Short Story: 海上和床上 – On the sea and in bed

Ooookay, glad that’s over. Had a huge 3-week ordeal with my hosting company, they corrupted a server and screwed up the backups, I had to rebuild a bunch of the posts from scratch, some of my early data was lost, and a bunch of comments were lost as well, especially on the more recent posts. Sorry if you had something to say and it got deleted. Luckily, I had local copies of most of the posts, so everything should basically be working again. Thanks for sticking with me. So, back to business.

Today, a story for beginners (HSK 2-3) that’s mostly comprised of dialogue between a man and a sailor. The story drives home a quick life lesson: there’s risk in anything you do, so there’s no point in trying to avoid danger entirely.

Source here.

Some language stuff

Most of the harder words here are ocean-related. You probably already know the word for ocean (海), here are a few others:

水手 shuǐ shǒu – Sailor

西洋 xī yáng – Western Seas. Doesn’t refer to a particular ocean, just the ocean lands that are west of the South China Seas.

风暴 fēng bào – Storm

印度洋 yìn dù yáng – Indian Ocean

捕鱼 bǔ yú – Catch fish / fishing

And a couple of other important phrases:

既然如此 jì rán rú cǐ – “Since it is like that…” or “In that case…”

永远也不 yǒng yuǎn yě bù – I saved the hardest one for last, here. This whole phrase means “would never”. But this may seem strange to you, because if you look at each word individually, here’s what it says:

永远 – Forever
也 – also
不 – no / not

The reason “forever” is used, is because it is referencing an event in the future, rather than the past. In Chinese, “have never” (in the past) and “would never” (in the future) are expressed with different words. “Have never” is usually expressed with 从来没有, sometimes shortened to 从没 or 从未. But if you’re talking about something you would not do in the future, you use 永远不, sometimes shortened to 永不. The 也 here doesn’t mean “also”, it is basically a strengthening word, it just makes the “never” stronger.