A double entendre

I borrowed a few children’s books from the library, and one of the books that I borrowed had this:

I couldn’t stop laughing 🤣 This is from a library book that kids are reading! 😱 I am going to mention this to my teacher tomorrow, but I don’t quite know how to explain the double entendre using my limited Chinese! I’ll let you know tomorrow how I go… 😆

Anyway, I’ve borrowed these rather simple books because I want to incorporate some more natural sounding Chinese sentences into my spoken Chinese. These sentences are being read by native speakers, so you can’t get any more natural than that. I am using a lot of English grammar to translate what I want to say into Chinese, and so I’m trying to eliminate the translating by trying to make these simple sentences my go-to sentences from which I can build more complex ones. So I’m trying to repeat them as often as I can to internalise them, swapping out words and inserting new ones. Basically, I’m doing this:

– The kids are playing near the river

– We are playing near the river

– They are eating ice-cream near the river

– They are drinking water near the big tree

– I am reading a book under the big tree

Basically playing modular blocks with the different parts of the sentence 😊 The words and sentences are easy, but they’re not fully internalised. I still have to think about each sentence. So it’s all about repetition. And the books that I borrowed actually do a fair bit of repetition, so it’s definitely good practice for me 👍