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Shenzhen Days: Saying stuff better From: 刘畅 <tilly88@words.creation> |
| Hey, y’all. Y’awl. Yuallll. Yeh-ahhl. Yeaal. Sometimes it’s tough to represent how a word really sounds in text, huh?
Take— for a totally random example— ‘Shenzhen.’ How do you say it? What’s that ‘zh’ doing in there? Can you just ignore the h? (Spoiler warning: You can’t. Zh is its own sound in Chinese.) We don’t have time to go into all the fun foibles of Pinyin, the official romanization system for Mandarin Chinese, so let me just give you a little shortcut: Say ‘shen-jen.’ You know, like you’re talking to your best friend, Jenn! And… well, then you’re probably closer than you were before. How’s that for confidence! I’ll do one more. The Chinese ‘yuan’ is the currency here. That word is *one syllable*. I hear people go ‘you-ahn’ or ‘youu… …aahnnn’ and, wow, that’s kind of painful. I’m not sure how to fix this quickly. How about trying to say ‘youahn’ really, really fast? You’re still making two sounds instead of one, but maybe it’s closer. Maybe. By the way, we use ¥ as a currency symbol, which you might’ve associated with JPY, the Japanese yen (¥). And it is! It’s also CNY, Chinese yuan (¥). Look, don’t you dare give me side-eye if you come from a place that uses the dollar sign because do you mean Hong Kong dollars ($)? Australian dollars ($)? Canadian dollars ($)? Yeah. At least we can probably agree that $$$¥¥¥ means HELLA CASH! Anyway. Now you’re wandering around Shenzhen buying things in Chinese yuan like the super pro that you are. Pronunciation can be tough but it’s worth putting in the effort. Ain’t it, y’all? Yrs, | |