Imagin that you go to a Chinese restaraunt and order Kong Bao Chicken, will it be better if you can use standard Mandarin to say it?
Well, there are a lot of such words in English, Like 'Kong Fu', 'To fu' and the like. So how to pronounce them correctly with Pinyin (provided that you are interested in it)? I will list a bunch of them, hoping someday it will help you.
Kong Fu -- gōng fū (fu, if it's light tone, usally applied on the last character)
To Fu -- dòu fǔ (fu)
Lao-tzu -- lǎo zǐ
Tao Te Ching -- dào dé jīng
Also it's said that 'Long Time No See' also comes from Chinese, since it perfectly matches what we say
Here, jiǔ (久) means 'a long time'. hǎo (好) is something like 'what a' in 'what a good day', though you might already know that hǎo (好) also has the meaning of 'goodness' as in 'good plan'.
bù (不) means NO! We will talk about that more later. About the tone, as you notice, is 2nd but not 4th in 'hǎo jiǔ bú jiàn'. This is because in oral Chinese, we just speak that way. If there has to be a rule, someone else has come up with this: when two 4th-tone characters are pronunced together, it 'becomes' 2nd+4th.
Finally, can you try to figure out how 'Kong Fu Panda' sounds like in Chinese if I tell you that xióng māo (熊猫) is just Panda in Mandarin?
OK, now you can check it with us:) gōng fū (fu) xióng māo Read more...
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