One of the more amusing literal translations from Taiwanese is the phrase for crying – lâu-ba̍k-sái, which literally means “flow eye shit.” It’s only really amusing as a foreign language speaker though, as for Taiwanese it’s obviously normal.
不甘/毋甘 (m-kam) is the phrase for 捨不得 in Taiwanese. So the phrase in the Taiwanese song above (愛人的目屎 by 黃克林) means “I can’t bear to see you cry”
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.
Was flicking through some notes yesterday and found this handy pitch guide for the different tones in Taiwanese – handy in the sense that it may be of use to some people other than pitch deaf me. The first line is the character; the second line is the romanization; the third line is the linguistic description of the kind of tone it is in Chinese along with the number commonly attributed to the tone in superscript (note that fourth tone changes when it ends in a glottal stop or with p t or k); the fifth line represents how the tone changes when used before the final character in a clause. Continue reading
This is a continuation of this post on a popular Taiwanese language song called ‘The hustle bustle is all a dream’. This time I’m going to look at Verse 2 of the song featured below – this is the version by Jiang Hui (江蕙) – a favourite of middle-aged Taiwanese women, and it’s a good one to whip out at KTV:
LKK/老扣扣/洛可可/老硞硞 láu kho̍k-kho̍k (audio available here) Out of touch/ fuddy duddy
This is an adjectival phrase that most commonly appears using the roman letters LKK . It means old and out of touch and has the sense of being behind the times or of an older order. Surprisingly the roman letters often appear in news articles and novels as opposed to the Chinese characters. This took me by surprise as I thought that using roman letters was usually something quite informal – like the 火星文 that features widely on BBS.
When I asked my coworkers for examples, one of them cited Andy Lau’s attempts at street dancing as LKK.
I also found the following examples on the internet:
為了不讓自己顯得ＬＫＫ，我決定在生活中多學習新世代用語 (I have decided to learn phrases used by the younger generation, so as not to not appear so out of touch)
from the Liberty Times in which it is used as an adjective.
這屆海峽兩岸圖書交易會將邀請知名作詞人方文山、製作人王偉忠等人出席相關活動，吸引年輕人參加，讓圖交會不再「LKK」。 (Renowned lyricist Vincent Fang and TV producer Wang Wei-Chung, among others, will attend this year’s Cross-strait Book Fair, in order to get young people to attend and to prevent the book fair from being out of touch with the younger generation.)
from CNA, in which it’s used as an adjective.
And this rather more current example from ET Today:
網評／得網路者得天下 屁孩成就國民黨LKK的慘敗 (Social media: Whoever rules the internet, rules the world; the brat generation succeed in defeating the out of touch KMT)
In this last example I had to rearrange the words in the translation, but essentially LKK is an adjective here too, describing it as an “out of touch crushing defeat”.
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.
Photo credit: Politics & 2P
The phrase “melter” in Belfast slang refers to someone who prattles on endlessly without seemingly ever saying anything that means anything, hence the phrase, “I’m going to go over there now, you’re melting my head!” Taiwanese has a similar sentiment manifested in the phrase “有的沒的”, meaning “Something and nothing/nonsense/trivialities” which can be used in both Mandarin (you3de5mei2de5) and Taiwanese (ū ê bô ê – audio available here).
The handy thing about this phrase is that you can use the Taiwanese in Mandarin and in Taiwanese, or you can just use the Mandarin if you can’t recall the Taiwanese.
It can be used as a noun or an adjective and I’ve included an example below:
你不要在那邊講那些[有的沒的/ū ê bô ê], 無聊死了！
I wish you’d stop going on about all this crap, it’s so dull!
The ū ê bô ê in question can either be something trivial, or in some contexts gossip, but expresses the speaker’s opinion that they are above gossip.
These are various examples I’ve found on the internet:
看看一堆有的沒的是非問題
有的沒的聊了幾句便睡 *Note – in this phrase 有的沒的 is used as an adverb with the 地 omitted.
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.
Feel like your friend’s being a pretentious ass and want to take him down a peg or two? This is the phrase for you!
Ké-gâu 假
– translated into 自作聰明 or “trying to be clever, thinking you’re clever” (when you’re not).
Lí mài teh ké-gâu! 你 mài teh 假gâu!
It can be adapted into Mandarin too, so you can say:
你不要在那邊ké-gâu! Stop trying to be clever!
One example would be a recent ad I heard on the radio the other day, which used a quote from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, specifically about the Übermensch to advertise apartments in Hongshulin.
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.
I was discussing Taiwanese expressions that are quite hard to translate today with my coworkers over lunch, and one word they mentioned really stayed with me because it evokes a very comic picture in your mind. The phrase is 「犁田」lê-chhân and is often rendered phonetically into Mandarin as 「雷殘」. It’s original meaning is to plough fields, but it has been extended to mean when people fall off the back of their motorbikes but keep holding on to the handles so that they get dragged behind, like a man driving a plough, although it can be applied to falling off your bike or motorbike in general. It is a jokey term, so only really appropriate for minor scrapes. It is another of these Taiwanese terms that you can use in Mandarin, the equivalent (but without the comic image) is 「摔車」. Drive safe people!
The Ministry of Education’s Taiwanese dictionary provides this example:
伊昨暗車騎無好勢，都犁田矣。I cha-àm chhia khiâ bô hó-sè, tō lê-chhân—ah. (他昨晚車子沒騎好，就摔車了) Last night he wasn’t driving carefully, and fell off his bike.
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.
脫箠(凸垂) thut-chhôe to make a mistake, to muck up; Mando: 出差錯
One of my friends used this word in a message he sent me today. The message read as follows:
在工作…客人要來工廠我很忙>_<
我怕我講英文惠[sic. should be 會]凸垂
緊張!!!!I’m working… a client is coming to see the factory [so] I’m really busy>_<
I’m worried I’ll make a mistake with my English
Nervous!!!!
I seem to have learned mostly offensive Taiwanese so far, but hopefully that will change as I slowly run out of offensive material. This is still one of my favourite phrases in Taiwanese, because it’s so cutting. The photo above (not mine, found on Facebook, but originally posted to ptt) had me laughing for a while during the Sunflower movement. Cabinet member Hsiao Chiachi (蕭家淇 Xiao Jiaqi) remonstrated with the press that someone ate his taiyangbings (太陽餅 a flat pastry filled with stuffing, like a moon cake) during the brief occupation of the Executive Yuan by students – obviously his major concern at a time when the Legislative Yuan was still occupied by students. The caption reads: “The ones I was going to give my colleagues were eaten too!” His words and his despair have spawned many a meme, but this one has to be my favorite. I don’t agree with the premise of the phrase, as it’s pretty offensive to call anyone stupid, and I don’t think Mr Hsiao is stupid either, his comments were just comically ill-timed. He was probably attempting to portray the students, who were being deified in the pan-green press at the time, as vandals (stealing, damaging property etc), and therefore undermine the support in Taiwan for the protest in the Legislative Yuan. This came across, however, as a passionate love for sun cakes, and utter disappointment that someone else had gotten to them first. Continue reading
This is an amusing term, as it describes the Walmart-esque fashion often showcased on 9gag, and the Taiwanese equivalent of it – the red tint to the hair, the blue and white flip flops, leopard prints, teeth stained by betelnut, pretty much the calling card of the 台客 – and is generally considered the broader version of the phrase 你很台 (You’re very into Taiwan style – puzzling enough this is not a compliment, it’s kind of like calling someone a chav (痞子pízi in Mandarin) in the UK).
This word is really common, and you’ll often hear it (with Taiwanese pronounciation) in Mandarin. It’s often written using the character 俗, but I don’t think that this is the actual character that it’s derived from, as the dictionary lists the romanization sông, and 俗 is pronounced sio̍h and sio̍k and means cheap when used in isolation. The other character I found it listed under – 倯 – appears just to be a phonetic rendering into Mandarin, as it doesn’t appear in any dictionaries – although I could be wrong.
This phrase is pretty useful as it can be used in Mandarin in phrases like 他很sông, to indicate your disapproval at someone dressing like they’re from Kaohsiung (only joking Kaohsiung, most Kaohsiungers are really well dressed – I’ve just been living up north for too long to have sense). The Taiwanese equivalent to that phrase would be:
伊足sông i chiok sông
or
伊真sông i chin sông
伊 i he/she 他／她
足 chiok 很*
真 chin really 真
sông out of touch/unfashionable
*There are also other ways to say 真 or 很 in Taiwanese.
A word of warning, although you may be eager to try out your Taiwanese on people, make sure that you don’t offend anyone. This may be alright to joke about with friends, but might not be appreciated if said to strangers or people you don’t know very well.
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.