![]() It seems that the designer is illiterate with the Chinese script but knows the spoken word "chabuduo" and its meaning. The Pinyin here ("CHA BU DUO") refers to "差不多" ("almost, nearly, just about about the same, similar just about right, not far off, not bad"), while the Chinese characters "足够近" simply mean "close enough (in distance)". To supplement my own reactions to the pairing of "zugoujin" and "chabuduo" on the t-shirt pictured above, here are some observations by advanced graduate students from the PRC: In terms of euphony, "chabuduo" just rolls off the tongue and lips, but "zugoujin" is clunky and easy to garble. My instinct is partly borne out by the fact that one can find occurrences of "chabuduo" in Qing period (1644-1911) fiction and probably earlier, whereas it's hard to find evidence of "zugoujin" before the 20th century, and it seems to have appeared first in the sciences (including math) and social sciences (making it highly liable to borrowing through translation). ![]() It just doesn't ring true to me as a genuine Mandarin construction. Somehow it strikes me as translatese from English "close enough". As a matter of fact, I cannot help escaping the feeling that "zugoujin" is not authentically Mandarin. "Zugoujin" doesn't have as many translations and definitions as "chabuduo":įurthermore, as shown above, "zugoujin" is far less well known than "chabuduo", so it would make sense to gloss the former by the latter. Chabuduo") in which he critiqued the pervasive noncommittal nature of his countrymen. Aside from his promotion of the vernacular and script reform, one of the many reasons for which I admire Hu Shih was the fact that he wrote an essay called "Chàbùduō xiānshēng zhuàn 差不多先生傳" ("Mr. A Google search for " chabuduo" will give you an idea of what people think of it.Ī Chinese scholar whom I respect deeply was Hu Shih 胡適 (1891-1962). Thoughtful, discerning Chinese themselves do not approve of the "chabuduo" outlook that is so pervasive in their society. One cannot be "chabuduo" in one's approach to grammar and meaning. For example, in my Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese course, when we are reading texts, if a student says that a passage "chabuduo" means this or that, I get upset and sternly rebuke them by telling them that parsing and analyzing structures and sentences must be done meticulously and rigorously. It's a lackadaisical mindset that I deplore. ![]() "Chabuduo" amounts to an attitude toward life or a philosophical stance, depending on how seriously you want to take it. However, with 127,000,000 ghits to 2,410,000 ghits, "chabuduo" is far more common than "zugoujin".Ī fuller list of translations and definitions of "chabuduo" would go like this: The two idiomatic terms, though expressed in quite different ways with dissimilar orientations (to be explained in detail below), amount to roughly the same thing, so it is reasonable to gloss one with the other. Intriguing t-shirt that is making the rounds these days:
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