Community Notorious on Nostr: One Million Years Ago I met two adorable #Chinese exchange students at college in ...
One Million Years Ago I met two adorable #Chinese exchange students at college in Utah. Their names were Frances and Michelle. The said they would teach me Mandarin. I practiced 20 or so phrases and they critiqued my pronunciation whenever I was at their apartment.
They said a greeting was very important, so they taught me how to say hello. They said in #Mandarin it was important to greet women differently from men. I don't have any idea how to spell/transliterate this, but they said I had to say to them, every time we met, something like "Ni hao, Pio Liang." They were very happy when I said it, clearly because I was doing so well.
A few months later, we had all drifted apart (as is common in college) and I met another Mandarin speaker. She was surprised to learn there were gendered greetings in Mandarin. I told her what Frances and Michelle had taught me for "hello [to women]" and she laughed so hard she cried. It took a minute or two for her to be able to tell me Frances and Michelle had trained me to say they were very beautiful every time I saw them.
No regrets. They were quite beautiful.
#story #truestory #language #prank #funny #noregrets
They said a greeting was very important, so they taught me how to say hello. They said in #Mandarin it was important to greet women differently from men. I don't have any idea how to spell/transliterate this, but they said I had to say to them, every time we met, something like "Ni hao, Pio Liang." They were very happy when I said it, clearly because I was doing so well.
A few months later, we had all drifted apart (as is common in college) and I met another Mandarin speaker. She was surprised to learn there were gendered greetings in Mandarin. I told her what Frances and Michelle had taught me for "hello [to women]" and she laughed so hard she cried. It took a minute or two for her to be able to tell me Frances and Michelle had trained me to say they were very beautiful every time I saw them.
No regrets. They were quite beautiful.
#story #truestory #language #prank #funny #noregrets