Chinese translation help

September 22, 2009 5:08 PM

硬背. Please translate this into English for me.

According to Google's machine translation, 硬背 means "blindly memorizing." Is this correct? If not, is there a better way to express this precise idea in Mandarin?

posted by killdevil to Writing & Language (4 answers total)

I'm a native mandarin speaker, and I tend to say "死背." My Chinese education is casual at best, though, so I ran a Chinese-English dictionary search for you. It recommends 死記硬背, which I've heard as well.
posted by mittenedsex at 5:14 PM on September 22, 2009

Whats the context? It means nothing to me other than the two characters ying4 (hard) bei4 (back).
posted by wongcorgi at 5:55 PM on September 22, 2009

If I plug the two characters into a Google find and then do a 'Translate this page' on each of the sites it finds, it comes up with 'rote' in the majority of cases I looked at.
posted by tellurian at 6:28 PM on September 22, 2009

mittenedsex is right on all counts. The phrase 死記硬背 is commonly used to mean 'rote learning', as tellurian has also noted.
posted by Abiezer at 7:14 PM on September 22, 2009