Good evening, everyone. I’ve just been reading an alarming news story over at The Chairman’s Bao, which has graded Chinese-language articles for learners of Hanyu. It is a story about a Miss Tang, an internet celebrity who was badly burned at a coffee shop. It is graded at Level 3 and I am most definitely a Level 1 student but I like a challenge so I tried to translate the story. In so doing, I learned a lot of useful phrases and I now know how to report that someone accidentally set their clothes on fire. Here’s today’s sentence. I’ve highlighted some of the words in various colours to help you match the Chinese characters to the pinyin, in case you are a beginner like me.

警察说，唐和她的一个女性朋友在咖啡店吵架的时候，不小心用打火机点燃了自己的衣服。

Jǐngchá shuō, Táng hé tā de yīgè nǚxìng péngyǒu zài kāfēi diàn chǎojià de shíhòu, bù xiǎoxīn yòng dǎhuǒjī diǎnránle zìjǐ de yīfú.

Policeman say, Tang and one of her female friends in the coffee shop, when arguing, accidentally used a cigarette lighter to ignite their own clothes.

Vocabulary:

警察

jǐngchá – policeman – seemingly a combination of characters meaning ‘to be alert or aware’ and ‘to scrutinise’

咖啡店

kāfēi diàn – coffee shop – kāfēi is a loan word, probably from French, it sounds like ‘café‘. Coffee-drinking in China probably started in Shanghai, possibly in a zone set aside for the French, called the French Concession, in the second half of the 19th century.

吵架

chǎojià – argue – if you study Heisig, you might recognise 吵 as ‘noisy’

不小心

bù xiǎoxīn – without care; accidentally, careless

用

yòng – to use

打火机

dǎhuǒjī – cigarette lighter – literally ‘strike fire machine’

点燃

diǎnrán – to ignite (and adding le at the end makes the past tense)

There’s more to this very interesting story so I might continue to analyse it in a later post.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash