The story is: there was a painter a long time ago, his style is very confusing people, nobody understood what exactly he paintings were.

One day, when he just drew a head of a tiger, a man came to ask him to draw a horse. So he just randomly put a horse’s body under the tiger head. The guy asked him what was it, he said: “mamahuhu”. Of course, that guy didn’t want it and left.

So he hang the painting at the living room in his house, when his elder son saw it, the painter told him it was a tiger, however, he told his younger son it was just a horse.

Later on, his elder son mis-killed an expensive horse when he was hunting, because he thought it was a horse, so the painter had to pay lots of money to the owner.

Also his younger son was killed by a tiger when he was trying to ride the “tiger”, because he thought it was just a horse.

Now you understand, the meaning of “mamahuhu”, Chinese people use it as “not good, not bad"

Benny

Learn Chinese, Learn Mandarin from AskBenny

i am a chinese girl. i am doing this for a school report on animal idioms. just that i have to translate it into chinese. Thank you so much for the story. :D

In Thai language we have very similar phrase " ngoo ngoo pla pla" (ngoo pronounce like “who”)literally means “snake snake fish fish”. … “so so”