Xie Xie Xiang!

Nee I hv not gone nuts."Xie Xie" is supposedly "Thank You" in Chinese! This titbit is courtesy Sabs who has spent over a year in China. She came up with this post when I ate her brains for a "X post". So over to her for rest of the post .

Guess who's the celebrity in the pic :-P

"Xie Xie" was perhaps the first of the Chinese words I learnt to pronounce correctly with the right intonation and expression...bow gently and say ‘Shi-eh Shi-eh’ without a pause, really fast so it flows. Imagine that you are the vent weight of a pressure cooker that has given the first two half whistles :-D - yeah, now the ‘shi-eh shi-eh’ sounds right. Well jokes aside, I think nothing can be more beautiful than the word ‘thanks’ and that too said with an added effort. Interestingly they say thanks to you for taking their cab, buying their wares or for paying the due for their service(N not other way round!)

Chinese words and names can be tongue twisters to the unfamiliar. My students at the Anhui University found an easy way out, by adopting ‘English’ names...what amused me was the creativity in choosing their assumed names- butterfly, dragonfly, book, mayflower, Meg Ryan, David Beckham, coco cola...and what not. I used to tell them to go back to their Chinese names but many of them found it uncool ! On the contrary, I was keen on choosing an assumed Chinese name for myself and from a list kindly made by my students, I narrowed down on dongmei (winter plum), Xiang(Fragrant\To-soar) and yinghua(cherry flower), planning to use them someday as pseudonyms.

So XieXie Xiang for this post.

Linking this to AtoZChallenge - X is for XieXie Xiang