Every year around Christmastime, my “Christmas Songs in Chinese” blog post from 2006 gets a lot of action. I’ve been seeing a lot of requests there for lyrics, and I tried to help out with that, but I found the Chinese versions of these Christmas songs’ lyrics surprisingly difficult to track down. If anyone can offer links to those lyrics, it would be appreciated by many.
Anyway, you may enjoy these Sinosplice Christmas music posts from the archive:
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This post comes a bit late, I realize, but if you’re in China (or elsewhere) and still suffering from holiday season eggnog withdrawal, it just might help you pull through.
In Shanghai, we foreigners generally depend on Carrefour (a French supermarket chain) and City Shop (formerly City Supermarket) for our hoity-toity imported food expat needs. But for some reason, neither ever carries eggnog.
This year, when I complained to JP about the lack of eggnog, he suggested I make…
“Christmas” in Chinese is, of course, 圣诞节, but in the spirit of my previous Character Creations, I’ve created two new single characters that mean “Christmas.”
Character Notes: some radicals in the creations above were chosen for semantic reasons, but many elements were chosen for purely visual purposes. In some cases I purposely shunned a more obvious option (such as 木 for “tree” or 星 for “star”) because they didn’t have the…
So I’m caught up these days with an experiment (I hate humans!), work, and now even Christmas. So I decided to just throw up a link.
I found this interesting-looking online book: How Taiwan Became Chinese.
Has anyone read it? Any good? The title smacks of propaganda, but I’m willing to eat a little propaganda every now and then in the name of good education…
OK, I’ll admit it. I like some Christmas songs. Not so much “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” as some of the more traditional ones. So I get a kick out of hearing these songs sung in Chinese. Thinking that some of you may feel the same way (you all seemed to really enjoy the Hakka Jingle Bells song), I decided to put together an album of Chinese Christmas music.
This album contains secular kids’ classics like “Jingle Bells” as well…
About a year ago I presented a Hakka version of Jingle Bells and a lot of people enjoyed it. I thought this year I’d share another Chinese take on the Christmas classics. This time it’s a band called Cookies (曲奇) singing in Cantonese (so to me it sounds almost as bizarre as the Hakka song). You have to listen to a bit of Canto-pop before they get into it, but at the 1:26 mark they start singing…
Recently I set up the little artificial Christmas tree my girlfriend bought for my last year. When I went to put the Christmas lights on it, I found that one of the wires had come disconnected from the switchbox. I probably wouldn’t be able to fix it without a soldering iron. Since I didn’t have time to get new Christmas lights, I just left the tree plain.
The next day my ayi came over and I pointed out the Christmas…
Last week at work I had this conversation:
A: John, you have an activity on Saturday.
J: This Saturday? The 25th?
A: Right.
J: I can’t. It’s Christmas.
A: Why can’t you?
J: It’s Christmas. I have Christmas things to do.
A: It’s just for an hour.
J: No. It’s Christmas.
A: OK, I’ll tell them.
Later I was approached by my supervisor:
V: John, I realize it’s Christmas, but can you please work on Saturday?
J:
…
The name of the Christmas song “Jingle Bells” is 圣诞铃声 (something like “Christmas Bells”) in Chinese. But the famous English refrain “jingle bells, jingle bells” in Chinese is the onomatopoeic “叮叮当, 叮叮当,” which sounds like “ding ding dong, ding ding dong” to Western ears. It doesn’t sound at all like sleigh bells ringing to us, it just sounds really funny (or maybe like doorbells). In my experience, every Westerner who…
It’s hard to believe that last year at this time I was arriving home in Florida for a surprise visit. Prior to last Christmas, I had been in China two Christmases in a row. Yet this year I feel more divorced from this “Christmas” thing than ever before. This year Christmas is just that Western holiday between the HSK and my move to Shanghai.
Speaking of the HSK, I think I did “OK.” I think I’m borderline between 7 and…
John has lived in China for
10
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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