Niubi!: The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School

Excellent; there's no other book or resource that touches on this subject. I hope the author will update the book in the future with new entries as language evolves with time. The younger generation will come up with new words/phrases and it would be helpful to understand what they are cursing at you whether in person, during internet communications or in mobile text messaging using PinYin. That's because many Chinese don't know how to write it in Han characters.You don't have to visit China to be cursed at in Mandarin/PinYin. There are numerous Chinese immigrants in the USA, and around the world due to Globalization, who won't hesitate to curse at you for whatever reason.I am not a native Mandarin speaker and was never taught or exposed to the profanities in Mandarin. I think the contents in this book would have shocked my Mandarin teacher. NIUBI has enlightened me on new vocabulary and I appreciate the effort the author put into researching the written form of such rarely published words. Even online/offline publishers have difficulty writing these words.

I am a 50+ yo engineer/businessman who has been working about 6 years to learn conversational Chinese, to support myself in frequent business travel to China. My success with learning Chinese can best be described as "modest"!Most formal education on foreign languages teaches an artificial "classroom" version of the language. As a simple example, language lessons will teach one how to order tea and stop there. In the real world, however, even such a simple task will require real world vocabulary. I was stopped cold on the first attempt to order tea by questions such as, "Green tea or black tea?"In contrast, this book makes good on its title, teaching "Real Chinese", usable for real situations, including lots of slang terms,insults, etc.I would recommend this to anyone trying to learn Chinese for real everyday use in China. Further, I would note that many of the chapters would be especially valuable to students and other young people trying to prepare for social encounters.I have shown the book to several of my Chinese friends and they have generally endorsed the content as accurate and timely (representing real world usage in mainland Chinese cities in the 2012-2013 timeframe.

It would have been easy to do a lazy job on this, relying on the easy shock value of 'bad' words. But the author has taken the trouble to explain in great detail all sorts of surrounding detail such as for example the build-up of the characters denoting bad words, making it really intellectually/academically interesting and entertaining, aside from the learning of bad words.

A good collection of hit words that we use everyday, especially online. This book can help Chinese language learners by enriching their vocabulary and if used appropriately, will surprise a native speaker! WARNING: Not all words are good for friendly conversations!

Enough said! I just wanted to write and say that I enjoy reading this book and wanted to give it as many stars as possible.

I saw Ms. Chao's interview with Danwei on youtube and I was excited to buy this book. "Niubi!" is split into 8 different categories of vocab ranging from charts and tables detailing the dirtiest of dirty language, to more authentic practical language that is not offensive in any way.While a main component of this book is dirty language, "Niubi!" goes beyond that. I studied Chinese out of textbooks for a good 4 years and feel that generally they aren't made to help you get out and have real conversations with real people, but instead focus on teaching you to read the paper or to have 'civilized' impersonal conversations. I really wish this book would have come out a couple years earlier so that I could have learned this type of vocabulary more efficiently.This book in the end is a really good book for any student of Chinese. Beginners will get a better sense of the authentic daily vocabulary that Chinese people actually use, and more advanced students can learn about the vocabulary used in certain sub-cultures within in China (internet culture, gay culture etc). The only way I think this book could have been better is if the author put more of the trickier words into sentences to help with usage and context. Overall very pleased and would recommend to anybody interested in Chinese.

As a very humble learner of this wonderul language, this little book is a nice addition to my collection of books on Mandarin Chinese. Standard text books for learning foreing languages tend to be bland, boring and full of silly texts, detached from everyday conversation, modes, idioms and colloquial language and expression, so this book is a must if you want to improve a little bit by learning street language, internet slang and other idioms which will, if you don't know them, put you at a loss to interpret them. It is nice that there is nothing held back in terms of language and obscenity or profanity, so delicate stomachs maybe should abstain. Otherwise it is sometimes a good laugh. A culture's own profanity and preferred insults is always also an insight of the culture itself, specially it reveals things about the culture's specific way of thinking, what things it values more, (and therefore are the subject of most hurting abuse), how it deals with censorship online, and so on. Not that I will be using all of this everyday, and some of it can get you GBH in a Beijing alley, but it is good to know, specially internet slang which you can easily find when browsing and dirty words which could be harder to find sources for.

I have lived in China for a couple of years and discovered this book shortly after I arrived. It really is a fabulous guide to swearing, slang and genuine idiomatic Chinese as used on the streets. Not only did I find it interesting and amusing, but my first copy was leafed through avidly by my fluent Chinese-speaking assistants, both of whom then went out and bought their own copies. I have subsequently bought about 15 copies for friends and business contacts (provided that they are reasonably open-minded and have a sense of humour). Many of them are fascinated by the Chinese characters - although they use the words fairly casually in speech, they have never seen them written down and a typical comment is "ahhh - THAT's how you write that one!" It is also an interesting insight into Chinese culture and the concepts that people here do or don't find offensive. A must for any student of the Chinese language!

Came very quick in excellent condition.

Bought for my brother who works in China. When he took it back he said all the guys who he works with loved it too as quite often they know they swear words but didn't know how they were written! Good fun.

Brilliant book which teaches you all the things you should never say to a Chinese person. Also teaches you what you say accidentally when you mess up a tone.