“Been-been-biang-biang” is the sound of 乒乒乓乓 in Taigi. 乒乒乓乓 is an onomatopoeic expression that mimics the sound of objects colliding or hitting each other. In the context of weather reporting, the announcer was probably describing heavy rain hitting roofs.
That character was my Forumosa avatar for quite awhile.
[I don’t know if the biang character has finally been added to Unicode, but it should be. I mean, if they decided to included a bizarre Cyrillic letter than only ever appeared in one manuscript (this one: ꙮ ) they can certainly add in biang.
Yeah, I think I remember that! I thought the character looked familiar, but it’s so bafflingly complex-looking that I couldn’t be sure that it was the same one as the celebrated character that you adopted.
She said it again! “Bing bing biang biang”! Music to my ears!
It has been more than 2 years since my first encounter with the word, but yesterday, by chance, I saw the same EBC weather caster again say “bing bing biang biang”. September 4, 2025. Let this glorious day live forever in our collective memory. Hallelujah!
Now I need your help to pin down exactly what she’s saying, and exactly what is the meaning of “bing bing biang biang” in this case.
I’m going to try to run this through a translation app later, but does anyone feel like having a go at transcribing and translating the sentence with “bing bing biang biang”?
The “Bing bing biang biang” is somewhat similar to the “Pitter Patter” some ppl use to describe the rain hitting the roof, the ground or other objects (pots/pans/vehicles) out in the rain…
Hear The Cascades singing about it in the 2:05 mark:
I’m almost positive that “bing bing biang biang” comes from Taigi, although as others have mentioned “biang” is a phonological gap in Mandarin (the syllable is allowed, but doesn’t exsit). I’ve also heard “king king kiang kiang” as a similar onomatopoeia. Calling @hansioux for more linguistics fun
It’s used 6 times in Journey to the West. The language used to write Journey to the West shows influences of either Yangzhou (揚州) or Tsuantsiu (泉州) languages. Instead of 吳承恩 who is traditionally credited with writing the story, the actual author could be either 李春芳, who was from Yangzhou or 陳鳴烈, who was from Tsuantsiu. So yeah, finding common Taigi terms in Ming dynasty novels isn’t that weird.
They’re talking about how rain affects traffic. It’s something like “At 5:50, when everyone is off work, the traffic is bing-bing-biang-biang”
edit: Unclear to my ears whether she’s saying “The traffic is bing-bing-biang-biang” or if she’s saying “right when everyone got off work the rain was bing-bing-biang-biang”
When Taiwanese people are presenting, it seems like they often adopt this very wordy, filler-prone sentence structure. I guess to buy time for the brain to catch up and come up with what to say next.