Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Mandarin for Dummies (round 2)

My all time favorite (so far) local lunch is Yong Tau Foo. There is a yong tau foo stall in pretty much every hawker center. It is basically a small salad-like bar where you can choose from a selection of tofu (fried and plain), all types of fresh greens, fish balls, all sorts of fried stuff and fresh vegetables. You fill your bowl with all your favorite choices and once at the front of the line you hand it over they steam and make a soup right in front of you. YUM! One other thing you can add to your soup is one of 3 types of noodles (really thin, thin and thick). Now I have relaxed by eating habits quite a bit since being here but I am not really a fan of the noodle so here in lies the problem since generally the hawker workers speak very little English. I have come to know all the workers in the yong tau foo booth near work so they pretty much have my order down, this was after the first day I looked at the noodles, shook my head “no” violently and almost jumped over the counter to knock the noodles out of her hand but what if I were to visit another stall where they didn’t know me quite so well??

This potential dilemma brings me to today’s lesson:

No Noodles = Bu Yao Mian 面条不喜欢

Add this to our earlier lesson and you get = Bu Yao Mian, XieXie (no noodles thank you)

Look at that we are practically fluent after only 2 lessons.

2 comments:

JDizzle said...

You can also use this phrase at the Chinese pool store.

get it?

Kitty said...

lol...chinese pool store...