I was reading through Taiwan’s Yahoo! News this morning and came across a very short article, but it’s one I think has a lot of fun and useful vocab in it:
今起變天 越晚越冷
更新日期:
2011/04/11 02:38陳至中/台北報導中國時報【陳至中/台北報導】
週末假期全台天氣大好,短袖短褲紛出籠,但中央氣象局表示,今天「鬱悶星期一」受到東北風影響,溫度下降像溜滑梯,越晚越寒冷。北部夜間低溫甚至可達攝氏十五度,民眾白天出門記得多帶一件保暖外套,以免受寒!
今天起又有一波東北風南下,全台溫度白天起就會直線下滑,北部早上可能有二十五度,夜間只剩十五度。且北部、東北部、東部迎風面都有短暫雨,出門記得帶雨具。
Source: http://tw.news.yahoo.com/article/url/d/a/110411/4/2pldi.html
I hope Chinese Hacks doesn’t mine that I borrow their format for a minute here, but I promise it’s just this once and only because it’s such a smart format!
The phrase that really caught my attention in this article (and the reason for this post) was this:
溫度下降像溜滑梯
The temperature is dropping like sliding down a slide.溫度
ㄨㄣㄉㄨˋ
temperature下降
ㄒㄧㄚˋㄐㄧㄤˋ
to decline / to drop像
ㄒㄧㄤˋ
to resemble溜
ㄌㄧㄡ
to slide滑梯
ㄏㄨㄚˊㄊㄧ
slide
I think that’s just a fun little phrase to learn, but it packs a lot of interesting vocab and grammar. Sure, it’s (theoretically) silly, but we now have a fun way to describe falling temperatures to friends! We can also do metaphors!
[what it is] 像 [what it is like] (一樣)
e.g. 今天下雨像颱風(一樣)
It’s raining like a typhoon today! (In Taiwan, this is not uncommon)
There’s plenty of other things in there, like referring to Monday’s as “depressing” [鬱悶星期一] (Someone’s having a case of the Monday’s!), and good advice on bringing out your “rain gear” [出門記得帶雨具].