I love Chinglish. A lot.
In fact i’m not too proud to admit that much of my valuable revision time last year was spent on sites like www.engrish.com, giggling immaturely at accidently funny Chinese and Japanese-English translations. Which is why this current list of ‘top ten’ embarassing chinglish amuses me greatly, and I thought was well worth sharing:
1) Good good study, day day up (好好学习，天天向上)
Note: Study hard and make progress everyday
2) How are you? How old are you？(怎么是你？怎么老是你？)
Note: Why are you here? Why do I always meet you?
3) You have seed. I will give you some color to see see. (你有种，我要给你点颜色瞧瞧。)
Note: You dare to bully me! I’ll get you back
4) You ask me, me ask who? (你问我，我问谁？)
Note: You ask me the reason, I don’t know either.
5) We two who and who? (咱俩谁跟谁？)
Note: We are intimate friends.
6) No three no four (不三不四)
Note: indecent
7) Horse horse tiger tiger (马马虎虎)
Note: Just so so.
8) One car come, one car go, two car pengpeng, one car died! (关于一场车祸的描述)
Note: (It’s a description of a traffic accident) Two cars collide, one of them was ruined.
9) People mountain people sea (人山人海)
Note: So many people
10) If you want money, I have no; if you want life, I have one! (要钱没有，要命一条)
Note: I have no money, what I own is only one life.
So thank you People’s China Daily. My favourite here has to be the car one, and no10 has an amusing Nina Simone-ness to it. But still by far my favourite piece of Chinglish didn’t even make the list: It was on a sports centre in Andingmen a couple of years back and it had a list of activities on it, one of which was ‘Yoga Pirates’. Yaaaarrrrrrrr
Have any of you seen any decent Chinglish recently? If so, do come and share it.
p.s on a more serious side, there are interesting debates surrounding Chinglish. Here is an example of one such debate.
