Words to Your Mother: 懂嗎 (懂吗/dong ma)

Had trouble posting last night, so I'm effectively doubling up tonight to keep my roughly one word/phrase per day schedule.

懂嗎 (懂吗 or dong ma) is Mandarin Chinese for "Understand?" or "Got it?"  Ni dong ma is a slightly more proper way of saying this.

Like Vietnamese or Hmong, Chinese is a tonal language.  In this case, the tone for "dong" starts low and dips even lower.  The tone for "ma" should be fairly neutral.

As you can probably guess from the links, this phrase pops up a fair amount in Firefly and Serenity.  Shiny.

technorati tags:words, vocabulary, 懂嗎, 懂吗, dong ma, Mandarin, Chinese, tonal languages

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