Today I am going to go with a 校友 (schoolmate) to be photographed for an advertisement. They are looking for foreign 面孔 (faces) to shoot using a new 泡脚 (foot washing) machine. The photographer said he was looking for 金发碧眼 (blond hair and blue eyes) , and would provide 报酬 (compensation) to cover expenses. This 摄影师 (photographer) would only take a couple of 镜头 (shots) , some 室内 (indoor) and some 室外 (outdoor). At the end, I think that me and my friend may stand a chance to 小有名气 (be famous).
校友 xiao4you3 – schoolmate
面孔 mian4kong3 – face
泡脚 pao4jiao3 – footwashing
金发 jin1fa1 – blond hair
碧眼 bi4yan3 – blue eyes
报酬 bao4chou2 – compensation
摄影师 she4ying3shi1 – photographer
镜头 jing4tou2 – shots (also lens)
室内 shi3nei4 – indoor
室外 shi3wai4 – outdoor
小有名气 xiao2(3)you3ming2qi4
1 Comment
I’ve enjoyed this gem a lot for the fun in it. It’s alright that somebody’s face can be shot just like that, but never in my three decades as an English teacher have I heard that it is done with a foot washing machine. It’s not that ‘foot’ is a strange adjective there, and that it could perhaps be improved by inserting a hyphen. Or by perhaps inventing the foot-washer to mean whatever the ingenious Chinese have invented. But I hope the shots were taken with a camera and the photos were “to be used to advertise” the machine. Is that correct?
The other issue is that some were intended to be indoor shots, some outdoor ones. Using adjectives. But in the actual sentence, the photographer only wanted to take a few shots indoors and a few outdoors. These are adverbs. Sorry, there’s a difference, unlike in the Chinese language, or in Dutch, where adverbs have identical forms to the corresponding adjectives.
At the end of my response, let me guess that you hope to become famous some time later, i.e. in the end, not at the end of this article.
Anyway, thanks for this posting too. I wish I could speak Chinese as well as you can, in the end.