Chinese Rhymes

In a previous blog

http://tainanchineseclass.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-is-chinese-hard.html

I wrote that Chinese has lots of homonyms, these are words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings. Sometimes the 4 tones can distinguish which word is meant, but a lot times it is from context that the word is known.
For students of Chinese, like me, this is always a problem, the context is never clear and thinking I heard one word when it was another can cause problems.

But one advantage of having so many homonyms is that it is easy to make up rhymes. Here is a short one:

人 在 天堂
錢 在 銀行









It would be pronounced like:

rén  zài tiāntáng
qián zài yínháng

The final sound and tone of each line is the same. And its meaning would be:

the people are in Heaven
their money is in the bank

It is just the old English adage that "You can take it with you." (It should be the goal of everyone to die with just one cent, the problem is that we don't know when we will die!)

While at the Liao Ning Night Market, we ate at a shop whose walls were covered with these rhymes.

Here's one that I translated:


一杯兩杯不是酒
三杯四杯嗽嗽口
五杯六杯露一手
七杯八杯貼牆走
九杯十杯牆走我不走

The pronunciation would be:

yī    bēi liǎng bēi bú shì jiǔ
sān bēi sì       bēi sòu sòu kǒu
wǔ  bēi liù     bēi lòu yī shǒu
qī    bēi bā     bēi tiē qiáng zǒu
jiǔ   bēi shí    bēi qiáng zǒu wǒ bù zǒu
As you can see the final sound of each line is the same sound and even the same tone. The five lines are about drinking wine, translated we have:

1 and 2 cups is not really wine
3 and 4 cups is just a mouthful
5 and 6 cups you're just showing off
7 and 8 cups you need to stick to the wall
9 and 10 cups the wall is moving but you are not.

There were other rhymes but I haven't translated them, most of them are of a sexual nature.