New Member of Skritter, Michelle

Hi, I am Michelle. I am a new member of the Skritter community, and I am currently interning as a marketing assistant.

My full name is Michelle Ying Huey, Lai (赖盈慧), but you can just call me Michelle-my Christian name. I am a Malaysian Chinese, and I come from a Christian family. My parents named me 赖盈慧 hoping I would become a girl who was both wealthy (盈利) and wise (智慧)- a future I am currently seeking.

As lots of you probably know, Malaysia is a multi-cultural country; hence, I know a few languages (Chinese, English, and Malay) and dialects (Cantonese, Hakka). I am a 4th year student of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, majoring in Chinese Language Studies and Education. I am interested in this subject because it is a new field of study in Malaysia. Nowadays, with China developing at such a high speed, thus, I believe that Chinese language will become an important, widely used language in the future. Moreover, I find Chinese culture fascinating with its long history of over 2000 years.

Last but not least, I know that life is just too short, so I have decided to study abroad. I’m experiencing life in a way that is different, fresh, and challenging. Joining Skritter is kind of challenging for me too. I hope that we can all learn together with Skritter. Feel free to give any kind of comment; we will do our best to respond and keep making Skritter better and better.

Cheers~!

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Study this post's Chinese vocabulary in Skritter (add to your queue):
赖盈慧 - LàiYíngHuì - (a personal name)
盈利 - yínglì - Profit, Gain (wealthy)
智慧 - zhìhuì - Wisdom, Knowledge

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Chinese Version: You can study the words from this post in Skritter.

Skritter新成员-Michelle

大家好，我是Michelle，Skritter 的新成员之一，正在实习市场助理这一职务。

我的全名是赖盈慧，你可以叫我Michelle-我的基督名字。我是马来西亚华裔，在基督教家庭中长大。我的父母为我取名为“赖盈慧”是因为他们希望我将来能够成为有“盈利”，有“智慧”的人，这也是我目前所追求的。

众所周知，马来西亚是个多元种族的国家，因此，我会几种语言（汉语、英语、马来语）和方言（广东话、客家话）。我是上海交通大学的大四学生，主修对外汉语教学方向。这课程在马来西亚是一个全新的领域，这也是我对它感兴趣的原因。中国正迅速的发展中，因此我相信汉语将来会广泛被运用。此外，中华文化拥有两千多年的文化历史也是它的魅力所在。

最后，我知道生命的短暂，必须好好的活出精彩，因此我决定到国外留学。我正在体验一个不同的生活，这样的生活非常的新鲜也有挑战性。参与Skritter 的实习工作对我来说也是一种挑战，所以我希望我们大家能够透过Skritter一起学习，请不要吝啬你们宝贵的意见，我们会尽全力解决所有问题，让Skritter越做越好！

Cacairl, A New Member of Skritter

This post has a Chinese version below. Feel free to test your Chinese by reading the Chinese version first!

Hello—nice to meet you! I’m a new member of the Skritter community, and I am currently interning as a marketing assistant.

My name is 尹东娥 (YǐnDōngÉ), and I am a junior from East China Normal University (华东师范大学 or ECNU), where my major is Public Administration. You can also call me by my English name, Cacairl. Is it an unusual name? It’s my creation—the integration of double “cat” with “girl,” omitting the double “t” and the letter “g.” I selected this name because I believe a successful woman resembles a cat, for a cat can be clever, submissive and vivacious. It may favor some individuals, especially its owner, but a cat never loses its own character. When it needs silence, a cat will conceal itself to think deeply, and no matter what you do to lure it away, it will remain quiet. A charming girl is like a cat, and I want to be that girl!

During my first two years of college, I wanted to be a professor of education because I found this field of study important and interesting. I met a professor in this field who taught me a lot, and I worked as his research assistant first. Then, I attempted to formulate my own research projects, of course with assistance from this professor and other faculty members. Although I devoted much time and effort to these research projects, during the second half of my sophomore year, I realized that I do not enjoy research. At the end of last year, I decided to stop my research efforts because I had read many academic texts and discovered that they are too theoretical for my taste. Furthermore, most studies’ results seem quite similar and their suggestions do not work well. Even more significantly, I do not enjoy the academic atmosphere in China. Becoming a professional academic is no longer my goal. I don’t regret my decision because this was an invaluable experience, and now I know what I truly want to pursue.

Now, I’m a member of the Skritter community, which I find quite useful. To be honest, as a native speaker, I always confuse the tones of certain Chinese characters, and I occasionally write some characters out of order, but Skritter can be helpful in these aspects. In addition, Skritter improves my handwriting, for these characters are 楷书 kǎishū (standard handwriting script in China), if you observe carefully how Skritter writes a Chinese character. The blog is interesting, and we can express our opinions about Skritter freely. In summary, Skritter continually strives to improve its services to consumers in various ways. I hope a Web site about learning English for native Chinese speakers will feature a blog like this as well!

Finally, as a native speaker, I’m pleased to help you to solve your difficulties in learning Chinese！


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Study this post's Chinese vocabulary in Skritter (add to your queue):
尹东娥 - YǐnDōngÉ, a personal name
华东师范大学 - Huádōng Shīfàn Dàxué - East China Normal University
楷书 - kǎishū (standard handwriting script in China)

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Chinese Version: You can study the words from this post in Skritter.

Cacairl, Skritter 的一个新成员

大家好，很高兴认识你们！我是Skritter的一个新成员，作为一名市场助理在这实习。

我叫尹东娥，来自于华东师范大学，今年大三，我的专业是公共事业管理。你也可以叫我的英语名字Cacairl, 是不是没听过呢？这是我的创造，它有“猫”和“女孩”两个英语单词组合而成，省略了“猫”中的“t”字母和“女孩”中的“g”字母，因为我觉得一个成功的女人应该像一只猫咪，猫有时聪明，有时温顺，有时可爱，它们也会对人示好，尤其是它的主人，但它永远不会失去自己的个性。当猫需要安静的时候，它会躲进自己的世界若有深思，无论你怎么诱惑，它都无动于衷。一个有魅力的女孩应该像一只猫，我想成为那样的女孩。

在我大学的前两年，我想成为一个教育领域的教授，那时我觉得教育研究很重要也很有趣，我也认识了一位教育领域的教授，他让我受益匪浅，开始时，我作为他的研究助手，后来，我也自主展开研究，当然我得到了这位教授和其他一些老师的帮助。尽管我为研究付出了很多，但去年下半年，我开始觉得自己并不喜欢研究，去年年末，当我读完很多学术文章后，觉得这些学术文章都很理论，它们的研究结果也很类似，而且它们提出的建议很难解决实际问题，最重要的是，我不喜欢国内的学术氛围，所以我决定不再做科研了，成为一个学术型的教授再也不是我的目标了，对此，我一点都不后悔，因为那些经历教会了我很多东西，而且让我明白了什么才是我最想要的。

现在，我成为Skritter的一员，我觉得Skritter真的很有用。诚实地说，作为母语就是汉语的人，我也经常搞不清楚一些字的声调，但Skritter在这方面可以很好的帮助你。另外，因为Skritter上的汉字都是楷书，如果仔细观察它是怎么写一个汉字的，那它能提高书写水平的。Skritter的博客也很有趣，大家都可以在博客上对Skritter畅所欲言，总之，Skritter通过多种途径来改善服务，我多么希望给我们中国人学英语的网站也有这样的服务呀。

最后，作为汉语为母语的中国人，我很乐意和你一同解决学习中的困难。

(This has been posted by Doug due to blogger being inaccessible in China.)

Marketing Skritter

My job should not exist, at least if you take an economics-inspired, idealized view of the world. In classical economics, lower prices should automatically bring more customers, reducing the field of selling to merely order-taking and the field of marketing to only market research, offering design, and related topics. In reality, our biggest barrier isn't price--rather it's awareness of our product. If you're reading this, you probably already know that Skritter's a great way to learn Chinese characters (and, yes, Japanese characters too), but there are still far, far too many people out there who have never heard of Skritter, and I want to fix that.

I've been working with George, Scott and Nick to see what we can do grow Skritter. We've got a number of projects lined up to understand the market better and raise awareness of Skritter, particularly amongst Chinese teachers. I want the help I got learning Chinese characters from Skritter to be available (and known) by everybody who even thinks of learning Chinese or Japanese.

My own reason for studying Chinese is personal. My wife is originally from Beijing, though we met in Toronto during university. Gatherings of family and friends are much more enjoyable when one can communicate and I felt I didn't understand a big part of her life not knowing much about China and being unable to speak Chinese. So I set my mind to learning Chinese and I've had a lot of fun doing it.

As for why I joined Skritter, there is another story. A nice little cafe opened near my house called Central Avenue Cafe. It was reasonably priced, had good food, a nice staff, and a decent atmosphere. Unfortunately, the cafe didn't market itself well and was soon out of business. The cafe had a coffee focus but didn't open for breakfast and didn't do any promotion even though it was close to, but slightly out of the way of, several apartment buildings. Now, Skritter isn't in any danger of going out of business but I do want to do everything that I can to make sure that it's a long-term success. Frankly, I can't imagine learning Chinese without it anymore.

As for why the Skritter team took me, well, you would need to ask them of course! I have worked at several other start-ups including some from the dot-com era and have lived and worked in four countries on three continents now. My undergraduate education is in Math and Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in Canada though I did a Master of Arts in Diplomacy afterwords in the US.

I'll leave you with three characters that are supposedly about people from Sichuan Province ( 四川省) that a Chinese teacher of mine taught me:

不怕辣 - búpà​là​​ - Not afraid of spicy (food)
辣不怕 - ​làbú​​pà ​ - Spiciness, not afraid (of that)
不辣怕 - bú​làpà​ - Not spicy, afraid (of that)
怕不辣 - pà​bú​là​- Afraid of non-spicy (food)

Mmm, tasty Sichuan food (四川菜)!

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Study this post's Chinese vocabulary in Skritter (add to your queue):
不怕 - Unafraid
辣 - Spicy
四川 - Sichuan Province
菜 - Food/Dish

Heisig Keywords Are In

I've just finished adding, for Chinese and Japanese, support for Heisig keywords built into the practice page. This uses the upcoming custom definitions to replace the standard definitions with the Heisig ones for the applicable characters (1500 so far in Chinese, all 3007 in Japanese). You can easily turn it on and off from the language settings page. Have a try!

The changes don't propagate to the other vocabulary tools, like the list editor and viewer, but if the practice page is where you need the keywords the most, then you should be good to go. I've also included them into the character decompositions which are in alpha testing, but some of the characters with radical forms don't have the Heisig keywords applied to them yet.

The motivation behind Heisig keywords is that when you're learning a ton of characters using Heisig's Remembering the Kanji/Hanzi method and book, you don't want a lot of extra meanings slowing you down. So you learn just one keyword per character first (usually corresponding to its primary meaning). Later, you learn all the rest of the ways the characters can be used in context in words.

Enjoy!

Happy Birthday Skritter

Yesterday, one year ago a little website launched. The three cofounders had been working on the site for almost a year prior to the launch. The site's name was Skritter and it was the brainchild of one Nick Winter, and the adopted child of George Saines and Scott Erickson. Through a lot of work and attention to what you (our users) have told us, we've made this last year very productive.

On this occasion, we would like to invite you to take a moment and look back at how far things have come since last year. Here is our landing page on May 12th 2009:



You'll notice that we were still using our old demo video (although obviously you can't see it in motion in the screencap), the blog leader was visible, and so were the testimonials. That has been shuffled and reshuffled since then. Perhaps the biggest change we've made in the interim is shortening our landing page so that it now fits in 768 pixels.

Here's what the practice page looked like back then:



Lots has changed since then: you'll notice the flash is on the right side of the screen, there are 6 buttons (rather than the current 5), the tone buttons hadn't been redesigned, there were no grading buttons, the magnifying glass for dictionary lookup hadn't been built, information about the scheduling was in cryptic format, no active lists/settings dialogue, no manual add button, and the strictness button was still languishing beneath the flash. There was no hidden pinyin support, reading practice, definition practice, tone colors, or stroke order animations, to name a few of the features developed over the last year.

On the eave of yet another big update (check out this month's newsletter on the 15th for more info), it is nostalgic to look back and see what used to be. And so with a little tear in our eye, we wish Skritter a happy first birthday and extend a thank you to everyone that has so generously helped us reach this milestone. We have awesome users and there's no way we could have built this site without your help!

Chinese people's English names 中国人的英文名字 (Zhōngguórén de Yīngwén míngzi)

Earlier this week I saw this video (below) from Sexy Beijing about the English names that Chinese people choose. During my time in China I encountered my fair share of Chinese people with English names that seemed a bit strange. In my first year as an English teacher at 山西农业大学 (Shānxī Nóngyè Dàxúe, Shanxi Agricultural University) I didn't want to be imperialistic and force English names on my students so I decided instead to let them pick whether they wanted to use their Chinese name, choose their own English name, or have me help them choose an English name. Almost all of my students (about 135 out of 140) either already had their own English name, chose their own English name, or wanted me to help them choose a name. For the students who wanted me to help them choose an English name I asked them a few questions: Do you want an English name that sounds similar to your Chinese name? Do you want a common name or a more unusual name? Then I gave them my first pick and a few other secondary options.
The majority of students who wanted help picking an English name wanted names that were common and sounded similar to their Chinese names. It was a challenge on my part to find the right names to fit the criteria. This year I helped three of my Chinese students choose English names. For 林舒燃 (Lín Shūrán) I settled on "Susan Lin", for 林必成 (Lín Bìchéng) I chose "Brian Lin", and for 林晨丽 (Lín Chénlì) I chose "Jenny Lin". I opted to keep their 姓 (xìng, family name) spelled out in pinyin and base their English first name off of the sounds of their Chinese 名 (míng, first name).

The photos below are of some of my graduate students from Shanxi Agricultural University proudly showing off their new English names. If you click to get a closer look, you'll see that the namecards read: (top) Ryne, Sunny, Sean, Jarry, (middle) Kobe, Paul, Rain Man, (bottom) Swallow, Lily, Lucifer, Vivid.
I've found that the English names Chinese people tend to choose generally fall into these several categories (all of the examples are from students I met in China):

1. Common names (Paul, Lily, Susan, Jon)
2. Animal/plant names (Swallow, Fly, Ghost, Bird, Lucifer)
4. Food names (Cherry, Apple)
5. Object/adjective names (Neat, Sunny, Power, King, Vivid, Water, Sea, Summer)
6. Number names (Six, Seven)
7. English names with creative spellings (Jarry, Blandon)
8. Superstar English names (Kobe, Dick Cheney, Benz, Zelda, Link)
9. Extra creative names (Silver Fox, Judy Chicago, Mou, Rain Man)

I sat down and had a talk with Jarry and Blandon pointing out that they were not using the most common spelling or pronunciation for their English names. They both stuck with their names because they wanted to be different from the norm and they thought the names sounded better after the change in spelling (Just like Samanfar in the Sexy Beijing video).

If you look at the user comments on youtube about the sexy beijing video, you'll see that it caused a considerable amount of controversy. Some people said that they thought 苏菲 was being really demeaning and possibly even verging on racist by poking fun at the unusual English names. Personally I think that a lot of Chinese people choose their English names fully aware that the name is a little out of the ordinary. I don't see a problem with that. If a Chinese person with a strange English name should happen to work abroad or come into frequent contact with English speaking 老外 (lǎowài, foreigners), they could always change their English name later on. Back in High School I chose to be named "Luigi" in Italian class (a shout out to Luigi of Super Mario Brother's fame). I wasn't planning to use Luigi in any other context outside of Italian class, and it was fun during that time. I was given my first Chinese name, 芮杰明 (Ruì Jiémíng) by my Chinese professor at Oberlin College, but later decided to change my 姓 after I found out that 芮 is not very common, plus the fact that I couldn't pronounce Ruì very well during my first year of studying Chinese.

Have you met any Chinese people with unusual English names? Am I leaving out any categories of English names? Have you taken a Chinese name?

Let me leave you with two anectodes:

On my way to class I see my student "Ghost" zooming by on his bike, so I yell out, "Hi Ghost! What's up?". He yells back "Hey Ben, not much!"

A fellow teacher had a student named "Dead Soul", who often skipped class. Imagine taking attendance every day at the beginning of class:
"Jim" ... "Here!"
"Susan" ... "Here!"
"Dead Soul" .... (no response) ...
"Dead Soul?" ... (uncomfortable silence)
"Jerry" ... "Here!"

Some Interesting Results from the User Survey

Several weeks ago we asked people to take a Skritter user survey. In it, we asked all sorts of questions about how you use Skritter, what you want out of similar educational services, what news outlets you pay attention to, what you thought needed improving. The survey was a pretty big success! We had banked on only a few dozen people answering it, but at this time 169 of you filled it out, giving us 4225 answers to the survey's 25 questions. For those of you that filled it out, thank you very much, we really appreciate you taking the time to help us make the site better.

And without further ado, we'd like to share 3 interesting insights we gained from the survey:

Getting Started Isn't as Hard as We Thought
For a long time, we've been concentrating hard on making it easier to start using Skritter. For those of you who have been around the site for a while (all 50% of you), you might remember how different things used to be. For instance, do you remember when we would drop you right on the practice page after logging in? Or perhaps when getting to the different vocabulary sources involved hovering over a non-clickable-looking menu and following a drop down to "lists" from which point you still had to find different vocabulary sources?

Well, apparently we have been making good progress on this front because 93.3% of you said that it was either "Sorta Easy" (31.5%) or "Very Easy" (61.8%) to get started using the site.


We can't help but think that perhaps your experiences to date may have colored those glowing reviews of our ease of use since we still see so many glaring problems, but it certainly feels good to know that we're making progress!

You Guys Study Like Crazy
We have always encouraged people to study for short regular intervals to maximize character retention, but honestly, we didn't think so many people were actually doing it. Results from the survey indicated that 82.9% of you are either practicing 3-7 (57.1%) or 7+ (25.8%) times a week.


That kind of regularity is hugely important to learning efficacy and we applaud everyone that's being so diligent. To give you a point of reference, here at SkritterHQ Nick studies every day for exactly 20 minutes, I study about 5 days a week for 10 minutes a day, and Scott tries but falls squarely into the 1-3 times a week category.

Supporting Different Curricula is Important to You
We're probably preaching to the choir, but we strongly believe that educational tools should support different modes of study across different bodies of content. That's why we support so many lists, allow you to create your own, and have tie-ins to other sites (like ChinesePod).

The results pointed to the fact that you like the fact that Skritter is an open, platform agnostic tool. Of the people that answered the survey, only 8% of you thought supporting different curricula was unimportant. We have a short list of textbooks you guys want updated and the survey results underscore the importance of our approach to vocabulary.

Note on Stats
We do realize that our stats aren't terribly scientifically correct. We're pulling data from a self-selected group of learners out of an already small group of Chinese and Japanese language enthusiasts who like learning on the web.

In a perfect world, we'd have polled 5x as many learners at several institutions, some students that aren't affiliated with institutions, administered an actual Likert scale instead of our modded 3-choice version, removed the anchoring effects of some of the multiple choice answers in favor of free responses, given the survey in paper as well as online form, randomly shuffled the questions to remove any leading effects created by question sequences, and had a professional statistician look over the questions to ensure that we were asking questions in the least biased way.

So, the results certainly aren't authoritative, but they have been helpful for their intended purpose: giving us a little help figuring out what you say you want, what you say you don't want, and how we can better attract people to the site.

We want to thank everyone that took the time to fill out the survey. We really appreciate how involved everyone has been and we look forward to using the result to better the site and your user experience.

See Your Squigs, Audio Shortcut

For kicks, I've enabled a new experimental mode whereby you can see your own squigs after you finish writing a character. Press Ctrl+Alt+D to enable this new mode, then write some characters and check out just what you actually put in there. Try it out!

(Scott points out to me that this shortcut happens to minimize all your windows on some Linux window managers, so if we keep this around, I'll probably change the shortcut to something else.)

For Chinese, I've also added a keyboard shortcut to hear the audio for the current prompt. Just press 'A'. Faster than clicking the speaker icon, and if you're trying to train your hearing, you can combine this with hidden pinyin mode to hear the sound before you've seen the pinyin.

We've recently begun alpha testing the decomps, mnemonics, custom definitions, and starred words. If you want to help test, let me know and I'll activate the new stuff for you!

There's some App Engine downtime today at 4PM EDT (GMT-4): you won't be able to practice, save any changes, or post to the forum for up to one hour. Thanks for your patience.

Zhongwen Chrome extension: now with Skritter support

If you use Google Chrome and study Chinese, then you should install the Zhongwen Chrome extension made by Skritterer shillec. It's a popup translator for Chrome, is very handy, and now lets you simply press 'S' to add any Chinese word to your Skritter queue! This is even better than combining Firefox's Perapera-kun and the add-to-Skritter bookmarklet (which you should still use if you're on Firefox). Also remember that if you're looking up words on MDBG, you can add them to your Skritter queue by clicking the "S" icon in each word's row.

shillec has been great about working in user feedback from our forums, so you can let him know what you think in this thread. Thanks, shillec!

Chinese tongue twisters and palindromes 汉语绕口令和回文 hànyǔ ràokǒulìng hé huíwén

Have you learned any Chinese tongue twisters or palindromes? Getting a few of these under your belt can help improve your Chinese, not to mention that they also make great party tricks.

This tongue twister is the one that I heard most often during my time in China: 吃葡萄不吐葡萄皮，不吃葡萄倒吐葡萄皮, (chī pútao bú tù pútao pí, bù chī pútao dào tù pútao pí). This translates literally to “eat grapes (but) don’t spit out grape skins, don’t eat grapes (and) spit out grape skins”.

Another good one to check out is this one full of shí and shì sounds: 四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十；谁把十四说“十适”，就打他十四；谁把四十说“适十”，就打他四十 (sì shì sì, shí shì shí, shísì shì shísì, sìshí shì sìshí; shéi bǎ shísì shuō "shíshì", jiù dǎ tā shísì, shéi bǎ sìshí shuō 'shìshí', jiù dǎ tā sìshí). This translates literally to “four is four, ten is ten, fourteen is fourteen, fourty is fourty; whoever calls fourteen “shíshì” (you should) hit fourteen (times), whoever calls fourty “shìshí” (you should) hit fourty (times). I heard 大山 (arguably the most famous foreigner in China) recite this one or a modified version of this one once at blinding speed in a youtube video (if I remember right I think it was during the CCTV 春节联欢晚会 (chūnjié liánhuān wǎnhuì, Spring Festival Party tv program). If anyone has seen that video please post a link to it below in the comments.

The band S.H.E. from 台湾 (Táiwān, Taiwan) has a song with a couple of up-tempo rap style tongue twisters. The lyrics and music video are at the end of this post for you all to check out. Also for those of you into Chinese language podcasts, check out this one from Popup Chinese, where they recite some impressive tongue twisters. Listen at 5:50 to hear the king of Chinese tongue twisters as far as I'm concerned. It is so fast that it sounds to me almost like an audio track of someone speaking a weird dialect of Chinese played back at 4X.

回文 (huíwén, palindromes) are relatively easy to form in Chinese compared to in English. In English palindromes the spelling of each word is important and must be symmetrical. For example: “Was it a cat I saw?”, “A man, a plan, a canal - Panama!”, and “No "x" in "Mr. R. M.Nixon"?” It's easier to create palindromes in Chinese because 汉字 (hànzì, Chinese characters) are word-units so there is no need to worry about symmetrical spellings like in alphabet based languages. Chinese 回文 are not usually symmetrical but instead can be read in either direction for two different meanings. This is particularly interesting considering that Chinese is sometimes written from right to left, especially on old placards hanging above doors at temples and other old buildings. There is a lot of potential for confusion on the part of the unseasoned Chinese student who might not know which direction the sign is meant to be read. Here are two Chinese palindromes for you to chew on: (thanks to the Chinesehour blog)

“我爱妈妈，妈妈爱我” (wǒ ài māmā, “I love mother, māmā ài wǒ, mother loves me”)

“上海自来水来自海上” (shànghǎi zì lái shuǐ - láizì hǎi shàng, “Shanghai’s tap water comes from the sea”)

Yellowbridge has a great list of a bunch of other palindromes with english translations here. These were my favorites:

人过大佛寺 (R to L: rén guò dà fó sì, A man walks past Big Buddha Temple, L to R: sì fó dà guò rén, The temple's Buddha is bigger than a man)

僧游云隐寺 (R to L: sēng yóu yún yǐn sì, Monk travels to Cloud Hiding Temple, L to R: sì yǐn yún yóu sēng, The temple hides the clouds and traveling monks)

What other Chinese tongue twisters have you encountered? Do you know of any other Chinese music that uses awesome tongue twisters? Have you seen any palindrome signs or posters in China that make sense both ways?




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中国话 (Zhōngguóhuà, Chinese Language)

扁担宽 板凳长
扁担想绑在板凳上
扁担宽 板凳长
扁担想绑在板凳上

伦敦玛莉莲 买了件旗袍送妈妈
莫斯科的夫司基 爱上牛肉面疙瘩
各种颜色的皮肤 各种颜色的头发
嘴里念的说的开始流行中国话
多少年我们苦练英文发音和文法
这几年换他们卷着舌头学平上去入的变化
平平仄仄平平仄 (仄仄平平仄仄平)
好聪明的中国人 好优美的中国话

扁担宽 板凳长
扁担想绑在板凳上
板凳不让扁担绑在板凳上
扁担偏要绑在板凳上
板凳偏偏不让扁担绑在那板凳上
到底扁担宽还是板凳长
哥哥弟弟坡前坐
坡上卧着一只鹅
坡下流着一条河
哥哥说 宽宽的河
弟弟说 白白的鹅
鹅要过河 河要渡鹅
不知是那鹅过河
还是河渡鹅
全世界都在学中国话 孔夫子的话 越来越国际化
全世界都在讲中国话 我们说的话 让世界都认真听话

纽约苏珊娜 开了间禅风Lounge Bar
柏林来的沃夫冈 拿胡琴配着电吉他
各种颜色的皮肤 各种颜色的头发
嘴里念的说的开始流行中国话
多少年我们苦练英文发音和文法
这几年换他们卷着舌头学平上去入的变化
平平仄仄平平仄 (仄仄平平仄仄平)
好聪明的中国人 好优美的中国话
有个小孩叫小杜
上街打醋又买布
买了布 打了醋
回头看见鹰抓兔
放下布 搁下醋
上前去追鹰和兔
飞了鹰 跑了兔
洒了醋 湿了布
嘴说腿 腿说嘴
嘴说腿 爱跑腿
腿说嘴 爱卖嘴
光动嘴 不动腿
光动腿 不动嘴
不如不长腿和嘴
到底是那嘴说腿 还是腿说嘴
全世界都在学中国话 孔夫子的话 越来越国际化
全世界都在讲中国话 我们说的话 让世界都认真听话
全世界都在学中国话 孔夫子的话 越来越国际化
全世界都在讲中国话 我们说的话 让世界都认真听话
全世界都在学中国话 孔夫子的话 越来越国际化
全世界都在讲中国话 我们说的话 让世界都认真听话