The Chinese Ice Phobia




Popup Chinese show

Summary: Any chance you remember that scene from Goldfinger where James Bond is trussed up on the cutting board, and he turns to the villain who then says something about expecting Bond to die in the slowest and most painful way possible? Well... if Goldfinger were a Chinese film we could replace his laser with a glass of iced water and show our villain laughing maniacally from the certain knowledge that Bond's mere proximity to the glass would usher in a fate at least as bad as and quite possibly much worse than death. What we really mean to say is this: Echo and Brendan are in our studio today, and they both spend a non-trivial amount of time ignoring our dialogue in order to argue about the relative merits of Chinese medical superstitions involving food temperature. That may or may not be your thing, but if you're learning Chinese we think you'll find this lesson useful if only because it features an incredibly common sentence pattern you can use whenever you want to say "whenever". This is the 一/就 pattern and it's one of the most useful sentence structures to know in Chinese. So listen up and be sure to let us know what you think of the show in the discussion section below.