Name: English Words that are ACTUALLY Chinese!
Uploaded: 2025-11-03T21:01:10.000Z
Duration: 9 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

And the word brainwashing and even ketchup does too.

Adverbs of manner

So how many other English words are actually Chinese?

Well, we're going to tell you in this episode of Learn Chinese now.

We patch together words from all sorts of different languages.

French, Latin, Greek, even languages like Arabic and Turkish.

So it's natural that English would would borrow some words from Chinese.

But some of these words are what you would least expect.

But before we start, if you like what we're doing on this channel,

please give us a like subscribe and become a member so we can keep making videos about everything Chinese.

Alright, let's get into our first word: Gung ho.

It means someone who's enthusiastic about something.

Wow, someone's really gung ho about doing all those extra credit assignments.

Man, he's really gung ho about mowing his lawn every week.

Gung ho actually comes from a Chinese word called, 工合, which looks on the surface like it means work together or cooperate together.

But 工合 was the name of an actual organization in China.

You see, in the 1930s, China was facing a lot of problems.

Unrest, invasion from the Japanese and so on.

There were millions of war refugees and something needed to be done about them.

So the Chinese people started industrial cooperatives, or 工業合作社.

工合 is just a shorthand for that long word.

It was basically a worker owned company that focused on producing military use items such as blankets, boots, things like that.

So in the 1930s, a US Marine Corps colonel named Evans Carlson toured China,

and he was so impressed by the Chinese spirit that he named his unit after these cooperatives.

Carlson said that the motto gung ho meant work together, work in harmony.

Which is interesting because while it's inaccurate, it happens to be a hominin of the correct word can mean to do something together.

So his wrong interpretation ended up becoming how we understand gung ho to mean to go all out to do something and to work together as a group to do it.

So English got the word tycoon from Japanese, but the Japanese got their word from Chinese.

There's a word in Chinese called 大君, which basically means great prince.

As Japan learned a lot of their culture from China, they also borrowed a bunch of wood words and dajun was one of them.

So in the 1850s, Commodore Matthew Perry came to Japan to open it up to Western trade.

When the Japanese tried to negotiate with him, he insisted that he wouldn't talk to anyone but the highest leader.

At that point, Japan had an emperor, but he was mainly just a figurehead.

It was the shogun that ran the country at the time.

But the thing is, shogun in Japanese basically just means general of the army, which doesn't sound good enough as a title to present to the Americans.

So the shogun decided to call himself the tycoon when talking with the Americans, and that did the trick.

So when the American press talked about Perry's visits to Japan, they changed taikun  to tycoon,

Even Abraham Lincoln was called the tycoon by some of his aides.

But gradually, the word came less to mean a ruler and more to mean just a rich businessman, which is the way we use it today.

Back in the 1600s, Britain was beginning to trade with the Chinese.

One of the cities that was doing big business back then was Amoy, which we now call Xiamen.

If you look at it on a map, it's basically right across the water from Taiwan.

So the people of Amoy had a kind of sauce made from pickled fish called kaijuk.

So it's hard to know exactly what this tasted like,

but probably a good comparison is the fish doux or yulu fish sauce.

Around the late 1600s, the British brought this food back home and called it catchup, and then ketchup.

They westernized it a bit by using anchovies and mushroom sauce.

Later, an American named James Mees invented tomato ketchup.

Then people got rid of the anchovies, and our great American condiment was born.

Now, some people also use the spelling catsup,

but that's just another attempt to find a way to make ketchup into English.

This word comes straight from modern Chinese.

In Chinese, there's a term called xino, which literally means to wash the brain.

This term became synonymous with the Chinese Communist Party's use of propaganda to psychologically manipulate both its enemies and its own people.

So how did Americans find out about the term sinao?

You see, during the Korean War, sometimes the Chinese army would take American troops as prisoners.

And what the American generals noticed was that the Chinese were often able to get information out of the POWs, and

sometimes could even get them to defect to the Chinese.

An American journalist named Edward Hunter investigated it and found that the Chinese were using re education techniques on the American.

And when he talked to former Chinese prisoners who had been subjected to this kind of treatment, he learned about the term xi nao.

He then wrote the English term brainwashing for the first time in the Miami News in 1950 and followed it up with a book on the same subject.

And the word has been in our lexicon ever since.

So in Mandarin literally means very long, no sea.

And you could see how maybe some Chinese people who don't speak English that well might say it this way.

Kind of like how you would take the Chinese term for Chinese people or and literally that reads as China man, which is probably how the old term Chinaman came about.

Anyway, in 1892, there was a newspaper article in Boston that came out about a woman who talked with the local Chinese a lot and ended up accidentally picking up their way of speaking English.

In the article, she said, maybe I think I go see my mama today.

That phrase got picked up in other places and now we all know it.

Another phrase that we won't get into detail on is no can do, which probably comes from either, which means not okay to be done, basically, or which literally means no can do.

In the late 1800s, there was a missionary in China named Arthur H.

Smith who popularized the idea of saving face.

He wrote a book on the characteristics of Chinese people, and

he devoted an entire chapter to the concept of face.

In that book, he face will be found to be in itself a key to the combination lock of many of the most important characteristics of the Chinese.

There's a term called which literally means lose face.

And there's another term we mianza, which means to do something for your face.

And that's probably where the idea of saving face came from.

So did you like this list of words we shared today?

Do you want us to do another episode of these kinds of words, or do you think we left any words out?