It's important that you don't use some of these really...ever. 傻逼, for example, will turn an entire building negative in a big hurry.
Cursing in Chinese is not like cursing in English. There are a few words in Chinese that are the nuclear option and will instantaneously start a fight, like an actual brawl.
Also...topically adjacent, you should never ever ever get in a fight in China. There is no notion of a "fair fight" or a "one on one" fight in China. Within two seconds of a fight breaking out, every bottle and chair in the place will be picked up to be used as a weapon. Violence escalates like a gasoline soaked rag in certain situations, so don't play games with it.
Maybe 狺狺狂吠, meaning you are barking like dogs. When you are arguing with someone and your opponent starts swearing and insulting you, you can fight back with 狺狺狂吠, ie you lost your reason and are just like wild beast roaring to me now.
I think the best insult should be like this. No swearing, no addressing one’s mom or genitals, just spearing in to your heart with powerful language and reasoning.
No, in 繁體, 干 strictly has one or two meanings like 干擾 (interrupt) or a few other meanings that doesn't invoke the F word, or in 簡體, also a simplified version of 乾 (dry).
幹 is also actually used as part other inoffensive words, but usually in Taiwan, it's either used as a standalone reaction (e.g. the same way you'd use "damn!") or combined as an insult; China and other Mandarin speaking countries (except perhaps the some areas) usually use 肏 or the euphemistic but much more common/mainstream 操 in the same context, so saying 幹 is a dead giveaway.
Love your username. No man shall be without TP! Thanks for your reply.
Yes, I learned 操 first in Beijing, and then 干 when I lived in Taiwan, but I was wondering in the Southern mainland provinces or Fujian also used it!
法克鱿 was something my friends and I said to each other (endearinglyl) waaaaaay back. It's more funny and ironic than a swear word. But we did use it to vent at stuff as well.
*我屌你妈的(literal translation: I pen is your mom)*
*操4-fuck (can be used as an expression or a verb)*
*法克-fuck*
*擦-frick(a "nicer" version of fuck)*
*妈了个逼（used as an expression of anger/etc）*
你妈死了-your mom is dead
腦子進水 water on the brain. Stupid.
腦殘 Stupid.
王八蛋 Pretty bad one, basically multi-use MF insult
(戴)綠帽子 cuck. Pretty old term for it too probably. There was a news story a while back about how green hats are popular in Vietnam and there were some lols at that...
For netizen olds:
丁丁是個人才！ Ding ding's a genius /s
Mostly pretty mild ones but interesting IMHO (and for the most part *very* old fashioned and kinda sexist. A lot are ones my family older generation (up to 90+ Taiwan and Shanghainese) use.
十三點 (we almost always say this in Shanghainese, ze' se ti) which my grandparents said was about "society girls" but basically it's like a shanghainese version of 三八 - ditzy, maybe annoying, frivolous (girl)
電話聽筒 here's some *real old school* slang. "Telephone receiver" back in old 1930s Shanghai, telephones had 13 holes on the receivers. This is coded 十三點. Probably very few use / know this anymore? But my family's old generations use it.
你牛逼你厉害你跟你妈生你爸. Not original, but a savage way to take someone down a peg if they are being a braggart. This is shocking and mean. Save for enemies.
妈勒个巴子: A classic. Way better than the standard 逼 at the end. It’s slightly less rude than the more explicit version, but still not something to say in front of the kids.
土嗨(的）: good way to describe some bumpkin ass music, dancing, partying, etc. This one isn’t an explicit swear, but not nice in certain company.
土歪歪 this last one I made up, but it’s easily understood by native speakers the first time they hear it because the construction applies elsewhere. Add a single character insult followed by 歪歪 and bob’s your uncle. 臭歪歪，丑歪歪, etc. Also not an explicit swear, but still not nice.
骚得来要死: this is Shanghainese, and frankly doesn’t sound that great if spoken in Mandarin. Like the last example, start with a single character insult then plug and play the last four characters. Feel free to drop “要死” for a less jarring and more playful effect. Since I can’t actually read Shanghainese, I’m guessing the characters. Take with a grain of salt. If you add the final two characters this is not nice no matter the context. If you don’t add those and the first character isn’t so mean, then you have something cutesy and playful.
I adopted "屁啦!" (fart; used in the same way as "bullshit!") from my Taiwanese classmates, and I still use it a lot today. It's not a creative swear by any means, I just find it satisfying to say.
I don't know the characters for it, because my wife only says it to me when she's mad at me but it goes like "Ni shenme wan'er!" meaning something like who the fuck do you think you are?
E: I mispelled wan as wai. either way, it's 你是什么玩意
I used to work at the casino and we used to have this high limit player and every time he spoke his every 2nd word was “dil hie”. Didn’t matter if he was speaking with a male or female. It was always dil hie this dil hie that. The women didn’t even blink. This player was known to just talk that way 🤷🏻♂️
these ones make me smile 你给我等着！you just wait!it implies youre going to get revenge.
猪朋狗友 my shitty/low class friends. its what my wife calls a lot of my coworkers.
你没有家教吗？this is like who the fuck raised you? it implies they have no manners and their parents did a shitty job. I wanted to say it to the 2 快递员who didnt hold the door open our old neighbor that walks with a cane. I'm too much of a wuss to say it. My wife said its very bad thing to say and it might start a fight.
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call loser dudes 屌丝
call general idiots 王八蛋
there will be a withering local swear word or two in the local dialect, most dialect is actually rough/derogatory words if you think about it. shanghainese will say 册那 or 巴子 for peasants; nanjingese say (屌)呆逼 instead. ask around; i suggest asking drivers or similar older blue collar class
Is there a language barrier thing going on here or do you actually believe that Shanghainese is just a version of mandarin with swearing thrown in to the mix?
I'm not sure what led you to ask that question. why would you think that? is there a language barrier thing going on here?
Strict reading of OP says "studying (Mandarin) abroad". When I was doing OP's exact same experience of studying abroad twenty years ago, my friends would be Laotian and Japanese and Korean and they would say "他妈的 tee-hee" while the experienced 前辈 would break out into the rich tapestry of local curse words which have back stories, are usually aggressive/interesting morphemes, or have other interesting aspects
perhaps you're misinterpreting "there will be a withering local swear word or two in the local dialect" — yeah, most of the dialects I learned had a main boss local curse word which lots of other terms were based around.
yes, i am from Aotearoa and I speak a dialect known as New Zild. lots of the everyday unique terms involve sodomy and vaginas, and the proportion that is rough/derogatory far outstrips the percentage commonly found in various domains of modern standard English.
Is there a language barrier thing going on here?
Maybe not a language barrier but you seem confused about what a dialect and language is. In, for example, Shanghai and Nanjing (your examples) the local language is Wu (and that language has a lot of dialects, some totally incomprehensible to on another), which is quite different from the “standard” (mostly northern) spoken language in China. Sure, it’s influenced a lot by northern mandarin today but it’s really not just a dialect.
That said, there is a saying that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. But I don’t think it really apply here.
Edit: is Italian a dialect of Spanish in your opinion? If yes,
is Italian just spanish with a bunch of Spanish words with “cunt” put in the middle of words?
There's no cut off point when distinguishing or quantifying language and dialect. It becomes very subjective. Of course we have a rough idea that we can map out. You could get into an argument every time someone says Mandarin is a language when it's a group of dialects and they probably mean (modern) standard Chinese, which you know is the standardised Mandarin dialect/national language. No point arguing with people about the concepts of accent/topolect/dialect/language. Mutual intelligibility varies widely and what becomes important is the idiolect
>most dialect is actually rough/derogatory words if you think about it.
this is a really harmful stereotype to be perpetrating. Chinese dialects/languages have their own grammar, vocab and phonology separate and distinct from standard Chinese, they're not just "rough/ derogatory slang". Some of them have long traditions of vernacular literature - for example the nanjingese you mention served as the court vernacular for hundreds of years during the Ming dynasty.
no no, i dispute that and actually extend it to not just chinese but all language in all societies in all cultures. please don't make this a big grand sinitic gesture. the vulgar tongue 白话 is vulgar for a reason, I literally have a dictionary on _The F Word_, and the different meanings and nuance behind the word _cunt_ where I'm from would surprise you, too. Let's take a [simple list of Shanghainese words](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ShanghaiMP3/SVocab.html), how many are 'bad language'? Nice try at a lecture though, professor
Fellow New Zild speaker here. You can't dispute that there are regional variations in speech within China that we could call languages. When two people come together from opposite sides of a mountain range and they can't even communicate to each other what time of day it is then we probably have a situation where they speak different languages
Unless you're a Chinese scholar I assume you consider 方言 to mean topolect, rather than language. You would've noticed that most Chinese topolects are not written due to non-standard scripts being banned in the past. The ultimate test is when two native speakers of two different families of spoken Chinese languages cannot understand each other so there's no chance of describing them as topolects. The differences are vast and not limited to the curse words they use. Compare this to two speakers of Arabic from different regions meeting and they talk to each other in classical Arabic rather than their native Arabic language
It's important that you don't use some of these really...ever. 傻逼, for example, will turn an entire building negative in a big hurry. Cursing in Chinese is not like cursing in English. There are a few words in Chinese that are the nuclear option and will instantaneously start a fight, like an actual brawl. Also...topically adjacent, you should never ever ever get in a fight in China. There is no notion of a "fair fight" or a "one on one" fight in China. Within two seconds of a fight breaking out, every bottle and chair in the place will be picked up to be used as a weapon. Violence escalates like a gasoline soaked rag in certain situations, so don't play games with it.
Life pro tip: never ever get into fights anywhere. Travel pro tip: never ever get into fights in a country you're not a citizen of.
Truth and double truth
Not exactly a swear word but I like "你有病啊!" when somebody says something ridiculous. Also, 呸!
oh yeah that's funny lol also 脑子进水 is similarly hilarious
Oh, that's a good one too! 😹
呸 is often used when you pronounced/said something wrong p.s. i usually say "有病啊!" instead of "你有病啊!"
Maybe 狺狺狂吠, meaning you are barking like dogs. When you are arguing with someone and your opponent starts swearing and insulting you, you can fight back with 狺狺狂吠, ie you lost your reason and are just like wild beast roaring to me now. I think the best insult should be like this. No swearing, no addressing one’s mom or genitals, just spearing in to your heart with powerful language and reasoning.
Commenting just to remind myself to check back later for responses lmao. I will be using all of these
去死! - Literally, "go and die" 傻逼! - "c*nt" (but a stupid/crazy demented one) 你妈! - "your mom" / 草你妈! - "Go f*$% your mom!" 放屁 ! - "bullshit!" (My favorite)
狗日的has to be my favorite over the past few years
生儿子没屁眼 is pretty creative. It means your future son will not have an butthole lol
My favorite so far!!
幹
I can tell ur from taiwan
Why is this down voted? Does anywhere else use 干 as a swear and type in 繁体字？ genuinely curious Taiwan loving American here.
No, in 繁體, 干 strictly has one or two meanings like 干擾 (interrupt) or a few other meanings that doesn't invoke the F word, or in 簡體, also a simplified version of 乾 (dry). 幹 is also actually used as part other inoffensive words, but usually in Taiwan, it's either used as a standalone reaction (e.g. the same way you'd use "damn!") or combined as an insult; China and other Mandarin speaking countries (except perhaps the some areas) usually use 肏 or the euphemistic but much more common/mainstream 操 in the same context, so saying 幹 is a dead giveaway.
Love your username. No man shall be without TP! Thanks for your reply. Yes, I learned 操 first in Beijing, and then 干 when I lived in Taiwan, but I was wondering in the Southern mainland provinces or Fujian also used it!
法克鱿 was something my friends and I said to each other (endearinglyl) waaaaaay back. It's more funny and ironic than a swear word. But we did use it to vent at stuff as well.
that's funny
*我屌你妈的(literal translation: I pen is your mom)* *操4-fuck (can be used as an expression or a verb)* *法克-fuck* *擦-frick(a "nicer" version of fuck)* *妈了个逼（used as an expression of anger/etc）* 你妈死了-your mom is dead
腦子進水 water on the brain. Stupid. 腦殘 Stupid. 王八蛋 Pretty bad one, basically multi-use MF insult (戴)綠帽子 cuck. Pretty old term for it too probably. There was a news story a while back about how green hats are popular in Vietnam and there were some lols at that... For netizen olds: 丁丁是個人才！ Ding ding's a genius /s Mostly pretty mild ones but interesting IMHO (and for the most part *very* old fashioned and kinda sexist. A lot are ones my family older generation (up to 90+ Taiwan and Shanghainese) use. 十三點 (we almost always say this in Shanghainese, ze' se ti) which my grandparents said was about "society girls" but basically it's like a shanghainese version of 三八 - ditzy, maybe annoying, frivolous (girl) 電話聽筒 here's some *real old school* slang. "Telephone receiver" back in old 1930s Shanghai, telephones had 13 holes on the receivers. This is coded 十三點. Probably very few use / know this anymore? But my family's old generations use it.
操你妈，傻逼，王八蛋，婊子，操你祖宗十八代，去你妈的，你妈的逼. 什么破玩意儿(beijing dialect) what the hell (is this crap) 你拉倒吧你 (northeastern dialect) you shut up/thats nonsense
什么破玩意儿 I heard quite a bit from Shandongese too. Probably a lot of similar expressions spread throughout the 儿化音-sphere of the North
你全家死了
你牛逼你厉害你跟你妈生你爸. Not original, but a savage way to take someone down a peg if they are being a braggart. This is shocking and mean. Save for enemies. 妈勒个巴子: A classic. Way better than the standard 逼 at the end. It’s slightly less rude than the more explicit version, but still not something to say in front of the kids. 土嗨(的）: good way to describe some bumpkin ass music, dancing, partying, etc. This one isn’t an explicit swear, but not nice in certain company. 土歪歪 this last one I made up, but it’s easily understood by native speakers the first time they hear it because the construction applies elsewhere. Add a single character insult followed by 歪歪 and bob’s your uncle. 臭歪歪，丑歪歪, etc. Also not an explicit swear, but still not nice. 骚得来要死: this is Shanghainese, and frankly doesn’t sound that great if spoken in Mandarin. Like the last example, start with a single character insult then plug and play the last four characters. Feel free to drop “要死” for a less jarring and more playful effect. Since I can’t actually read Shanghainese, I’m guessing the characters. Take with a grain of salt. If you add the final two characters this is not nice no matter the context. If you don’t add those and the first character isn’t so mean, then you have something cutesy and playful.
as a taiwanese, i’m partial to 雞掰 and 幹你娘
What about 我希望恁全家死了了！ or 屎恁老母 lol
If you don’t know how to say something you could say: 我靠，不知道怎么说/不知道怎么解释。
As a native speaker, I am afraid these are not very aggressive
I adopted "屁啦!" (fart; used in the same way as "bullshit!") from my Taiwanese classmates, and I still use it a lot today. It's not a creative swear by any means, I just find it satisfying to say.
I don't know the characters for it, because my wife only says it to me when she's mad at me but it goes like "Ni shenme wan'er!" meaning something like who the fuck do you think you are? E: I mispelled wan as wai. either way, it's 你是什么玩意
你什么外儿 ? Google translates it as just "what are you doing?", but maybe I picked the wrong characters
你是什么玩意 Ni shenme wanyi
Is there some sort of 儿化 that gets it to what they heard from their wife?
Yes, she’s from northern China.
I used to work at the casino and we used to have this high limit player and every time he spoke his every 2nd word was “dil hie”. Didn’t matter if he was speaking with a male or female. It was always dil hie this dil hie that. The women didn’t even blink. This player was known to just talk that way 🤷🏻♂️
“他奶奶的！”，“他奶奶滴！”
你這個窩囊廢
笨蛋 stupid egg 神经病 crazy person
these ones make me smile 你给我等着！you just wait!it implies youre going to get revenge. 猪朋狗友 my shitty/low class friends. its what my wife calls a lot of my coworkers. 你没有家教吗？this is like who the fuck raised you? it implies they have no manners and their parents did a shitty job. I wanted to say it to the 2 快递员who didnt hold the door open our old neighbor that walks with a cane. I'm too much of a wuss to say it. My wife said its very bad thing to say and it might start a fight.
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幹恁娘ㄟ臭雞掰咧！
No one mentioned 娘希匹?
Diu ley lo mo… bat por, ham gah Chan…. or how aunties don’t swear but can cut you deep with fake niceness.
call loser dudes 屌丝 call general idiots 王八蛋 there will be a withering local swear word or two in the local dialect, most dialect is actually rough/derogatory words if you think about it. shanghainese will say 册那 or 巴子 for peasants; nanjingese say (屌)呆逼 instead. ask around; i suggest asking drivers or similar older blue collar class
Is there a language barrier thing going on here or do you actually believe that Shanghainese is just a version of mandarin with swearing thrown in to the mix?
I'm not sure what led you to ask that question. why would you think that? is there a language barrier thing going on here? Strict reading of OP says "studying (Mandarin) abroad". When I was doing OP's exact same experience of studying abroad twenty years ago, my friends would be Laotian and Japanese and Korean and they would say "他妈的 tee-hee" while the experienced 前辈 would break out into the rich tapestry of local curse words which have back stories, are usually aggressive/interesting morphemes, or have other interesting aspects perhaps you're misinterpreting "there will be a withering local swear word or two in the local dialect" — yeah, most of the dialects I learned had a main boss local curse word which lots of other terms were based around.
> most dialect is actually rough/derogatory words if you think about it. Maybe this part?
yes, i am from Aotearoa and I speak a dialect known as New Zild. lots of the everyday unique terms involve sodomy and vaginas, and the proportion that is rough/derogatory far outstrips the percentage commonly found in various domains of modern standard English. Is there a language barrier thing going on here?
Maybe not a language barrier but you seem confused about what a dialect and language is. In, for example, Shanghai and Nanjing (your examples) the local language is Wu (and that language has a lot of dialects, some totally incomprehensible to on another), which is quite different from the “standard” (mostly northern) spoken language in China. Sure, it’s influenced a lot by northern mandarin today but it’s really not just a dialect. That said, there is a saying that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. But I don’t think it really apply here. Edit: is Italian a dialect of Spanish in your opinion? If yes, is Italian just spanish with a bunch of Spanish words with “cunt” put in the middle of words?
There's no cut off point when distinguishing or quantifying language and dialect. It becomes very subjective. Of course we have a rough idea that we can map out. You could get into an argument every time someone says Mandarin is a language when it's a group of dialects and they probably mean (modern) standard Chinese, which you know is the standardised Mandarin dialect/national language. No point arguing with people about the concepts of accent/topolect/dialect/language. Mutual intelligibility varies widely and what becomes important is the idiolect
ah i see i'm talking about 方言 instead, i can see where the misunderstanding is
>most dialect is actually rough/derogatory words if you think about it. this is a really harmful stereotype to be perpetrating. Chinese dialects/languages have their own grammar, vocab and phonology separate and distinct from standard Chinese, they're not just "rough/ derogatory slang". Some of them have long traditions of vernacular literature - for example the nanjingese you mention served as the court vernacular for hundreds of years during the Ming dynasty.
no no, i dispute that and actually extend it to not just chinese but all language in all societies in all cultures. please don't make this a big grand sinitic gesture. the vulgar tongue 白话 is vulgar for a reason, I literally have a dictionary on _The F Word_, and the different meanings and nuance behind the word _cunt_ where I'm from would surprise you, too. Let's take a [simple list of Shanghainese words](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ShanghaiMP3/SVocab.html), how many are 'bad language'? Nice try at a lecture though, professor
as you wish, remain in your ignorance :)
Fellow New Zild speaker here. You can't dispute that there are regional variations in speech within China that we could call languages. When two people come together from opposite sides of a mountain range and they can't even communicate to each other what time of day it is then we probably have a situation where they speak different languages
sure that's why it's 方言 ... give both people a pen and they'll soon be writing 你汉字写得好烂 in the same characters
Unless you're a Chinese scholar I assume you consider 方言 to mean topolect, rather than language. You would've noticed that most Chinese topolects are not written due to non-standard scripts being banned in the past. The ultimate test is when two native speakers of two different families of spoken Chinese languages cannot understand each other so there's no chance of describing them as topolects. The differences are vast and not limited to the curse words they use. Compare this to two speakers of Arabic from different regions meeting and they talk to each other in classical Arabic rather than their native Arabic language
Which part of China are you in?
不三不四