幼儿难爸玩
If you can read this, you’re Number One!
"You Are No. 1"Superstar Andy Lau, recently named China’s most desirable man by professor Jiang Jiehai, signed with East Asia Music yesterday in a deal rumored to be worth HK$200 million.
The photo at left is of Andy’s frequent co-star Sammi Cheng, also an East Asia artist, presenting him with a congratulatory wall hanging that her father wrote with his left hand (he lost the use of his right hand to a stroke). The characters read "You Are No. 1!"
That’s not a translation: the Cantonese pronunciation of the characters 腰呀冧吧温! ("yiu a nam ba wan!") approximates the English sentence.
Spelunker says in the comment:
For artistic (or autistic) Mandarin speakers:
愚贰囡爸萬! (pinyin = Yu er nan ba wan!)
(The only problem is the second character, which actually means "two")
That’s funny. It reminds me of games we used to play in English classes. It’s not hard to phonetically transcribe English in Chinese. The real fun is to make it read like a real Chinese sentence.
my version:
幼儿难爸玩
(you4 er2 nan2 ba4 wan3)
which translates to
"little baby challenges daddy for fun"
Great find, Kevin. 三克油喂你妈吃
December 8th, 2007 at 9:17 am e
油尔为尔卡么
Once I watched the infamous Da Shan ( 大山) on TV in Beijing, and he told a story about a Chinese man who wanted to travel abroad and, naturally, wanted to know how to buy stuff. So he asked his friend how to ask what something costs (多少钱?) in English. His friend told him just to say:
好妈吃? (hao3 ma3 chi1)
but when he went there, he couldn’t quite remember, and so said:
好妈吃? (hao3 chi1 ma? — does this taste good?)
and then
吃好了吗? (chi1 hao3 le ma? — has it all been eaten?)
Same basic idea…