Ever wonder what all those Chinese place names really mean? Keep on wondering. Although I’ve taken a map of China’s provinces and some neighboring countries, and translated their names directly into English, you will still be left clueless.

I have to say though, the resulting names are amusing. They remind me of the signs you see everywhere here that appear to be translated by monkeys who had just finished smoking banana peels. People will probably say that some these are wrong, however if you look deep enough into the characters you will find that the translations aren’t just correct, they also predict the future. I see your future is marriage to a large bovine, a life of track-pants and flab sprawled out over the couch watching Top Gear re-runs.

Oh yeah and to the people who are no doubt going to complain about the lack of the ‘Stan countries and Macao, I know I left them out. Macao is the size of Yao Ming’s dick (that sure made you think, didn’t it?!) and the ‘Stans all have like 20 characters in their names that make it really hard to fit into my map. So I’ll give them to you now:

Ha! Too bad you can’t read any of it. I know the clever ones will quickly jump to Google Language tools to get some sweet machine translation action going on, so I’ll save you the trouble by posting it below. You’ll notice that it seems to start off well, but as with all my creations, things quickly go south.

My favorite Chinese dishes
Now I do not have a favorite Chinese dishes, but I have a favorite type of cuisine. I think China could very good barbecue is good some West dishes. Last year I came to China. After a night to a bar, my friend introduced me, a simple food. Immediately I really like the. It’s still a little bit of fresh taste very hot. Many foreigners do not like spicy food. But I like spicy food because my mother is Burmese she done me a lot of spicy dishes. Another reason why I like barbecues… Very cheap. I could go in the restaurant barbecues, food, drink beer and only spent 20 yuan. Barbecues in Canada is also very tasty but too expensive.

When I eat barbecue I never buy: 10 Series lamb, five strings of meat, two strings of garlic, a bread, and a bottle of Tsingtao or Gill. Occasionally I buy: String potatoes, pork Series, and rice. Rare Series with my children I drank pot liquor. I know your thinking, you think I am crazy. On! I am crazy.

When I and my friends eat barbecue, we have to the same restaurant. I just do not know its name, but there are very good food. Because there Qingdao Olympic Therefore, the government should close down the restaurant. They think that the restaurant too soiled. Wrong! They are not clever. I think this restaurant no problem. You! The barbecue restaurants continue to open the door because they increased.

I heard barbecues from the Xinjiang best. I do not know if my information on or wrong, whether I intend to Xinjiang to eat there very famous skewers infants. I ask you to join!


Written Chinese consists of these funky characters you may have seen on signs as you quickly made your way through the local Chinatown to escape the toxic smells. Those characters are called hanzi, which is actually pronounced han-tse. Each of those characters can be components to words and are usually words on their own. So they aren’t letters ok? To make things easy for us foreign devils, there is a system called pinyin, which turns each of these hanzi into Romanized letters so that we can know how to pronounce each character. In the spoken language one thing can be many, because there are only a certain number of possible pinyin combinations in the language. This results in some characters/words having the exact same pronunciation as other words. This makes speaking and understanding a fun game.

Today I want to look at one specific pinyin pronunciation: shì. Using you’re observational skills you should notice that on the “i” there is a ` mark which means that the tone is a falling tone from high to low. Yes Mandarin is a tonal language and there’s 4 different tones, but I want you to forget about that because if you don’t your brain will short circuit and burn up just like one of those “this is your brain on drugs” commercials. To pronounce this pinyin simply say “sure” but without the “re” part. Easy as eating a freshly baked yet highly sought after in China apple pie. Now lets look at the possible hanzi for this pronunciation and the corresponding English meanings.

To be fair some of these are word components. Just remember though that there are only a few hundred pinyin pronunciations, but over 60 thousand characters, which means…an entire People’s Army of words have the exact same pronunciation. Remember now that there are four tones and they can sound practically the same to the untrained ear, therefore more words sounding the same. By now you’re probably thinking that Chinese people only say 7 different words. So how do we deal with this? You could wrap yourself in a carpet and jump off a bridge, but luckily tons of words are obscure terms and names that hardly ever get used unless you’re reading classical texts or are training to be a nuclear scientist. Mostly there’s only about 15000 characters that get used and about 3000 of those are common. So we’ve watered it down quite a bit. Finally, Chinese is really contextual language, meaning you can’t just pull words out of your ass whenever you feel like it. It just doesn’t work; people will have no idea what you’re saying because words need other words to make sense. They might even get angry and eat you. Just like I ate a person once. But it was at a Korean restaurant so it was ok. Actually, just forget trying to learn, it would probably just be easier to travel back in time and fly a 747 into the Tower of Babel. Case closed!