I have the “Insta-dict” with the Oxford English Dictionary built in and a Longman dictionary card.
I looked up toast. The first entry is a verb. Translated back on the dictionary it says to bake, to roast, to toast. The Chinese word is Kao. Then there are a few similar words. Then there is the word toast as in
Toast is a good one. I think in ‘Taiwan English’ it just means thickly sliced bread.
Here’s an obvious one:
‘Hello’ - people who don’t speak a word of (real) English, say this all the time and it means ‘hey/oi/excuse me’, not ‘good day’.
MC - menstrual cycle not DJ “jintian bu yao, wo you MC” or something
NG - can;t quite figure this one out, but it’s something like ‘offcuts’
Brian
[quote=“Sir Donald Bradman”]
NG - can;t quite figure this one out, but it’s something like ‘offcuts’
Brian[/quote]
It means bloopers or outakes, it’s short for No Good, which they don’t use in English…
711 put out some toast products recently, NT$15 for a piece of buttered bread, and they spelled it BUTTER TOASS, i called them up on it, and they changed the packaging to the correct TOAST although it is NOT toast.
Hey, Saddam, you’re toast!
I believe the taiwanese picked up this incorrect use of toast from the Japanese who call all breads “toastu” – so blame it on our friends in Tokyo.
NG means No GOod, ie, this take was NOT GOOD< cannot use it.
what does sng ON TV MEAN…SNG?
I asked my wife, but when I ask her to explain chinese to me it’s like asking her to explain quatum physics, let’s see if I got this right:
bready products with cream and buns and the fancy things they sell in bakeries is mian bao = bread.
rectangular/sliced/plain bread = toast.
So chinese define bread or toast by the shape, not what it’s made of.
Anyone concur ?
maybe it’s Satellite News Gathering
Also a company that makes Tv vans and stuff which is where I always see SNG, Those might be the same SNG, I have no idea.
Is SNG the name of a channel or programme too ? Or is it just on vans ?
i heard it stands for LIVE broadcasts, and one meaning i heard was SIMULTANEOUS NEWS GATHERING. Maybe Satellite is correct, too.
I see it on tv screens all the time, this news segment is SNG, i.e. LIVE!
Also, ever noticed the pronunciation of the letter “N”? It’s not SNG, but S “un” G.
Another pronunciation phenomenon is that they never pronounce an acronym as a word, e.g., AIDS is always referred to as A.I.D.S., four individual letters. Samething with the latest SARS bug that’s going around.
Also Japanese-style pronunciation of the letters ‘L’ and 'F":
L-u, f-u
This thread is rapidly devolving. Ya’ll might want to start thinking about taking it over to tealit, where it would feel more at home. 
Actually serendipity, this is pretty much what I had in mind when I started the thread. If you have a problem with a particular poster, why not call them on it rather than insult everyone. If I misunderstood your post and you are a big fan of Tealit, sorry, I’m kinda slow.
I asked a friend about toast, actually about ‘tusi’, and she said that all bread is mianbao, but that bread from which one would normally make toast; i.e. square cut, sliced etc. is properly called ‘tusi mianbao’; so ‘the toast type of bread’. This gets shortened to tusi, hence the confusion.