怎么样 - A little Chinese lesson...

I have a new favourite Chinese word! The word zěnmeyàng ( 怎么样) can be roughly translated as "how" in English according to my Chinese textbook. VERY roughly if you ask me. The way Chinese people use it can be quite different from the way we would use the word how. For instance "wǒ zhōumò qù zěnmeyàng?" (which is a sentence from my textbook) means "how about this weekend?". If you translated it word for word it would come out sounding something like...I weekend go how...yeah. So it tends to mean something a bit more than just "how". Chinese people like to use it as a greeting over nǐ hǎo...or so I'm told. Saying "nǐ zěnmeyàng?" is like saying "what's up?". Or you can just say "zěnmeyàng".

I love it. I love the way it sounds and I feel super Chinese when I say it. I can't wait to try it out on more people!

The other thing I really love about this language at the moment is the Chinese way of asking questions. Chinese is not a language that lends itself very well to straightforward yes or no questions from what I can tell. For instance, if you wanted to ask "is it ok?" you would have to say "hǎo bù hǎo?". This literally means "good not good," as if you were saying "circle one of the above"! I think its super cute. You don't need to say "yes" or "no" to this type of question. You just answer "good" (hǎo) or "not good" (bù hǎo). I'm sure I'll probably get over this since its actually a kind of longwinded way of asking something in a lot of other contexts and Sandy tells me that its a bit of a childish way of phrasing things. For now I'm happy to go around asking people if they are something bù something though.