Important Basic Food Items?

[NickyMS]

Hi everyone! I've been reading the forums for a bit and just signed up to post this. I'm trying to make a video game of sorts with a focus on teaching Chinese food vocabulary and I was wondering what the most basic, everyday words are. I was thinking of having a category of dishes (ex. rice, bread, fish), drinks (ex. coffee, water, milk), and fruits (ex. bananas, apples, peaches). Any feedback or insight would be fantastic. Thanks so much!

[Shelley]

Hello and welcome,

 

What is your level of Chinese?

 

What is your "video game of sorts"  going to be? Are you aiming at kids or adults?

 

This is the sort of thing you could find in a dictionary, have you got an English/Chinese dictionary? If you have a smart phone or tablet I would recommend Pleco. Have a look here  https://www.pleco.com/

 

I would be careful using Google translate, its ok but not always 100% right.

[km-xuesheng]

Hi NickyMS, you may find these useful.  

 

http://www.digitaldialects.com/Chinese/Fruit.htm

 

http://www.memrise.com/course/318022/western-foods-and-drinks-in-chinese/

 

If I find anything else, I will post it.

 

Good luck for your game.

[NickyMS]

Thanks you two for those resources! To be a little more clear, I meant, what food items do you think a beginner would need to know? Like, I know some lists of foods, but which ones do you actually encounter the most? Like anecdotally? Thanks

[hedwards]

Are you talking about menu items or ingredients? Obviously a beginner should know the meats, probably a few vegetables, rice, noodles and a few drinks. But, I found that most of the time I'd just point to something on the menu with a meat or ingredient that I recognized and didn't worry too much about what I'd get.

 

I personally focused on my meats and drinks first and when I could order those properly started adding other things. But, I've got an adventurous palette and no food allergies so if I wouldn't know if I got the "wrong" food until I ordered it and didn't like it. In practice though most Chinese foods are worth trying.

 

After the basic ingredients, I'd probably focus on the cooking method, braised, fried, grilled and such.

 

OTOH, beginners need to know any ingredient they're allergic to especially mushrooms. My roommate had a bad reaction whenever he would eat fungi and it was a real challenge communicating that it wasn't just one type of mushroom it was more or less all of them.

 

But, that's just me, I recommend doing it like that because you start with some success and build more success until you have things more or less mastered. Apart from people with dietary restrictions, it should work well for most people. Whether or not to bother learning the characters is up to the person, but with such a small set of vocab to learn, I'd recommend at least learning how to recognize the characters. Or possibly only learn to recognize them and not bother to learn to say them if you've got higher priorities.

[liuzhou]

Another thing to bear in mind that the name of a food item in one place may be totally different in another. When I moved from Hunan to neighbouring Guangxi, I would ask for things I knew well in Hunan and the Guangxi locals would look at me in bewilderment. I assumed they didn't have those things - wrong! They just used different names.

 

I know five different ways to say potato, for example.

 

I read Beijing food lists and find many things unrecognisable.

 

Here is a partly completed list of food and names as used here. 

[jerry42]

Hi NickyMS -- If you are still pursuing this topic, I have something that might possibly be of use to you -- it's a list of Chinese food and cooking terms, and a whole lot of Chinese dishes, which I put together with one of  my teachers when I was studying Chinese in Peip‘ing 北平 in 1947, yes 1947!  A total of 22 pages -- ouch!

 

At that time pinyin had not been invented, so I used the Yale romanization system which was popular in that era.  No Chinese characters.

 

I'm attaching a scan of the cover page to give you an idea of what's inside. If you're really interested -- and I mean, REALLY, because scanning 22 pages takes time -- I'd be happy to scan and send you the lot -- or maybe only certain portions -- or none at all.  Just let me know.

 

Jerry

 

If you should want to communicate further by email, I'm at <jerrry94526@gmail.com>

[Demonic_Duck]

Maybe start with:

 

柴米油盐酱醋茶 - all the traditional necessities of life.

 

柴火 Firewood (not a food product, so leave it out)

米 Rice (米饭 cooked rice)

油 Oil (食用油 cooking oil, to be precise)

盐 Salt

酱油 Soy sauce

茶 Tea (茶叶 tea leaves、茶包 teabag)

 

Other than that, I'd suggest you broadly adopt a strategy of tailoring it to what you'd find in countries within the sinosphere, but also stick in some stuff familiar to students in western cultures (it's great to know 包子 and 粥 as breakfast items, but it doesn't help me with my "what I had for breakfast" presentation I have to give in my Chinese 101 class, seeing as I had Coco Pops and milk). It sounds like your ideas at the moment are more about simple dishes and ingredients, rather than more complex dishes with many ingredients.

 

With that in mind, I'd suggest you come up with a list of what you think are the essentials from a broadly western perspective, post that here, and then have us supplement it (because of course, there's a decent amount of overlap).

 

Also, @jerry42, I'd be very interested to see the full document, mainly from a nerdy perspective of seeing how food has or hasn't changed in 北京/北平 since '47 rather than strictly from a study perspective. Not sure if that alone is worth your scanning time, but I'm betting there are a good few other posters/lurkers here who would also be very interested for various reasons. Edit: also, not wishing to sound too much like roddy, but anything you post on the forums will prove helpful/interesting to many more people than stuff confined to private correspondence.

[Kobo-Daishi]

 

At that time pinyin had not been invented, so I used the Yale romanization system which was popular in that era.  No Chinese characters.

 

 

 

Are you sure that's the Yale Romanization?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Chinese

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_romanization_of_Mandarin

 

Doesn't seem like any Yale Romanization I know.

 

I can guess some of the ones in your image. TSAY is cai (vegetable, or dish), JU (W?) ROW is zhu rou (pork), YANG ROW is yang rou (mutton), JI ROW is ji rou (chicken), DEAN SHIN is dian xin (dim sum), and TANG is tang (soup), but, I can't get the rest.

 

If you've already scanned the rest for NickyMS, it might be fun if you posted it here for us to guess.

 

Kobo.

[Shelley]

Is it possible it the Yale romanization of Cantonese? as here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_romanization_of_Cantonese

 

Just a thought.

[Kobo-Daishi]

Is it possible it the Yale romanization of Cantonese? as here http://en.wikipedia....on_of_Cantonese

 

In that case, the big giveaway that it's not Cantonese would be rou (meat or flesh). In Cantonese there would be the final -k, for yuk.

 

Choi, jyu yuk, yeung yuk, gai yuk, dim sam, tong.

 

 

Kobo.

[jerry42]

Sorry for the Romanization confusion!  But if you look again at that title page that I attached, you'll see a handwritten note saying "These chapter titles are given in Guoyeu Lomaa Tzyh".  Well, the correct term would be Gwoyeu Romatzyh, or GR for short, the system developed largely by Chao Yuan-jen (Zhao Yuanren) -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwoyeu_Romatzyh -- under whose wing, at Harvard during WW2, I had my first round of learning Chinese.

 

All the other pages do use the Yale system, and one of these days before long I will get around to scanning them for you all to see.  请多多忍耐！

 

Jerry 

[Kobo-Daishi]

Well, the correct term would be Gwoyeu Romatzyh, or GR for short, the system developed largely by Chao Yuan-jen (Zhao Yuanren) -- http://en.wikipedia....Gwoyeu_Romatzyh -- under whose wing, at Harvard during WW2, I had my first round of learning Chinese.

 

Oh, the famous "stone lion" poem guy.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuen_Ren_Chao

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

 

What was he like as a lecturer?

 

Kobo.

[jerry42]

As you might imagine -- Excellent!  He wrote the lessons which were part of the curriculum, and they were full of the good humor that characterized him, a real gentleman and scholar. His two daughters served as drill instructors, which Dr. Chao called "informants".  No computers, tape machines, or digital devices in those days -- everything was done by live human beings.

[abcdefg]

@ Jerry -- I for one would be most interested in hearing more about what life in China was like back during that time period. Not just the food, but general living situation, etc. Bet you had a wealth of unusual experiences.

 

If you have time, please do share.

[jerry42]

As before I have to plead 忙不过来.  But I do have a slideshow of where I lived, fellow students, tutors etc. in old Peip'ing and a trip I took to Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, etc.

 

You can see it at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B759BnEqZMLAT1E1cmVMLWdSS1E/view?usp=sharing

 

No way to copy & paste that link, so I had to type it and hope it's right.

 

But be forewarned -- 100 slides!

 

Jerry

[Shelley]

The link works and I am lost for words.

 

Thank you, thank you for sharing that with us.

 

So much history, I am going to look at them again more carefully.

 

What a lot of wonderful memories you must have, must admit to being a bit green with envy.

[bokane]

Wow, jerry42! I'd really like to see the rest of that list, if you ever get the time, and I'd love to hear more about Y.R. Chao, who's one of my heroes. (Several people I know, including my adviser, studied with his daughter, but I don't think I know anyone who studied with the great man himself.) Wonderful photos, too -- like Shelley, I've gone a little 看紅了眼 here.

To get back to NickyMS's post: the suggestions above are good, and if you'd like to go a little more in-depth you might want to check out James McCawley's The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters, which was reissued in print a few years back. Tech-y tools like Pleco and Waygo mean that it's no longer the best bet for someone encountering Chinese-language menus for the first time, but it's still an excellent source of information for the language student.

[jerry42]

So I have finally scanned all the pages of (new title) "Chinese Dishes and Cooking Terms" and combined them into a .pdf file which is attached.

 

Please let me know of any egregious errors -- there are bound to be some.

 

Hmm....where the devil is the attachment button?  I've used it before but can't find it now.

 

Jerry

[abcdefg]

Down at the bottom right, next to "Post," click the "More Reply Options" button. It will take you to a screen from which attachments can be posted.