Parlez Vouz Chinois?

So I had Chinese class this morning.  To illustrate again how simple Chinese is in terms of sentence structure, consider this: 

Wo lai Zhongguo gongzuo.

Wo means “me,” lai means “come,” Zhongguo means “China,” and gongzuo means “work.” So if you want to say the sentence “I come to China to work” you literally say “Me come China work.”

Here’s another couple of bits of useless language trivia.  The Chinese word for Christmas is Shengdanjie.  Sheng means “great,” dan means “birth,” and jie means “festival.” So Christmas in Chinese is “Great Birth Festival.” Also, the word for turkey is huoji.  Huo means “fire” and ji means “chicken,” so a turkey is literally called a “fire chicken.”

I love this language.

Update: I was just talking to one of my employees and she told me that the Chinese word for turkey, huoji (fire chicken), is also how you pronounce “cigarette lighter.” It uses different characters but it’s pronounced the same way, like “ant” and “aunt.”

Pronouncing “ant” and “aunt” the same is an indication of the regional dialect you grew up with - it’s even one of the test words. 

Many dialects of American English pronounce them differently - there’s some really good reference material available online about the topic.

Here’s the weird part, I pronounce “aunt” differently in my head when I read the word than I do when I speak it most of the time.

Yeah, I actually thought of that after I put the update up, that it was a pretty poor choice of homophone, considering it’s dependent upon the accent of the person saying it.  Someone in the UK or Australia, or even parts of the US, would not pronounce the two words the same.  But I figured most people would get what I meant.