While living in Nanjing this past year I have spent quite a lot of time bicycling around the city and surrounding area. I’ve had the chance to get to know my local bike shop owner and have been learning new things about enjoying my favorite pastime in China.

One of these days, when I find the extra time, I’ll post some photos and routes and perhaps write a bit about cycling in China. For now, however, I thought I’d share a little bicycle vocabulary diagram that I whipped up last week.

While my Chinese is fine for daily life and work in China, I really have no technical vocabulary for dealing with bicycles and bicycle parts. Many of the words are not found in Pleco either, so discussing problems or repair requests with my bike can be a bit irritating as I have to pause and replace words I don’t know with gestures, sketches or awkward descriptions.

So last week I started to remedy this by stopping by the bike shop with a picture of a bicycle and a pen. I spent some time talking to the bike store owner and taking notes the old-fashioned way. He graciously helped me out. Of course I suppose it was also helping him a bit too as then he would no longer have to deal with my incomplete bicycle-related sentences.

Since knowledge wants to be shared, I thought that I’d share the diagram that I made from our conversation. Here is a PDF of the Chinese English Bike Diagram I’m planning to do another one with more detailed descriptions of different parts sometime soon and I’ll be sure to share that one too!