This weekend I started attempting to transcribe the text that Chandler sent me. It’s pretty difficult. I ran into a snag pretty early on when I realized that he had combined two characters into one utterance: instead of pronouncing 让我们 as rang4 wo3men he said something like rao4men and confused me. I deduced from normal sentence order rules that a subject had to go in that spot, and 我们 was the only likely word, and I had a feeling that 让 was used, but I didn’t realize until tonight that he had combined them together. I guess that happens a lot in Chinese, just like in English, and it’s something that I’ll have to look out for in the future.
Tonight I also heard the Chinese Olympic song featuring Coca Cola （可口可乐）. For a song that ties national pride together with a soft drink, it was actually pretty good. The chorus goes like this:
好呀好呀中国人红起来，好呀好呀畅爽呀。 I’m not sure how well 红起来 translates because literally it means “Are standing up red,” but I think it’s an expression of national pride. Roughly translated because my skills are nowhere near adequate, it means “Yes! Yes! Chinese standing up in red. Yes! Yes! Smooth and refreshing.”
The song has a really great melody and I think really captures the excitement in China about the Olympics.
This is a link to it:
