Lord_Cheap said:
butscrew said:
I do have a question for Chinese speakers though,
米 what does this mean in Chinese? In Japanese it is read as bei and means rice.
Cantonese pronunciation would be "mai", not quite sure about the Mandarin though, and it means uncooked rice. Cooked rice would be 飯 (Traditional Chinese) or 饭 (Simplified Chinese).
This is pretty old but I thought I'd reply to it anyway. 米 is written as "mi" in pinyin style and is pronounced like "me".
But to stay on topic, in Chinese, when describing an object, you have to have a specific object unit/description in front of it (I'm not really sure what it's called). It's impossible to translate into English because it simply doesn't exists in the English language. However, something similar in English would be a
bushel of apples, or a
plate of food, except in Chinese this has to be done with every single object you talk about.
Say you have a pencil. You can't just say "I have one pencil," in Chinese, otherwise it's grammatically incorrect. You have to say "I have one 支 (pronounced 'jir') pencil. And as I said, this applies for everything, whether it be pencils, food, fish, paper, mountains, mountain
tops, etc. And there are so many...
隻 is for animals, 頭 is for cows (idk why
), 條 is for rope shaped objects, 章 is for essays, 台 is for electronics (computers, tv), 對, 副,and 雙 are used for pairs (yay chopsticks!), and there are a bunch more that I can't think of right now.
Anyway just thought I'd share one of the many complications in my language