We took a poll of a group of international graduate students at the Communication University of China as well as our own staff on the WeChat expressions that confuse them the most, and discovered that apart from the oft-touted “generation gap” in people’s understanding of these expressions, there are also misunderstandings rooted in cultural differences as well as the fact that it’s really hard to get across a complex emotion in an illustration that’s a few millimeters across.īelow, we’ve listed the 11 expressions that confused our respondents most, excerpting some of their responses as well as the “official” explanation, as defined by the commands you can type in the app get the expressions to show up in both the Chinese and English settings of the app.
As shown by a recent guide published by Quartz, not to mention perennial accounts from Chinese internet users of funny ways in which parents and older relatives misuse expressions or make tacky stickers of their own, WeChat expressions can elucidate subtexts as much as they add further cryptic nuances to conversation. WeChat has certainly opened up new avenues of communication in China, not in the least by providing a rich arsenal of emojis and “stickers” that help us put hard-to-convey nuances and human expressions in messaging. State media calls it the “new channel for individual expression,” but to Chinese netizens, it’s the source of a new “generation gap” (代沟 dàigōu).