瞎子和跛子

This is something we must put right immediately.

哈哈，我同意。。我觉得同样的，不过:

http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh/OMD_%28%E6%A8%82%E5%9C%98%29

Ah, sorry, missed some of the follow-up banter there! ;)

Re: carrots....word on the street (quite literally, just asked a strawberry blonde expat friend of mine to take a random poll of native Chinese speakers) we've got one 咖啡色, one 金色 and, one "blonde!"

Remarkable.

Baba! 翻译 OMD 应该用“摸黑”吧~ 呵呵

这个头发颜色是什么？:

oh,sorry..thought you might have seen our convo here:

http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/5240#comment-177416

...was just joshing of course, though perhaps xiaoliang has come post my 胡说 founder days,so may not have realised what I´m like, hehe. ;)

ps I think you meant to say 西北,对吧？

真，

你真聪明，you don't miss a trick 【怎么说在中文？】，对，我错了，你说的对了，我颠倒那些小屁孩群电影。我喜欢简单脑子歌“你别忘记我”从“早饭俱乐部”电影。

我还喜欢夜半行军乐团的歌“如果你离开”和迷幻药皮草歌“漂亮在粉红色”从电影的名字一样的 【呵呵，最后是这么难中文】

Wait, my avatar looks Chinese? And what does xiao_liang have to do with this? I'm so confused.

I would imagine there are at least some red-headed Chinese passport holders, though...the northeast of course has ethnic groups whose people tend towards more middle Eastern/European features.

We need someone on the ground in XinJiang!

ok,so what would they call this hair colour:

..I think this was just before Anne got called "carrots"

oh,so you're not as Chinese as you look then. That xiaoliangs a sharp one. What else have you got thrown into the mix then?

The reason I was asking about hair colour is just for that reason..I've heard Chinese describe hair colour differently to westerners...for example what westerners call grey hair Chinese will call white hair. I think westerners description of hair is often not very accurate. I mean for example what is called red hair in many cases is much closer to orange.It'd be good to post some pics and see what Chinese would call the colour.

噢，在这里：

http://maps.google.com.au/maps?hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=gent+chinatown&fb=1&gl=au&hq=chinatown&hnear=gent&ei=en7zS5uVK42TkAWFtp27DQ&sa=X&oi=local_group&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CB4QtgMwAA

I had to ask an infinitely more Chinese person than I for the answer...conversation went something like this:

我：How would you call my hair color in Chinese? not 红色？丹色？

她：褐色

我：我的头发不褐色的啊！

她：但看起来褐色

Finally, grudgingly, she let me call it 栗子色.

酒红色 was also a suggestion, which I overruled.

有红棕色头发的人 maybe. Ha ha, 漂亮在粉红色， I only just got that!

@tal, 哈哈，Yeah, and she was blonde and born in the famous Chinese town of Ghent!

@barbardwan, actually, it seems that I have heard brown-haired ( to my eyes) Chinese describe themselves as 红发. However, this is just one of my recollections from a conversation, nothing authoritative.

jen not jenny has shown there are Chinese redheads [zenme shuo zai zhongwen?...hongse huozhe chengse?]

Ha! You got me! You had a Chinese grandmother?

嗨，你说的是《早饭俱乐部》吧！

oh I love that group mate....love the soundtrack of 漂亮在粉红色..didn't know they were studying 中文 though...well if it's good enough for them,then it's good enough for me. Hope they pump out some new material in 中文。

So Tal, you don't like 繁體字？Well, as my grandmother always said (冷笑）, "简体字 for simple minds." ；-）

我也要说恭喜恭喜你，非常特别的情况

thanks zhen for 九死一生

..so interesting that 九 is the number used in this expression when in English we have the expression that cat's have nine lives. Can't help but wonder if it's mere coincidence or not.

祝贺祝贺你们喜添小孙女！

Thanks for that Jen. My J to C dictionary for 命拾い gives me 捡了条命，死里逃生（成），九死一生（成），侥幸未死.

@zhenlijiang, 啊，你的记忆力好。对！我很期待跟我的孙女阅读书。

Thanks Tvan. Most Chinese children's books I've seen have such guides. Not that parents elsewhere aren't serious or selective about what sort of reading material their kids are first exposed to, but even the few times I've been in bookstores in SH esp. on weekends left me with the impression that Chinese parents of young children are intense! So I guess such guides (=promos) are necessary.

In a few years you can read the story again to your 孙子(孙女？)!

FWIW，my (occasionally useless) hover-over feature also gives the phrase 撿回一條命 as "a narrow escape."

@zhenlijiang, actually, I just got home from work to the actual book. Per the cover, the Chinese version was first published in 1988 in Taiwan, then ported over to the U.S. for overseas Chinese in 1991.

The U.S. version includes an English-language parental guide. I won't repeat it all, but its gist is "'The Blind Man and the Cripple' makes it easy for children to readily grasp the importance of cooperation." Also, that it helps children "understand the hardships of those who are handicapped." A bit heavy-handed for us adults, but I used to read this story to my children in both Chinese and English.

zhenlijiang, thanks for the Japanese expression. I was relying on a dictionary-based parsing which, as you just demonstrated, suffers from a lack of context.

The book was published in Taiwan and has an 1980's copyright. Both the Chinese and the English translation that I included came from the book. According to the advertising copy it's a Chinese legend, but I don't really know.

This web site still carries the book. http://www.childbook.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=A135

Hi guys I haven't yet had the time to really study this story, but would like to butt in just long enough to say I think this 总算 is "just barely managed to ~", not really "at long last". 捡回--same thing I guess Orangina's saying. The two were as good as dead, but they recovered what they'd lost = their lives. We have in Japanese this expression 命拾いをする inochi-biroi wo suru, which means being in danger of death (both lit. and fig.) but to then have a narrow escape, or "miss being killed by a hairsbreadth". 捡 and 拾 both mean picking up something that was dropped or lost, but looking in my dictionary this 捡 seems to really have the sense of acquiring something you didn't work for, that you're maybe not necessarily deserving of.

Was this tale originally written in Chinese?

@orangina, re: 熊熊 I think you're definitely right. I just don't understand the grammatical structure. I've got the common "older learner" problem of being too tied into my mother language's grammatical structure where the adverb generally precedes the adjective that it is modifying. I would have expected something along the lines of 熊熊的大火的...

I'm still working on the last part, though. The English translation, while it might convey the spirit of the story, doesn't seem to accurately reflect the meaning in Chinese; similar to another discussion going on in this group.

http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/8875#comment-177599

tvan, yes! these things are what I was talking about. But I haven't spent as much time with them so wasn't yet able to articulate what I found strange/difficult/new.

I think the adjective is not 熊熊，but 大火熊熊。So it is describing the temple, not the fire. The "fire engulfed temple" to be liberal about it.

For the second part, what do you think of "The two men got themselves together and returned to life." Not that they had died, but until they came up with their plan they were dead men. The piece of life they had left was forfeit.