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Essay: Watermelon

A young child’s thoughts and description of watermelon, their favorite fruit.

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西瓜

我吃好多水果,但是我最喜欢的是西瓜。

西瓜圆圆的,有一条一条的绿色花纹,像一个皮球

破开西瓜,周围是白色的瓜皮,中间是鲜红的瓜一口,甜甜的,真好吃。我好想一口气把整个西瓜吃完,可是妈妈说,西瓜不能多吃,吃多了会拉肚子

吃完西瓜,瓜皮要丢进垃圾桶,可不能随便乱扔,因为有人踩到上面会摔倒的。

Show English translation »
I eat a lot of fruit, but my favorite is watermelon.

Watermelon is round, and has a striped green design [on it], like a leather ball.

When you break open a watermelon, it’s surrounded by white skin, in the middle is bright red pulp. Take a bite, it’s so sweet, it’s delicious. I’d love to eat it all up in one mouthful, but mama says you can’t each too much watermelon, if you eat too much you’ll have diarrhea.

When you finish eating the watermelon, you have to drop the skin in the trash can, you can’t just carelessly litter, because if a person steps on it they can slip and fall.

12 replies on “Essay: Watermelon”

on December 4, 2012 Totally agree, NOMU is fab! I subscribed to their maleir years ago and I love receiving their recipes every month (have saved them all)! The styling is equally delicious

Wow i have read many of ur articles! Great job im in secondary school now( 14 years old) but my chinese foundations like i do not know how to read and write chinese characters… I cant seem to remember them… However i still can speak and hear chinese… Please do me a favour by guideing me on how to remember well these chinese words. I have been failing ever since the begining! Please dont send me like practice makes perfect just tell me effective ways of remembering thx!

Hi Leon, thanks for dropping by. Everyone’s brain works a little differently, and some people have a hard time memorizing characters. I always found it easy to remember pictures, like characters, but not so easy to remember sounds. I can’t tell you what will work for you, but I can tell me what worked for me.

Whenever I find a characters that I have a hard time remembering, I make up some way to remember. For example, 买 and 卖 – buy and sell. I could never remember which was which, until I made something up: you can see that the bottom of each of these characters there’s a 头, which means “head”. If you’re going to the market with nothing on your head, 买, you’re going there to buy. If you’re going to the market with something balanced on your head, 卖, you’re going there to sell.

And peng – 朋 – as in 朋友,friend. Friends are like two moons next to each other – that’s why this character is 月and 月together. 月 itself looks a little like a ladder to the MOON, if you ask me. 开 looks like one of those Japanese-style temple gates – gates that are OPEN.

So yeah, it’s a little ridiculous, but those kind of things help me remember. Maybe it helps because I spend so much time devising a way to remember that the familiarity with the character helps it stick.

Other than that, the truth is that there’s no way to just open your head and pour the bloody characters in, more’s the pity, and you do have to put the work in. I’m still not a perfectly fluent reader, I need a dictionary often, and I practice a lot and I live in China. But coming up with tricks like that for the harder characters helps me remember. Once you have used tricks to remember the basic characters, after a while you don’t need those tricks because you’ve learned the characters, and you can come up with tricks for harder ones. Good luck!

Hi Leon,
a tip on what Kendra has build upon, there is a book from edoardo Fazzioli (http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Calligraphy-Pictograph-Essential-Characters/dp/0789208709) which shows there some of the characters come from and what there meaning is. For example the word 見 (jian) – which means to see and could be used with the word mian in 見面 (jian mian)- to meet, illustrates an eye. Mian means face – so to meet is to see someones face.

我吃好多水果,但是我最喜欢的是西瓜。
西瓜圆圆的,有一条一条的绿色花纹,像一个皮球。
破开西瓜,周围是白色的瓜皮,中间是鲜红的瓜瓤。咬一口,甜甜的,真好吃。我好想一口气把整个西瓜吃完,可是妈妈说,西瓜不能多吃,吃多了会拉肚子。
吃完西瓜,瓜皮要丢进垃圾桶,可不能随便乱扔,因为有人踩到上面会摔倒的。

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