Worm | Bug (虫) | S4E229 | OWAD Learning Mandarin Chinese

Learn Chinese with One Word A Day
~7 min a day with me to understand how Chinese make meaning with their language. Make foreign familiar. #chinesetutorial, #mandarin

[@stephbailliegee]

I appreciate how you connect with previous videos, this allows us to create a web of knowledge where words connect to other words 🙏

[@owadcn]

Thank you for your feedback. Dot connecting is what I relish in this discovery journey.

[@miserepoignee9594]

The observation you made at 2:30 about how flexible Chinese is when applying a word to different related ideas is something that really struck me when I first started studying Chinese. After watching this video, it does seem interesting that English uses "bug" to refer to almost any kind of insect or insect-like pest (ants, flies, ticks, beetles, stick bugs, stink bugs, and more) but not worms. I think spiders are right on the edge of what I would consider a bug as a native English speaker. I don't think I would ever call a spider a bug, but I also wouldn't think it was weird if someone else did.

[@owadcn]

Thanks for sharing! Seeing how another language define the scope of their word can sometimes make us realize how peculiar or seemingly arbitrary how our native language define things. Taxonomy is a fascinating field about classification of things.