Ting bu dong.

I had a spontanious chinese class the other day. David the card man was over for much of the afternoon, and we just sat there reading from an old myths and legends book in both pinyin and characters. I got stuck on a few places in the book studying on my own; where the dictionary and internet were no help with translating that annoying meaning.

I was proud of myself though, because they were either old metaphors or idioms that i had to hear the stories behind to understand. They were curiously alike to the same ones in english.

For instance "Yan er dao ling" means to shake like a leaf

"Zi qi qi ren" was a rather drawn out story. A cheater wanted more time to cheat his neighbours with, so he changed his clock's time. A cheater who cheats himself.

The funnest thing about learning chinese is how some phrases sound if you translate them literally. You usually have to read the sentence structure backwards and make sure you've translated with the right word or else it sounds very suspicious.