Angrboda

Where’s Momo and her google-fu? She was totally on top of it when I wanted to know whether “Mi” (as in, Mi Xian Black and… Mi Lan Dancong Black?) meant honey or somesuch.

Someone should compile a Chinese glossary of some sort! That would be cool.

I really have no idea how Chinese works but hong does mean red, but I have no idea about how to use it. It looks like just talking about red by itself is “hong se” but at least with cha, it’s just “hong.”

I really wanted to know about mi …because I was confused and forgot the first panda cub born here was Mei and not Mi. Still was useful!

Hei cha means black tea is my understanding from my video tea group.

My Mandarin is really, really rusty, but I think I still remember enough of it and some very basic tea culture to add here. If not, I could always just call up my parents (they emigrated from China to the US).

(Totally random, mildly irrelevant blurb below)
Chinese has a lot of dialects, the most commonly spoken and shared one being Mandarin (the other one is Cantonese). Mandarin has four tones, so one syllable spoken in one tone can have a completely different meaning when it’s spoken with another tone.

The Chinese refer to what we call black tea as “hong cha”, because the liquid looks kind of dark reddish when steeped. Black tea, or “hei cha” (my pinyin is also horribly rusty, so I might be spelling it wrong there) can be used to refer to the category of fermented teas (pu-erh falls under this).

Honey is “feng mi”, if I recall. I have no idea what “Mi Xian” is in the context of tea. I know of it as a type of noodle dish from some province (Yunnan, I think?).

I knew cha. So when I see ‘hong cha’ as part of the name I can be relatively certain of the type then, but with some room for exceptions? That’s worth remembering.
As I understand it, Mandarin and Cantonese sound like almost two completely different languages and a person speaking one may not necessarily be able to understand the other. Is the writing the same though? Or do we have to pay attention with the pinyin that it might be one or the other? I’m trying not to jump to conclusions here.
As for mi, perhaps on its own it has something to do with sweetness in general, and then whatever it’s combined with tells you what sort of sweetness?
(Sometimes I start to wonder if the easiest thing isn’t just to take an evening class in Chinese For Beginners or something…)

Chinese tea dictionary, type in your chinese phrase (pinyin included) and it will give you a translation! I used it a lot when I was in China.
http://babelcarp.org/babelcarp/

Though sometimes it does come up short, for instance when it can’t find “Mi”! But you can see that “Mi Xiang” means literally honey fragrant.

And I am pretty certain if it a tea is labeled Hong Cha that it is always “red tea”, or as westerners would say, black tea. In China if you order “black tea” (in english translation), you get a cup of puerh (I know because it happened to me)!

Yeah, you can be pretty certain that tea labelled as ‘hong cha’ in China would be a type of black tea.

Pinyin is used for Mandarin Chinese romanization only. Cantonese romanization uses something else.

And yes, Mandarin and Cantonese are very different from each other. Cantonese has more tones than Mandarin. I’ve always been under the impression that they’re mutually unintelligible, but one of my friends who speaks Cantonese at home but knows little Mandarin says she can sometimes figure out a conversation in Mandarin by using Cantonese to help. My dad once mentioned that he had difficulties trying to assist an elderly Cantonese lady many years ago, since neither of them could understand each other. I guess it depends on how familiar a Cantonese speaker is with Mandarin. From my experience and questions to/observations of friends and family members, it definitely doesn’t work the other way around (Mandarin speaker trying to understand Cantonese without any formal training).

Mandarin Chinese is the lingua franca for both verbal and written communication in China (there are a ridiculous number of Chinese dialects, and many of them are mutually unintelligible or only moderately intelligible with one another. It’s pretty fascinating.). There’s a form of written Cantonese, with a different grammar structure than Mandarin. Other than that, I don’t know much about it. I’m sure the characters are a little different as well.