Studying Chinese by Playing “Stone, Scissors, and Paper”

Many people usually find it boring to learn a language, especially for those difficult and complicated ones, such as Chinese. Actually, the easiest way to learn Chinese is to raise your interest in it and fall in love with it. And therefore, you may find everything will not be that difficult as you imagine.

So, today, in this Chinese language class, I will talk about a prevalent game, which may be known to all the people all over the world. That is “石头,剪刀, 布(shi2 tou5 jian3 dao1 bu4)”.

It is “stone, scissors and paper” in English. There is no need to emphasize the rule of it, because it is really popular among the whole world. Let’s come to some other names of it in China.

Besides “石头,剪刀, 布(shi2 tou5 jian3 dao1 bu4)”, we usually call it “猜拳(cai1 quan2)”. As we all know, we need to use our fist in this game, so the name “猜拳’ came out. “拳(quan2)” means fist in English. When we play this game, you never know what posture your competitor will make, so you have to guess it. That is we use “猜(cai1), which means guess” here as the verb. As you can see, it is a good chance for you to learn Chinese characters.

Do you know the implied meaning of “石头剪刀布” on the internet? It is more popularly used by young people to express their love to others. How can it have such a meaning? So, I will explain it to you. When we make a “paper”, it is just like making a “5”; when we make a “scissors”, it is just like making a “2”; when we make a “stone”, it is just like making a “0”. And then, if we connect these three figures tighter, they are “520”. “520” pronounces like “我爱你(wo3 ai4 ni3), which means I love you”.

Studying Chinese in an efficient way is very important for you. Maybe you can have a try to learn something by playing.