Children’s Story: 最可口的食物 – The most appetizing meal

Some language stuff

Quite a bit of the harder vocab in this piece revolves around eating. We’ve got 津津有味 jīn jīn yǒu wèi, to eat something with joyous relish, 啃 kěn, to gnaw on, 狼吞虎咽 láng tūn hǔ yàn, to fiercely gobble something up, and 饥肠辘辘 jī cháng lù lù, to be so hungry one’s stomach is rumbling.

饥肠辘辘 is actually a pretty interesting phrase. 饥肠 means “an empty stomach”, and 辘辘 is being used as an onomatopoeia, lu lu being the sound of one’s stomach grumbling from hunger.

爱挑食 ài tiāo shí – Three different words here, 爱, to love, 挑, to be picky, and 食, food. The literal translation here is “loves to be picky about food”. It bears pointing out that in this case, “love” does not really mean “to have fondness for”, but rather, “to do something often”. We use “love” this way in English as well, as in, “You just love to start an argument, don’t you?”

转一圈 zhuǎn yī quān – 转 is “to turn around” and 一圈 is “a circle” or “a loop”. That might sound like it means “to spin around in a circle while standing in place”, but it doesn’t. It means “to make a circular pass through a place” – imagine shopping at a farmer’s market or something, you walk all around to the different stalls to see what everyone is selling.

一幕 yī mù – You’ll notice my popup dictionary translates this as “a curtain”, a “screen” or “an act of a play”. A 幕 is indeed the measure word for “an act of a play”, but this is being used figuratively, what it means here is “scene”, as in, “When my eyes came to rest upon that ugly scene…”

那儿 nà er – Literally means “there”, but when it comes after a noun, it means “over where [noun] is”, or “[noun’s] place”. I just covered a similar usage of “这儿” in the last beginner post.

Source here