New favorite Chinese phrase

[cashew]

魑魅魍魉 [chī mèi wǎng liǎng]

Meaning: all the ghosties and ghoulies; or evil spirits of all stripes; or all the monsters and devils; or all the bad stuff.

I love how each character has the 鬼 radical. (Which means ghost/ghoul/monster.) Heeeee... Chinese characters are funny. What I like is that I can literally never have seen the character before in my life, but I will still know what the character means by simply following the character structure and reading the radicals.

Like: 又双叒叕 [yòu shuāng ruò zhuó]

The radical 又 means "again". So 又双叒叕 means "again and again and again...", aka déjà vu.

Sometimes I just have to share the really ridiculous moments in the Chinese language. Also, one of these phrases was invented in 800BCE while the other one came about in post-2010s. Guess which one's which.

Comments

[tanithryudo]

Oh oh oh! I know this! There was this song! (Huh, can't embed in comments)

生僻字

[tanithryudo]

And then on a completely unrelated tangent, I found this screencap on the douban forums lately and thought you might find it amusing:

[cashew]

OMG, I love this! Is there a bilibili version I can send to parents?! ( •̀ ω •́ )y

(Also, yeah, I found out you can't embed in comments when I tried to comment on the power outage post. XD)

Edit: I found the bilibili version and also the chem version. Chinese nerds are the best.

Edit2: And then traditional Chinese medicine students gives it a run. LOL

[cashew]

ROFLMAO

I love it. (Also, /(ㄒoㄒ)/~~ why must Chinese NT be so shitty? It's to the point where the Chinese NT is used as an insult by the fanbase to describe how teams are playing poorly, e.g. "Barça is the Chinese NT of European club football". XD)

[tanithryudo]

This is the official version of the chem one: https://www.bilibili.com/video/av51512280/

There's a reply under it with a huuuuuuge list of moar versions of this song.

[cashew]

OMFG, this is a treasure trove. Thanks. XD