Ni Hao

It's October, and me and Masala Papa are still waiting for news of Masala Baby. Meanwhile, I'm taking Chinese so I can at least say something important, like where's the bathroom, when we're over there. I'm tripping all over the pronunciation. If Japanese sounds singsongy and happy, Chinese sounds choppy and like you're mad at the entire world. Japan imported more than 3,000 Chinese characters into their writing system eons ago, which, for me, comes in handy when I'm trying to decipher the meaning of words in Chinese. The Chinese characters that spell the word telephone, for instance, are the same as those used to write the word in Japanese. The pronunciations sorta sound the same, too--dian'hua in Chinese, den'wa in Japanese. But not every word follows this rule, and some are vastly different. The Chinese characters that spell the word husband in Chinese mean teacher in Japanese. Patriarchy lives!

Today's word of the day, just because I love saying it:
gong-gong-chi-che (pronounced gong-gong-chee-chuh) = public bus.