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- Topic: Chinese >
- "She is not Canadian."
"She is not Canadian."
Translation:她不是加拿大人。
22 Comments
j is not pronounced like a y in Chinese.
https://forvo.com/search/%E5%8A%A0%E6%8B%BF%E5%A4%A7%E4%BA%BA/
So it is more like "Oh, Jianada!"in Mandarin and in Cantonese "Oh, Kanada!"
"ta bu shi jianada ren"
Some countries names use it, while most do not. Unfortunately, there is no trick or pattern... we have to learn them as we go.
Here is a link if you'd like to browse a long list:
https://www.freechineselessons.com/country-names/
Ah hah! I see, so for those countries that do not get the 国 (guó), Chinese characters are instead used to approximate a phonetic rendering of the country's name. Of course, each distinct character technically does have its own distinct meaning...
That makes me wonder, are there any phonetic country names in Chinese where, if one were to read the name literally character by character, it comes out as something hilarious or goofy? For example, I can see in the list you've provided above that "Ireland" is 爱尔兰, which, character by character, would actually mean something like "Love you blue," I believe.
Are there any great examples out there of this phenomenon?
I hate how i needed to go through all those characters and translating them with google to then find out that we arent supposed to put them alone yet but just to put them together to say canada.
Sometimes the individual characters don't contribute to the meaning, they're just phonetic.
In Cantonese, the first character is pronounced "ka", so the sounds are "ka na da" do you get it now? Mandarin, though, pronounces the first character as "jia", so that kind of ruins it a bit.
it means people so basically 加拿大人 means Canadian but literally means people of Canada.
