Plans Foiled? "泡汤 (pàotāng)"!
"泡汤 (pàotāng)"? Pick Yourself Up and Move Ahead!
Our lives are filled with hopes and dreams. Unfortunately, part of our life experience is to watch those hopes dashed to pieces! On a positive note, we can learn from heartbreak and approach our future challenges with more wisdom and experience in our next effort.
As a Mandarin Chinese student, I'm always faced with challenges and doubts. Here's my story:
I took my first Chinese class during my junior year of college. Over the next 12 months I crammed Chinese at school and learned from books and tapes in my spare time. Before going into the workforce, I decided to travel to China for one month after graduating from college. I was confident that I'd "hit the ground running" and be conversing with Mandarin speakers on the streets of Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou. As it turns out, I hadn't learned the tones of Mandarin properly. No one understood me. At a restaurant, I thought I was ordering dumplings "水饺 (shuǐjiǎo)" but actually I was ordering sleep "睡觉 (shuìjiào)" . My plans for landing in China and speaking Chinese with locals were destroyed!
Later on, as my Chinese improved, I learned a word to describe this heartbreak: "泡汤 (pàotāng)".
"泡汤 (pàotāng)" can be discouraging, but we can learn from it and pull ourselves back up! After my expectations of speaking Chinese in China were "泡汤 (pàotāng)", I decided to take a few online classes with native teachers back in the U.S. and am now a student here in China and will soon take my HSK Level 4 proficiency test in Mandarin.
Where does "泡汤 (pàotāng)" come from; what does it mean? Click "Read more" to check the answers.
