help i misspelled Brendan oh man i am not good with computer pls to help
yup: tool > technique > work > industry, and branching off into “construction” from somewhere in there
it originally depicted some variant of this but yeah the I-beam definitely helped cement* the continued use of this character
* 
Why settle for 1 when you can have 3:
张三、李四、王五
(and if you're wondering why they start indexing at 3, all I can say is it's a bit 乱七八糟)
I think it's pretty telling that the original sea lion comic is just a guy being racist and getting annoyed when the sea lion calls him out on said racism
admittedly a rather gay drama but w/e (word of honor)
Everyone's learning Mandarin lol. I've been on and off for a few years but should get back into it, 亡羊补牢！
I've tried to learn the Arabic alphabet a few times but I just can't keep track of the dots. Are there other ways to group the letters that help learning?
1st tone ā - a high flat tone, like singing
2nd tone á - rising, from the middle to the top, like a question
3rd tone ǎ - low tone, as low as you can, it often becomes vocal fry. (also rises a bit at the end of sentences or in isolation)
4th tone à - falling, from the top to the bottom, sounds angry
there's also a secret "neutral tone" that happens to the second syllable of many two-syllable words, or for grammatical particles. it changes tone height based on where the previous tone ended, so basically if the previous tone ends low, the neutral tone is high and vice versa. these syllables are also shorter in duration and some diphthongs are flattened.
It's not really slang, and it translates pretty cleanly as "[you] could hardly be saying that ... ?", but I still want to give an honorable mention to Chinese 难道 nándào which explicitly indicates a rhetorical question, and it's basically the default way of asking rhetorical questions.
I think you could even read the CPC rep saying 再降四分钱 to imply "how about you drop dead and divvy up your money" (but I'm a noob + definitely reading too much into it)