken it to mean something like “dork”. I don’t think it’s impact is quite as bad as “bitch” when saying it to a women. If a woman is pissed off because you called her “38” it is because a foreigner is putting her down.

43

I have a Taiwanese friend who use to call me san ba after I made off colour jokes.
I don’t think he was calling me ‘bitch’, instead I took it to mean ‘you nut’ or ‘crazy girl’. He also taught me 49, which he said was the same version for men.
It’s not impolite if you use it properly in a joking fashion with intimate friends. If you call some stranger woman teetering along the road on high heels “san ba”, that would be rude.

44

I’ve heard it explained as something akin to “dumb blonde” meaning usually women.

Try “LKK” on your male students if necessary instead. Or there is a whole bunch of slang using only numbers, from the days when we used to have only pagers instead of cell phones…the only one you really can’t use would be 8825252 because that could cost you money…

45

‘Sanba’ (38), if applied to women, means bimbo-ish, or over-effeminate. If applied to men it means camp or effeminate. It also has a more general meaning of just ‘annoying’ or ‘bad’. I would say if you want to say ‘silly’ or a little bit crazy, ‘bai chi’ is much better.

There was a thread a little while ago about the meaning of Sanba, and it probably comes form the date of International Women’s Day (celebrated more in the Mainland than here) which is 3/8.

Brian

46

I merged the last several posts with this exisiting thread on the same topic…

47

What about 39 for thank you? San Kyu from the Japanese for san kyu very much!

48

Sorry about the unorganizedness of this post, but I’ve been meaning to post it for a while. I’ll never do it if I wait to clean it up first, maybe someone else will (add pinyin, English definitions, etc.)

This is something I got in a email a little while ago. Sorry about the length too:

[quote=“Secret Taiwanese/Taiwaner email buddy”]>Subject:

49

good stuff miltownn…I like it…
I know most of them, but …EVERYDAY… you know :slight_smile:

ax

50

these numbers sound more like a help for foreigners to speak chinese though and not really like daily used chinese slang…???

btw, I wouldn’t wanna be called

51

A couple of words for a girl who gets around

  1. Incense Pot : since everyone sticks it into her, and supposedly there is some famous Incense pot down near Tainan, that you stick before to give it added effect ( this is a really nasty thing to call someone and should only be used to get the bird you brought home from the VIBE out of the apartment)
  2. Public bus: since everyone rides her

don’t know if they use “village bicycle” though

52

ok…this thing seems to be called urinal in english…=)…

and since a lot of people here, need proofs to believe a thing like that…i’ll try to find a pic for you next time…

53

To the best of my knowlegde, everything in there is directly connected locals. The number things might be stuff thrown up in a chatting window (some of them look familiar from CS sessions).

54

To the best of my knowlegde, everything in there is directly connected locals. The number things might be stuff thrown up in a chatting window (some of them look familiar from CS sessions).[/quote]

I think they intially came about when SMS’ing people on the mobile, as Chinese is a pain to type into a mobile; and have now have migrated to MSN, IQC, Yahoo messanger

55

Thanks for posting that list, Miltownkid.

Very interesting. I wish you continued success in your study of Mandarin–you certainly are very motivated (puts me to shame).

Thanks again (3Q).

56

The numbering is all from when CS (online game) was really popular and you couldn’t type Chinese int he chat boxes on the side.

The most popular was 745

Brian

57

My friends told me the numbers came from the time the ‘BeePee-ji’ (the beeper) was popular and cellphones to expensive …

58

I seem to remember getting a list of numbers and meanings with my BB Call sometime back.

BB Calls! Great scenes at scooter packed intersections, lights are red and “beep, beep, beep.” Everybody scrambling to see if it’s their machine.

HG

59

that makes sens then, but i’m not so sure, that the average taiwanese understands these numbers…

60

Older ones that were younger ones then can.

HG