The meanings of the word Baobei in ChineseĪmong the three main meanings of “宝贝” listed above, the first one, treasure, is the closest to its original meaning back in ancient time. Today, let’s take a thorough look at the word “ bǎobèi ” so that in the future you can use this word correctly without feeling embarrassed. Especially when taking the cultural difference between China and other countries into consideration, the usage of a word like this could be quite tricky! After all, calling a young kid “baby” has a completely different feeling and context from saying this to a lover. Many Chinese learners have questions about the word “ bǎobèi ” ( 宝贝, Baby ). It later turned out that his girlfriend was talking with a customer service guy on Taobao, one of the largest E-commerce platform in China, about something she just bought: It is very common in China for people to call the item they bought online as “baby”. Unfortunately because of this, the crosstalk genre of comedy is still being censored by political controls to this day. Crosstalk is considered hilarious and a safe means to poke fun at taboo subjects including political figures, traditional gender roles, sex and more. It makes good sense for someone to worry why their lover would call someone else “baby”. Chinese people find absurdity much funnier than the typical Westerner would. For ambitious learners looking to go beyond the basic 100 Chinese characters, we’ve compiled a list of resources you can take advantage of. I finally found out what he was worried about. To help you gain momentum, we’re going to start you off with 100 of the most common characters in Mandarin. So I didn’t answer him directly but instead asked back “You don’t know what it means?!” He reacted a little shyly and said “Well, I know it means ‘baby’…I just want to figure out if that’s the only meaning of this word? Or, if it has any other use that I don’t know yet?”Īs I started to think about how to explain this word in a correct context to him, he went on explaining: “Yesterday, my Chinese girlfriend accidentally sent me a message with this word and it confused me that she called someone else ‘baby’ other than me…” I was quite surprised to hear that because this should not be a difficult word for my students who had been learning Chinese for a while, or at least I thought so… A fun story about the Chinese word BaobeiĪs a Chinese teacher, among the many interesting questions about learning Mandarin Chinese asked by my students, there is one that left me a very deep impression: One day, a young man from the US asked me “What does ‘ bǎobèi ’ mean?” A easy way to learn Chinese is to use it in real-life conversation.
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