http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/022655 ... d_i=507846


has anyone seen this quirky little book on sale in Shanghai, i know itll take a while to get it off of Amazon

Picked up the same book at Shanghai Book Traders last month. (140rmb)

It has both Cantonese and Mandarin translations but disappointingly it's based soley on North American Chinese menus and all traditional characters.

Another small problem is that it does not contain a section of foods eaten by Americans/Europeans in China. One quick example that comes to mind is you will not find things like fried eggs sunny side up. Some day someone will come up with a good English/Chinese food dictionary for China but so far I have not seen any. This guide is about as good as it gets for now. I purchased mine through Amazon.com a while back.

thanks guys, mmm I might hold off on it, I presume the menus here are in Simplified characters. The real main reason that I want is that im vegetarian and would like to be able to sort of understand some of the menus. Other than that itll be "wo bu chi rou"..."I dont eat meat"

but even though I got a chinese friend to order yesterday saying no meat there was still some pork in the noodle dish and some meat in the soup....frustrating

I think you'll be better off learning something like "I'm allergic to meat" or "I'm a buddhist monk" or something.

The Chinese definition of "no meat" seems to be different from the western one

Lee_the_Bee wrote:thanks guys, mmm I might hold off on it, I presume the menus here are in Simplified characters. The real main reason that I want is that im vegetarian and would like to be able to sort of understand some of the menus. Other than that itll be "wo bu chi rou"..."I dont eat meat"

but even though I got a chinese friend to order yesterday saying no meat there was still some pork in the noodle dish and some meat in the soup....frustrating

I think you will have a hard time in most restaurants in China.... You will ind little pieces of some kind of meat in most veggie dishes....

Or if you are lucky, after they cook with meat, they will take the pieces out of your dish.....

Hey, this site may help, I found it some time back and thought it was helpful. It's a site dedicated on for vegetarians in China, and it lists how to say some common phrases and some common vegetarian food.

http://www.vegetarian-china.info/