Reading Chinese Menus: Characters: 豆 and 腐 — dòu and fǔ — beans and beancurd

[kake]

豆 and 腐

Having covered meat and fish, it's time to turn to the other protein staple of the Chinese menu — tofu, or beancurd. The full name for beancurd is 豆腐 (dòu fu), which is made up of the character for "beans/legumes" (豆) charmingly combined with the character for "gone off/rotten" (腐). Needless to say, beancurd is not actually rotten, and it's not even fermented; it's a fresh product made by coagulating soya milk. Wikipedia suggests that 腐 can also be translated as "curdled", but I have no idea how accurate this is.

Translation of 腐 is much easier in the context of the Chinese menu. If you see 腐 on a menu, it simply means "beancurd" — it's a commonly accepted and widespread abbreviation for 豆腐.

Given that the pinyin for 豆 is dòu, readers of my post on 肉 (ròu) should be able to deduce that it's pronounced like "dough", with a falling (fourth) tone. 腐 is pronounced as "foo". On its own, it's spoken with the third tone (falling-then-rising), but when combined with 豆 to make 豆腐, 腐 is spoken with the "fifth tone" (also known as "neutral tone"); this basically means that the syllable is a toneless one. For more on the fifth tone, there are some useful hints from pulchritude in a previous comment thread.

Other words which use 豆:

毛豆	máo dòu	green soya beans (edamame) — literally "hairy bean"
土豆	tǔ dòu	potato or peanut — literally "earth bean"
豆苗	dòu miáo	pea shoots/pea sprouts/mangetout leaves
荷蘭豆	Hélán dòu	mangetout (snow peas) — literally "Dutch bean" (may be abbreviated to 荷豆/hé dòu)
雪豆	xuě dòu	another word for mangetout

Note that I've never seen 豆苗 used to refer to what we call "beansprouts" in English! A different "sprout" character (芽/yá) is used in that context — beansprouts are 銀芽 (yín yá, literally "silver sprouts"), 豆芽 (dòu yá), 大豆芽 (dà dòu yá), or 芽菜 (yá cài).

Approximate pronunciations (in my British accent): máo rhymes with "cow", tǔ is as "two", hé is as "her", lán rhymes with "man", miáo is as "meow" (one syllable, not two), yín rhymes with "in", yá and dà rhyme with "ah", and cài is like "sigh" but with "ts" instead of the "s".

xuě is a little trickier. The consonant, "x", is like the "ch" in German "ich" (at least, as taught in British schools) or a bit like a softer version of the "ch" in "loch". pne suggests that the vowel sound, "ue", is as if it was spelled uè in French, but my French isn't good enough to confirm this, so if yours isn't either, check out this YouTube video at the 3:50 point.

豆:	dòu	radical 151 (豆)	Cantodict	MandarinTools	YellowBridge	Zhongwen
腐:	fǔ	radical 130 (肉/⺼)	Cantodict	MandarinTools	YellowBridge	Zhongwen

Related posts:

• 上湯豆苗 (shàng tāng dòu miáo/mangetout leaves in a rich stock),
• 乾煸四季豆 (gān biān sì jì dòu/dry-fried green beans),
• 麻婆豆腐 (má pó dòu fu/mapo tofu),
• 皮蛋豆腐 (pí dàn dòu fu/beancurd with preserved egg),
• 土豆絲 (tǔ dòu sī/shredded potatoes),
• 毛 (máo/hair)

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.

Comments

[pulchritude]

I have actually never heard of the term 荷蘭豆 before! The term with which I'm familiar is 雪豆 :O

[kake]

Oh, interesting! I've seen 荷蘭豆 on lots of menus but I don't remember ever seeing 雪豆... I'll have a trawl through my collection tomorrow.

[kake]

So, I've had a look through the menus I have, and none of them use 雪豆. I did find one that uses 荷豆, which I guess is an abbreviation of 荷蘭豆. Anyway, I've added 雪豆 to the post and to my own vocab list — thanks!

I'm not sure how best to describe the pronunciation, so I haven't put that part in yet. I usually describe "x" as being like the "ch" in German "ich" (as taught in British schools... I seem to remember it's a slightly different sound in different parts of Germany) or a bit like a softer version of the "ch" in "loch", but "ue" has me stumped. Any suggestions?

[pne]

The first bit is like the "u" in French "lune" (or the "ü" in German "früh"), isn't it? So, perhaps something like "as if spelled uè in French"?

("Like ühe in German frühe" probably wouldn't work because the e is usually reduced to a shwa there, which is not true - as far as I know - for the Chinese sound in yue, xue.)

[kake]

My French isn't good enough for me to know how "uè" is pronounced, so I've edited that in to the post and blamed it on you :) Thank you!

[pulchritude]

I'm terrible with phonetics and trying to find approximate sounds (mainly because it's my first language, I think), so I'm afraid I can't offer much help. Good luck finding something! :3

[kake]

No problem — thought it was worth a shot :) I've gone with pne's suggestion.

[pne]

荷蘭豆 — hé lán dòu — mangetout (snow peas)

Literally "Dutch bean" (荷蘭 is a phonetic representation of "Holland", i.e. the Netherlands). (So a better transcription might be "Hélán dòu".)

[kake]

Thank you! I've changed it.

[nanila]

Oh boy. I'm never going to be able to eat edamame again without thinking "I'm eating hairy beans. Heh. Heheheh."

[kake]

I'm not sure if that's a euphemism or a face pyjama!

[(Anonymous)]

The only thing I think I'd query here is the advice for pronouncing the sound transliterated as 'x' in pinyin; the "ch" sounds both as used in German and in the Scottish "loch" are, I think, produced way too far back in the throat to be a useful comparison. I think I would suggest to native English speakers to think more of the 'x' as half-way between an unvoiced 'th' (as in 'think') and 'sh'.

- ajva

Pronunciation of "x"

[kake]

Thank you — yes, I do see what you mean with the "th"/"sh" comparison, though I'm not sure it would make sense to me if I didn't already know what I was aiming for. Perhaps it works better as a refinement of pronunciation, rather than as an initial "roughly right" suggestion? I don't want people to get put off this early in the series by the difficulties of pronunciation, and indeed wasn't planning to explicitly talk about the "x" consonant until later (but 雪/xuě came up in comments and I edited it in).

I'm going to be talking more about aspects of pronunciation later on (currently scheduled for around the end of June), so I'll make sure to mention this then, and will credit the suggestion to you. Thank you again!