The Count

Following up on the last post, here’s today’s Chinese lesson.  Look at the following three sentences.

我没有热水。 我没有接受一个通知。我立刻需要热水。

The last character in the first and third sentences, 水, is shuǐ, pronounced “shwey.” This means water.  In the middle sentence, see the horizontal line and the thing next to it that looks like a veritical arrow?  The horizontal line, 一, is yī, the character for “one.” The second, 个, is gè, the character which, when placed with a number, indicates that this is a “counting word,” meaning that it’s used to identify a number of items or people.  So when you count you just say the number, but to identify one of something you say yīgè.  Thus when I said “I did not receive a notice,” the 一个 is used in the place of “a” to identify one of something.

Now, look at the first and third sentences and see if you can identify the characters for wǒ, meaning “me” or “I,” and rè, meaning “hot.”

I just see ???? ???????? for the above sentances. I’m using FireFox, do I need a translator? Some of the Chinese I see and some is just the question marks.

I do not have the hot water. I have not accepted a notice. I need the hot water immediately.

Someone forget to pay their bill?

If you can’t see the chinese script, download a language pack from Microsoft

Someone forget to pay their bill?

Nope.  See the previous post.

I find it bizarre that you can only pay some of these bills on certain days of the week.

Also, your stories of banking in China are just nuts - they certainly aren’t going to be winning any awards for customer service.  I wonder what they would think of BECU?  It has a value of some $6,000,000,000 and does so much of their business over their website that you can go for years without actually having to set foot in one of their facilities.