Example Usage

有一天你會得到夢寐以求的工作 （有一天你会得到梦寐以求的工作）
yǒu yī tiān nǐ huì dédào mèngmèiyǐqiú de gōngzuò
One day you’ll find your dream job

他真是我梦寐以求的（他真是我梦寐以求的）
tā zhēn shì wǒ mèngmèiyǐqiú de
He’s my dream come true

Related posts:

1. Wind Wind Rain Rain – No-nonsense Chinese Idioms After a short hiatus the idioms series is back, and with an simple one to ease you back in. If...
2. Chinese Translation: HTC Desire Advertisement Here’s a recent advertisement from Taiwan for HTC’s Desire mobile phone. Watch the advert and see how much you can...
3. To be burned out – No-nonsense Chinese idioms If you’ve been paying attention over the last few weeks you would have seen the ongoing series of posts about...

Here you can see the word in use at a mobile phone accessories stand in Taiwan:

The sign reads 瑞驛（瑞驿 ruì yì）which is the name of the shop, followed by 手機（手机 shǒu jī ）”mobile phone”, and then lastly 配件（pèi jiàn）”accessories”.

Here it is again in use on the Apple website:

Just like the English “accessories”, 配件 can be used for all sorts of things, such as 電腦配件（电脑配件 diànnǎo pèijiàn）”computer accessories”, 衣服配件（yīfú pèijiàn） “clothing accessories”, 汽車配件（汽车配件 qìchē pèijiàn）”car accessories”, so it’s clearly a very useful word.

Related posts:

1. Android ROM Flashing Keywords in Chinese Today we’re going to be looking at Chinese keywords and vocabulary relating to installing a new custom operating system on...
2. Pleco Chinese Dictionary for Android Pre-Release Version Available The availability of Chinese dictionaries is often a deciding factor when buying a new mobile phone, which should make the...
3. Chinese Language Ads: Windows Phone When I originally picked up this marketing material I thought it was for the new Windows Phone 7, although on...

Worth noting is that the woman being harassed is saying “ㄟ” which is the Zhuyin for the Pinyin “ei”, this is just a phonetic and she’s either saying “Hey!” in anger, or “ehhh!” in surprise. Check out our Pinyin/Zhuyin Cheatsheet for more comparison between these phonetic alphabets.

There’s a lot of useful related words that we can learn from this poster. Firstly, the poster reads:

擊退性騷擾（击退性骚扰）
jítuì* xìngsāorǎo
Fight Sexual Harassment

*note: 擊（击）is first tone in China （jī）, and second tone in Taiwan （jí）.

擊退（击退 jítuì） means to “fight off” or to “repel”. 擊（击 jí） is from 攻擊（攻击 gōng jí）to “attack”, and 退 means to move backwards and is also used in the word 退步（tuì bù）which means to “regress” or “do worse than before” and might be used as so:

我上次回英國時我中文退步很多（我上次回英国时我中文退步很多）
wǒ shàngcì huí yīngguó shí wǒ zhōngwén tuìbù hěnduō
The last time I went back to the UK my Chinese regressed a lot.

The 性 in 性騷擾（性骚扰 xìngsāorǎo）here means “sex” or “gender”, and 騷擾（骚扰）means to “harass”. 騷（骚 sāo）is an extremely useful word to learn, it means “trouble” or “disturbance” and when used in the word 騷動（骚动 sāo dòng） can be used to describe societal instability, or more specifically, a riot.

Related posts:

1. Hanping Pro 2.4.0 Chinese Dictionary Released – Now with Zhuyin! First Pleco adds optical character recognition to their iPhone app, then Hanping adds Zhuyin to their Android app – Christmas...
2. Chinese Language H1N1 Poster: Please do as I do! Just when you thought the H1N1 scare was over and we could back to our normal lives, this poster was...
3. An Interview with the creators of Mandarin Poster When we met with the people behind Mandarin Poster last year we really liked the idea they had for creating...

The idea is behind the category is to quickly illustrate how a word is Mandarin is used. No long explanations, and most posts will be an image and a definition, possibly an example setence at most. This way you can dip in quickly, learn a new word, and be on your way! Anyway, on with the first post…

The following two images show the Mandarin Chinese ord for “organic” in use on shop signs:

健康有機市場（健康有机市场）
jiànkāng yǒujī shìchǎng
Healthy Organic Market

天然有機食品（天然有机食品）
tiānrán yǒujī shípǐn
Natural Organic Food

Related posts:

1. Prohibited – Essential Chinese Vocabulary Probably one of the more important words if you are going to be travelling around China or Taiwan is the...
2. DVR your way to better Chinese If you planning on studying Chinese in China or Taiwan then watching TV while you are there is essential if...
3. Beware, newspaper thief! As a brief follow-up to our post the other day about Chinese signs, specifically the usage of “者” and “中”,...

Today’s text to speech (TTS) offering is from HC High Tech, and while their website is very basic, the Chinese text to speech engine that they provide is actually very good. No instructions are required to use it, just paste your text into the textarea and click submit.

Web design aside (it’s not the best looking of sites) there are a couple of things that make this web based text to speech interesting. The first is that the pronunciation is very good for a web based service, the speech is very clear and understandable, especially if you follow along with the text. The second thing that stood out is the pronunciation of numbers. For instance, in the random text I tested from a recent Yahoo news article, “3000元” was pronounced “三千元” and “88.9%” pronounced “百分之八十八點久”, instead of the “三零零零元” and “八八 久” that you might expect.

There’s not much more that can be said, other than that this is a great free service and we hope you find a good use for it in your repertoire of Chinese learning tools. If you know of any more tools like this you know what to do!

Visit HC High Tech.

Related posts:

1. Chinese Text to Speech in Your Browser Here’s a quick and simple way to hear the pronunciation of Chinese words – using the recently added Chinese text-to-speech...
2. Free Chinese Text to Speech Firefox Plugin Reading and comprehension is an important part of the language learning process, but something that shouldn’t be overlooked is listening...
3. Tools Roundup for Reading Chinese Online Reading Chinese online is a great way to practice your reading and comprehension, but nothing is more daunting than arriving...

Hanzi Grids, created by Imron, an admin on Chinese-Forums.com, does one thing and does it well – allows you to generate highly custom printable PDFs for Chinese handwriting practice. After registering for a free account, you’ll be presented with the screen below:

The website is extremely intuitive and makes use of slider controls to finely tune to the paper to your needs. The grid, text and guides can all be adjusted – there are too many controls to list out here, but trust me you can adjust every aspect of your paper.

Hanzi Grids also supports both Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters (as seen in the above image), and lets you adjust the orientation of the characters and paper itself. The website also caters to both North American and international audiences by offering both A4 and US Letter paper sizes. After you’ve finished adjusting the settings just hit the Generate PDF button to download your file. The result is a highly customised set of practice paper to suit even the fussiest of students, or teachers.

Visit Hanzi Grids to get started making your own Chinese practice paper. You can also follow @HanziGrids on Twitter, or join in with the conversation about Hanzi Grids on Chinese-Forums.com.

Related posts:

1. Practice Chinese with the best teachers There are absolutely hundreds of blogs and websites around for learning Chinese which makes it difficult to find the best...
2. Free Chinese Writer iPhone App Popup Chinese, a website offering podcasts and various tools for learning Chinese (look for a full review in the future)...
3. Remembering the Hanzi Book 1 – Review Greetings travellers, Today I thought I’d do a write-up of James Heisig and Timothy Richardson’s “Remembering the Hanzi”. In the...

The free download is available either by searching in Android Market on your phone, visiting the Android market online and clicking the Install button, or by going to pleco.com/getandroid from your phone’s browser. Not only can you get Pleco right now, but if you download it before the 30th of June 2012 you’ll also get the Handwriting Recogniser plugin, which is usually $14.95, for free.

Major features include:

• OCR
• Great Dictionaries
• Handwriting input
• Flashcard System
• Powerful Search
• Cross-referencing
• Audio Pronunciation
• Stroke Order Diagrams
• Document Reader
• Taiwan- and Mainland-friendly

From what I can see, it comes with all the great features that you’ve seen on the iPhone version – including the Optical Character Recogniser (OCR) that was released for iPhone back in 2010.

We’ll have a more in-depth review after we’ve had time to play, but in the meantime what are you waiting for?

Related posts:

1. Pleco Chinese Dictionary for Android Pre-Release Version Available The availability of Chinese dictionaries is often a deciding factor when buying a new mobile phone, which should make the...
2. Instant Chinese translation with HuayuNavi for Android and iPhone At this year’s IT Month Show in  Taiwan, a company called Funwish is asking travellers to Chinese speaking countries to...
3. Pleco 2.2 drops, includes the new Optical Character Recogniser Pleco has finally updated their iPhone dictionary to version 2.2.0 which includes the much anticipated Optical Character Recognition functionality that...

The website is a comprehensive guide to Chinese grammar, all organised by difficulty level, and complete with a learner’s FAQ and useful tools page. It even integrates with the most popular textbooks, so you won’t have to dig your textbook out to check a grammar point.

One thing to note is that while the site is called a Wiki, you can’t sign up immediately and begin editing and adding to it, though John tells me that people interested in getting involved will be able to. Just use the information on the contact page to find out more.

Also, the website is strictly in Simplified Chinese, which is unforunate, though here’s where New Tong Wen Tang comes in handy!

What are you waiting for? Share the word with your other Chinese learning geek friends… or use it as your secret weapon to win arguments in the pub over the use of 著 or 把!

Related posts:

1. Prohibited – Essential Chinese Vocabulary Probably one of the more important words if you are going to be travelling around China or Taiwan is the...
2. What Up, Kaoshiung? explores Taiwanese culture A few weeks ago we posted about a new video series that is being produced in Kaohsiung, Taiwan and covering...
3. Welcome to Chinese Hacks! Thanks for taking the time to check out Chinese Hacks. Our aim is to bring you tips, tricks, software, websites...

Here’s what the developers had to say:

Yes its only Chinese for now, and some features are missing, but let’s not dwell on whats missing. The main functionality is there and the new themes as well. Features will be added one by one until it is on par with the Firefox version. Install now and you will receive all those updates automatically as they are added.

What are you waiting for? Download PeraPera for Google Chrome and start reading Chinese online!

Related posts:

1. Chinese Dictionary for PeraPeraKun updated If you’re a user of the amazing pop-up Chinese dictionary addon for Firefox, PeraPeraKun, then you’ll be happy to know...
2. Chinese Pop-Up Translations With Perapera-Kun for Firefox It doesn’t matter how long you have been learning Chinese for, when browsing Chinese websites or reading Chinese news online,...
3. Chinese popup translations in Google Chrome It seems that Google Chrome is really growing in popularity lately – and can you blame people? It really is...

While the literal translation of this saying is to “to expose a horse’s leg”, the 馬（马 mǎ）used in this saying doesn’t actually have anything to do with horses. There’s an interesting story that accompanies this saying and although it differs very slightly from source to source, the main points are the same – Due to the wife (surnamed 马, so that’s where the ‘horse’ comes from) of Ming dynasty emperor Hongwu having unsightly legs, she was reluctant to show them off and had extra long dresses made to cover them up and keep them hidden. Then one day while she was out in the city a big gust of wind blew her dress up exposing her legs – and so the saying goes… to expose a 马 leg came to mean to accidentally expose a secret.

Now that we know the meaning, and the back story, let’s see some usage examples.

note: After some good discussion on Google+ over the uses of 漏 and 露 together with the fact that 露出馬腳 is a 成語, I’ve changed the definition above from 漏了馬腳 to 露出馬腳, though the meanings still remain exactly the same.

Obviously there’s the basic:

你漏了馬腳！（nǐ lòu le mǎ jiǎo）
You’ve let the cat out of the bag!

You’ll also see this saying quite often in news stories, usually relating to business, since trade-secrets or product release information is often accidentally released:

謠言再起！徵人訊息漏馬腳，8月推出新iPhone? （谣言再起！徵人讯息漏马脚，8月推出新iPhone?）
yáoyán zàiqǐ! zhēngrén xùnxí lòumǎjiǎo, 8 yuè tuīchū xīn iPhone?
More Rumours! Job ad lets the cat out of the bag, new iphone in August?

Here’s a fun example from some cheating exam students:

考生考試頻喝水漏馬腳，考官發現瓶中藏答案 （考生考试频喝水漏马脚，考官发现瓶中藏答案）
kǎoshēng kǎoshì pín hē shuǐ lòumǎjiǎo kǎoguān fāxiàn píng zhōng cáng dáàn
The exam students repeatedly drinking water gave them away, the examiner discovered the answers were hidden inside the bottles

Now go and have some fun using this phrase and if you have any secrets to tell use the comments to 漏馬腳！

Commenter Notes

#1
A commenter on Google+, 成默予, just pointed out that another common way to say this phrase is 露出馬腳（露出马脚 lòu chū mǎ jiǎo）. This is a very interesting point, since 露 and 漏 in this sense （洩露 and 洩漏） are essentially synonyms. It could be a regional thing with China using 漏 and Taiwan using 露 – but either way this is a lucky case as not only are the words synonyms, but they have exactly the same pronunciation. So no matter which you favour （露 or 漏） it won’t make any difference when speaking

I’d love to hear more input from native speakers from difference parts of the Mandarin speaking world!

#2
Jacob also points out below that 露出馬腳 is an idiom, while 漏馬腳 is just a saying, which explains why it can be modified.

Related posts:

1. The Riddles of the Hobbit – Part Three Good news everyone, it’s riddle time! First off, the Chinese and Pinyin versions, scroll down for the analysis: Traditional 三十匹白馬站在紅色山丘上...
2. Why ‘fried squid’ in Chinese means to be fired from a job This is a really fun Chinese saying that also has an interesting back story to go with it. Read on...
3. The Riddles of The Hobbit – Part One So a good few months ago now I decided to buy the Chinese version of The Hobbit (哈比人歷險記) in an almost...