Sunday, March 27, 2011

As tall as Yao Ming

My Chinese teachers in China used the following examples all the time:

姚明很高 (Yáo Míng hěn gāo): Yao Ming is tall

姚明是高高的(Yáo Míng shì gāo gāo de): Yao Ming is very tall

像姚明一样高(xiàng Yáo Míng yīyàng gāo): …as tall as Yao Ming…

And my favorite response was:

我比姚明高(wǒ bǐ Yáo Míng gāo): I am taller than Yao Ming

Yes, the Chinese people love their Yao Ming. For those of you who don’t know, Yao Ming is a 7 feet 6 inch basketball player from China. His Wikipedia page says that he is currently the tallest player in NBA, and he has also been the richest celebrity in China for six straight years. Being a basketball star in basketball-crazy China has made Yao Ming, in my opinion, the most well known Chinese athlete in China. Maybe that is why you see Yao Ming posters all over China and Yao Ming examples all over Chinese classrooms.

By talking about how tall Yao Ming is, we just looked at different ways of making comparisons in Chinese language. The following are the sentence structures:

A B (A bǐ B gāo): A is taller than B

A 是最高的 (A shì zuì gāo de): A is the tallest

A 一样高 (xiàng A yīyàng gāo): ...as tall as A…

And by now you should know that (gāo) means tall.

7 comments:

  1. 我比马思文高. Haha!
    But 姚明比 Roy.

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  2. Hi Ma,
    I learned a lot about china and chinese from your blogs. :)
    Please write your next post about chinese food.

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  3. Nice..I think you should post a video on how to pronounce some of the words with a Chinese accent. It would be more practical than a theoretical absolute in a strict sense. However, the little that I've learned from here is incredible. I'm now looking forward for your next post.

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  4. 马思文比姚明矮! :)

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  5. Hi! Nice post...I gradually remember my poor Chinese now. Please keep posting. I would like to brush up my Chinese:D 玲(rei)很高, 但是姚明是高高的。

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  6. Dipesh 比我高, keep up the Chinese blogs, your genius for starting this! :)

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