I present a YouTube channel in English. The channel runs AI models against each other on the same challenge and compares the answers. I want two lines of Mandarin in this video, said out loud, in my own voice, and I do not speak Chinese. I cannot read characters. I have never heard most of these sounds.
What I can do is read English. That is the entire tool you have to work with: you write something in English letters, I say it into a microphone, and a Chinese listener either understands me or does not.
Two quips. One sentence each, at most fourteen characters each, shorter is better — I have to say them on camera from memory.
Quip 1 — about Claude Fable 5 refusing most of the Johanna Benchmark challenges on cybersecurity concerns.
Quip 2 — Pick a Chinese proverb, idiom or set expression and use it to say something about the "China vs. the U.S." AI race. Use a relatively unknown one... not one of the top 30 examples that a Chinese person would think of first. Be creative, artistic, deep in your choice, even though it's then used to crack a joke.
Both quips are jokes and they are supposed to bite. Sharp, witty, outrageously funny, not diplomatic. A quip that is careful and balanced has failed this. So has one that hedges, and so has one that explains itself inside the joke. Do not soften it to be fair to everyone involved.
Respell it for an English mouth, not in pinyin. Pinyin is a spelling system for people who already know how it sounds. I do not, so I will read it as English and produce the wrong sound with total confidence: qi comes out "kwee" when it is "chee", xie comes out "zy" when it is "shyeh", zhong comes out "zong" when it is "jong", cai comes out "kay" when it is "tsigh", ren comes out "wren" when it is "run", shi comes out "shy" when it is "shrr". Write the syllables the way an English speaker has to see them in order to say them. If your respelling would survive being read aloud by someone who does not know a single Chinese word, it is right.
Mark the tone on every syllable, with these arrows and no others. I have never spoken a tonal language and I need to see the shape of my voice:
| Tone | Arrow |
|---|---|
| 1st, high and flat | → |
| 2nd, rising | ↗ |
| 3rd, dipping | ↘↗ |
| 4th, falling sharply | ↘ |
| neutral, no tone at all | · |
Respell what is actually said, not what the dictionary lists. Tones change when syllables sit next to each other. Write the spoken version, and say in tone_changes which syllables you changed and why.
One row per character. The characters, the respelling and your notes are going on screen together, lined up, so a viewer can see which sound belongs to which character. syllables must have exactly one entry per Chinese character in chinese, in order, with no rows for punctuation and no two characters merged into one row.
Warn me about the sounds English does not have. Tell me what to do with my mouth. "Say 'she' but with the tip of your tongue pressed down behind your bottom teeth" is useful. "Alveolo-palatal fricative" is not.
Pick the sayable version. If the funnier line needs a sound I would need three weeks to learn, write the slightly less funny line I can actually land. Say so if you made that trade.
You should know what is about to happen to your answer, because it changes what a good answer is.
I am going to paste your chinese into Google Translate to check it means what you told me it means. Then I am going to read your read_aloud into Google Translate's Chinese voice input and see what it thinks I said. What comes back gets compared, on camera, to the characters you started from.
So this is not scored on whether your transcription is correct by any standard. It is scored on whether a machine can understand your sentence from an English speaker's mouth reading English letters — and on whether the joke is funny in Chinese, which is a separate question from whether it is funny translated.
Raw JSON, nothing else — no markdown fence, no preamble, no commentary afterwards. Exactly this shape:
{
"quips": [
{
"id": "fable",
"chinese": "...",
"english": "...",
"joke": "...",
"syllables": [
{ "hanzi": "...", "say": "...", "tone": 0, "arrow": "..." }
],
"read_aloud": "...",
"tone_changes": "",
"watch_out": ""
},
{
"id": "proverb",
"chinese": "...",
"english": "...",
"joke": "...",
"syllables": [
{ "hanzi": "...", "say": "...", "tone": 0, "arrow": "..." }
],
"read_aloud": "...",
"tone_changes": "",
"watch_out": ""
}
],
"proverb": {
"text": "...",
"literal": "...",
"means": "...",
"why_this_one": "..."
},
"tones": [
{ "tone": 0, "arrow": "...", "what_to_do": "..." }
],
"hard_sounds": [
{ "sound": "...", "what_to_do": "..." }
],
"notes": "..."
}
chinese — the quip in simplified characters.english — a literal gloss, so I can check it against Google Translate.joke — one line: what makes it funny. I cannot read the Chinese and I have to explain the joke on camera.syllables — one entry per character. say is the respelling of that one syllable, tone is the number 1–4 as it is actually said (0 for a neutral syllable), arrow is that tone's arrow from rule 2.read_aloud — the whole quip as one line of respelling with the arrow after each syllable. This is the field I read off the screen, so it has to stand alone.tone_changes — which syllables come out on a different tone than the dictionary gives, and why. "" if none do.watch_out — only where this quip has a trap in it. "" otherwise; do not pad.proverb — the expression behind quip 2: the characters, the literal reading, what it actually means, and why you picked it for this. Say plainly who each half of the comparison is.tones — all five, in order, with the arrow and what to do with my voice.hard_sounds — at most five. The sounds most likely to make me unintelligible.notes — what you traded away, and which quip you expect me to lose.