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Once upon a time, a foreign friend of mine asked me to play ping-pong ball with him. I agreed and said: “I would like to accept your challenge and let us have a great game today!” On the way to the sports ground, we chatted about Chinese learning culture of sports and something like that with full ease and freely, because I am a native speaker who has been living in China for several years. During our conversation, I used a phrase qie1 cuo1, and then he was puzzled by its meaning. Noticing that he was truly interested in learning Chinese language as well as profound and far reaching culture online or offline, I was planning to give him some advice on how to choose a Chinese textbook or online learning Chinese language website for further study.
And then, according to my learning contents in online Chinese lessons that I have known for so long, I began to explain to him regarding the meaning and usage of the Chinese phrase qie1 cuo1. I used a stick writing the strokes of the phrase as 切磋 on the earth, and began to taught him to read after me qie1 cuo1. He got comprehensible soon the moment I was going to tell him about its old stories.
It is said that the word qie1 means that using an instrument to making and producing some animal’s bones. And cuo1 means that using an item to produce the teeth of the elephants. For some reasons, you have to know another two words like zhuo2 and mo1. For one thing, the word 琢 zhuo2 means that the movement of making some jewels and other worthy furniture. For another thing, the word磨 mo2 was the production of stones. Due to poor technology and tools, it was rather difficult to transform from the bones, teeth, stone into a whole and mature wares or tools in ancient time. To process different materials entailed different procedures and methods. So the four words above are the names of four totally distinct way of procession.
As time went by, people used the four words in total to signify a discussion and research two people in terms of skills and knowledge. In order to be brief for expression, people used the just two former words like qie1 and cuo1 to indicate this whole meaning.
After hearing a series of narrations of the strange and interesting original story, my friend became crazy about leaning Chinese language. The Chinese online lesson will give him a big favor in mastering the Chinese language words or phrases as many as possible. A moment later, he learned how to speak the phrase qie1 cuo1, and we really had a great time!