Ever since Beijing entered this summer season, heatwaves have on-and-off haunted the city. The thermometer at our Beijing home constantly spikes to 37 ℃. Even for someone like me whose hometown is in Wuhan, a place known as one of three-furnace-cities in China for its humidity and heat in summer, days like this in Beijing has hit my heat tolerance limit.
While sitting in front of my computer to write this week’s blog, heat seeped its way to kindle my inspiration for this post. Our keyword today is heatstroke, 中暑zhòngshǔ in Chinese. When outdoor temperature climbs above 37 ℃ for a-long-period of time, we hear this word quite often.
Lately a video clip circulated among my Wechat friends shows a brokenhearted woman sitting and crying next to her pet, a Golden Retriever who appears not responsive. According to its caption, the woman walked her dog in the sun highest after giving the dog a bath but not drying his fur properly. The dog had a heatstroke and was sent to a vet hospital but failed to respond to the emergency treatment and unfortunately died. This is no doubt a tragedy resulted from ignorance toward dog care, and it really broke my heart to learn about this news. But it’s also an alert for all of us to be aware of heatstroke! It happens to both humans and animals.
Now let’s put aside the story of heatstroke and look at this word 中暑zhòngshǔ. 中 is a Chinese character with two tones—–you may also visit my previous post introducing different Chinese tones, where you can read and hear about the sound of tones in Chinese. When at the first tone, 中 zhōng means in the middle, and an example of using this character is in the word中国 zhōngguó meaning China. It has the idea of the center state—–yes it also reflects the arrogance of the ancient Chinese rulers, who considered China is the center of the world. When at the forth tone, 中 zhòng means to hit or be hit by and you may also notice that it functions as a verb. As introduced in my other post, 暑shǔ means hot temperature or heat. 中暑zhòngshǔ literally refers to be hit by heat, and is equivalent to heatstroke.
Let’s use this term in a sentence.
我中暑了。(I got a heatstroke.)
You may click the following audio play to hear how 中暑zhòngshǔ is pronounced by a native Chinese.
To hear about the authentic pronunciation of 中国 zhōngguó, please click below.
Often in the Chinese conversations where include the topic of heatstroke, we mention 防暑降温fángshǔ jiàngwēn, literally meaning ‘to prevent heat, reduce temperature’ if for word-to-word translation. We may understand it as to prevent heatstroke by reducing temperature.
To hear about the authentic pronunciation of this common phrase, please click it below here.
Hope you have found these words and phrases useful. As usual, please let me know how you think on this subject by leaving me a comment. Keep cool in this summer!