Pop Chinese: A Cheng & Tsui Bilingual Handbook of Contemporary Colloquial Expressions

by Yu Feng

Idiomatic expressions always make a language come alive, and learning to use colloquial language can be a fun and important milestone on the way to fluency. This newly expanded edition of Pop Chinese: A Cheng & Tsui Bilingual Handbook of Contemporary Colloquial Expressions gives non-native speakers the tool they need to help them learn 1200 informal colloquial idioms and phrases popular in China today, with usage examples from over 500 popular films, TV series, and contemporary novels and short stories.

With the addition of an English-Chinese index, Pop Chinese now also helps Chinese learners of English understand English colloquial expressions. A new bibliography offers a guide to primary sources and is itself a fascinating survey of China's popular culture.

Pop Chinese contains a wide variety of spoken expressions, including idiomatic phrases, dialect expressions, slang, proverbs, words, and sentence patterns used only in colloquial speech, and words used in ways that differ from their standard definitions. Entries are given in simplified and traditional characters and in pinyin.

482 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2006