Lesson #6 - Where is the Bathroom?
June 13th, 2007Learn Chinese travel phrases with SurvivalPhrases.com! A little Chinese can go such a long way! Whether you’re traveling, visiting, or sightseeing, survivalphrases.com has all the essential travel phrases just for you!
Today we cover another high frequency Chinese phrase sure to be of use on your trip, travels or vacation to China.
Today we cover getting to the bathroom in Chinese. Be sure to stop by SurvivalPhrases.com before you set out on your trip to China, and be sure to stop by SurvivalPhrases.com and leave us a post!
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I really like the lessons and the format is easy to use. I also have a Mandarin phrase book that I bought in preparation for my first upcoming trip to China, and I’ve noticed that some of the phrases in the book differ from some of the phrases taught in these lessons. For example, the phrase “where is the bathroom” is different in the book. I was just wondering if there were several ways to say the same thing in Chinese (as it is sometimes in English), and if what we are being taught in these lessons is the more popular version or a better version to use?
Thanks - Jennifer
Does your book have 厕所 (ce4suo3) or 卫生间(wei4sheng1jian1) by any chance?
Michael,
Yes, they show the first listing you mentioned above (ce4suo3).
Jennifer
Okay! Ce4suo3 is the most direct way to say the bathroom, it is kind of like saying “toilet” in Enlgish. The “xi3shou3jian1″ that we taught you is more round about, and therefore more polite. It’s like saying “washroom” (which is literally what it means, “wash hands room.̶
The picture that someone gets in their head when you say “washroom” (in English or in Chinese) is someone washing their hands. When you say “toilet,” well… Though this is not something you have to worry about too much. The Chinese are generally much more straight-forward when talking about bathrooms than we Westerners would be. You almost certainly won’t be able to offend any of them by the way that you say bathroom. (I am not very good about being polite in any language, but when I’m in a quiet shopping mall at noon, or in a nice restaurant before the dinner rush, and I can hear my footsteps echoing off the walls, then I usually like to say xi3shou3jian1. Something about the thought of the word ce4suo3 echoing back at me is not appealing.)
Hope that helped. If it didn’t, let me know where I was unclear. And thanks for stopping by, we really appreciate the comments and questions. (Lets us know that we’re not just broadcasting into the void.)
I don’t know where that smiley in the middle of my post came from. That was supposed to be a close quotation mark. Stupid HTML.