tell me more

这个 means “this,” and 那个 means “that.” Together, they have the same “this or that” meaning that we use in English. The textbook pronunciations are something along the lines of “juh guh” for this, and “na guh” for that. On the streets though, no Chinese actually use the textbook pronunciations.

Colloquially, 这个 and 那个 sound remarkably similar to jiggah and a certain n-word that rhymes with jiggah.

Hmm, not the best of coincidences.

Even worse, Chinese use “that”, 那个, as a filler word the same way we use “uh”, with an even higher frequency. Asking for directions, you might say “Do you know where that, that, Russian restaurant is, near that Dongzhimen?”

In a short sentence, you’ve already thrown out three n-gah’s. Oy.

For an unknowing American like Victor, walking around the streets of Beijing, all he hears are Chinese people throwing n-gah this, n-gah that every other gibberish that he doesn’t understand. He asked me why do the Chinese have to be so racist all the time. I told him that maybe they were all secretly rap gangstahs.

(Interesting side note, the n-gah pronunciation of “that” is only in colloquial Mandarin, so you would only pick up on it in Beijing. In my dialect, the pronunciation is more like luh-guh, nothing worth noting, at least not in American English.)