One Hand on the Keyboard
Following up on the tongue twister post from the other day, I thought I’d explain one of the fundamental things about Chinese (or any language)—counting. You can see the words and their pronunciations on this page.
In the tongue twister example about the 44 stone lions, the word “44” is “sishisi.” In English this looks like “see-she-see.” It’s actually pronounced “suh-shur-suh.” The “suh” is pronounced sort of like the way Foghorn Leghorn would say “sir,” and the “shur” is more or less the way Americans would say “sure.” The “si” ("suh") is 4, the “shi” ("shur") is ten, and the other “si” is 4.
This is how you say numbers. Whereas we’d say “forty-four” the Chinese say “four-ten-four.” So 91 would be “jiushiyi,” or “nine-ten-one.” So if you can count to ten you can count to 99 relatively easy. On top of this, the Chinese have a super cool way of counting to ten on one hand. I found a cool animated GIF of the hand shapes on this page.
Pretty cool, huh? So if you’re at a market or somewhere and you can’t remember the number, you just use the hand sign. It beats holding up “5 and 3” for eight the way we would in the West.
