I bought a bunch of Game Gear games a few weeks back and at the bottom of the box, amidst the game manuals, were the instructions to the Pokemon card game.
The recent popularity in Pokemon Go seems like a good excuse to check out the vocab used in here. If a bunch of you are learning Chinese and playing Pokemon Go then maybe you can start using Chinese when you play.
什麼是「神奇寶貝」？
什么是“神奇宝贝”？
What are Pokemon?
Under normal circumstances 寶貝 means ‘baby’, not an infant, but as in ‘hey baby, how’s it going?’, so Pokemon in Chinese is really ‘magical baby’. It’s not the best name, I think they should have worked 戰 into the name somewhere to emphasise the nature of the game.
歡迎來到神奇寶貝的世界！神奇寶貝事一群神奇的生物，你可以收集並且訓練他們，來和對手的神奇寶貝對戰，以證明你就是世界上最出色的神奇寶貝教練！
Welcome to the world of Pokemon. Pokemon are a group of special creatures. You can collect and train them to battle against your opponent, to prove you are the world’s most outstanding Pokemon trainer.
Possibly the most important words in Pokemon are 收集 and 訓練 – collect and train. Which is what you spend most of your time doing in Pokemon, well, in addition to battling 對戰 with your opponent 對手 .
There’s far too much to go into here. Download the scans above and use them as self-study material – learning this vocab and how to play Pokemon in Chinese would make great language exchange material.
I also can’t recommend enough the Hanping Popup app for Android. It’s perfect for situations like this when you have text on printed material and want to view definitions without having to type out the words:
If you can’t tell your 皮卡丘 from your 胖丁 head over to Ninchanese for a long list of Pokemon names in Chinese.
