Author name: Nicole

Boyfriend in Chinese is nanpengyou. It’s the word for talking about him: to your mom, your coworkers, the friend who keeps asking. Said to his face, it sounds as stiff as calling out Boyfriend! across a room in English, unless you’re joking around. What Chinese girlfriends call him instead depends on the day, from sweet

Many relationships in China have a start date you can circle on the calendar: the day one person asked and the other said yes. Some couples even celebrate their first 100 days. From that day on, she’s your nüpengyou, the everyday word for girlfriend in Chinese. How to Say Girlfriend in Chinese Chinese Pinyin English

Is Chinese sentence structure the same as English? For the first sentence you’ll learn, it’s subject, verb, object, word for word: 我吃面。Wǒ chī miàn.I eat noodles. Add yesterday, though, and the two languages split. English tends to tack the new detail onto the end. Chinese tucks it in before the verb. The 了 (le) in

A Chinese guy can call three things laopo: his wife, his car and the anime girl on his lock screen. Only one of them gets a vote on dinner. Laopo is the everyday word for wife in Chinese, which is why it stretches so easily to cars and cartoon crushes. At work, on paper or

You’ve been dating for three months, and your phone already has him saved as laogong. It’s the everyday word for husband in Chinese, and no, nobody has proposed. In mainland China, dating couples sometimes switch to laogong and laopo (wife) once things get comfortable, a bit like English speakers sliding into babe. How to Say

Zenme means how, so the message a Chinese friend sends after a dinner you skipped can look like a puzzle: ni zenme mei lai. Nobody wants to know how you didn’t come. It’s a why. Chinese has two everyday whys, and that’s the one textbooks tend to leave for later. The other, 为什么 (wèishénme), is

Your age tends to come up early in Chinese small talk, sometimes before the tea has cooled. If you’re not used to it, that can feel personal. For the person asking, it could be practical: your age decides what they should call you. Someone a couple of years older might become 哥 (gē) or 姐

Why does shenme have an n you can never hear? Learners ask it all the time, usually a few weeks into listening to real Chinese, and your ears aren’t the problem. In normal speech the n melts into the m right after it, so 什么 (shénme) comes out closer to shemme. Say it slowly and

You’ve practiced it all week: hen gaoxing renshi ni, nice to meet you. Then you meet your new colleague in Shenzhen. She smiles, says ni hao, and pulls out her phone. Her next question is one the textbook skipped: wo sao ni haishi ni sao wo? Should I scan you, or will you scan me?

A woman stops you at a bus stop in Chengdu and asks which bus goes to the train station. You have no idea, and about two seconds to say so: 不好意思，我不知道。bù hǎo yìsi, wǒ bù zhīdào.Sorry, I don’t know. That’s I don’t know in Chinese: wo bu zhidao. Putting bu hao yisi in front, the