Simple and yet so complicated.
Talking to one of my friends here in China, he told me that Chinese doesn't make sense at all and that's exactly why when you talk Chinese it makes a perfect sense.
Some examples of marvelous word games in Chinese:
Jiǔ - means alcohol
Pútáo - means grape
Pútáojiǔ - means wine
Bái- white
Báijiǔ - the rice vodka= Chinese alcohol
Huǒ- fire
Chē- vehicle
Huǒchē- train, which actually ( as we all know) IS a vehicle that runs on fire.
Hǎo - means "good". In characters it looks like this 好, first character meaning female and the second one meaning male. In China if somebody has a daughter and a son - that's wonderful, that's why it stands for the word "good".
When people meet in the morning they ask each other:"Nǐ chī fàn le ma?" Which has the meaning of "How do you do?", but actually it translates as "Did you eat rice?", because food in China is a very important topic/aspect of life and if you ate that means you are good, if you didnt may be not so good. Kind of similar to American "How are you?".
You know how we celebrate the Women's day on the 8th of March, well Chinese also celebrate it. So when they want to say that somebody gossips a lot, they call them san ba ( sān= 3, bā=8) :)))))
Something else that i like abt the language is the name of the countries:
USA= Měiguó , Měi = beautiful, guó=country/national
UK= Yīngguó, Yīng= hero
China= Zhōngguó, Zhōng= Middle
Rén= people, and just adding "Rén" to Měiguó, it becomes Měiguórén = American, the same with Zhōngguórén, Yīngguórén, etc.
And there are many other interesting aspects of this language and word games, that i will try to update you with while I'm in China and trying to learn the language. Of course i will also write abt the excruciating part of the Chinese language- the pronunciations and the writing:) but pls be patient, i AM blonde and it is kinda difficult:)
PS: The Romanization System of the Chinese language in this post is called Pīnyīn, and is used by whole China Mainland and of course by foreigners to learn Chinese.