Jesús
"Me suena a chino" = "It sounds like Chinese" , in Spanish we use this expression ...

to say that we do not understand something or to express that something is to complex to understand. 

Like you can observe we use the Chinese language as metaphor of something difficult.

Do you have a similar expression in your own language ?

Jan 7, 2019 5:03 PM
Comments · 5
2
Wow, we have a very similar expression in Russian! "Ты как-то по-китайски это делаешь" (~"eh, you're doing it in a Chinese way") - we say that when someone is doing something in a weird/unorthodox fashion, for example, peeling a tangerine not the way most people do, or holding a pencil "incorrectly". Apparently in the past, Russians considered the Chinese to be a completely different, peculiar, shrouded in mystery culture. It's funny to hear that there's a similar expression in Spanish...
January 7, 2019
2
In America, there is the expression "It's all Greek to me!" which is similar to yours. 
January 7, 2019
1
Spanish villages = something completely strange to me, something I know nothing about.
January 7, 2019
1
It's a very old expression, even having been used by Shakespeare in his play "Julius Caesar." I'm not sure where it has its origins from, but I suspect it comes from the Greek alphabet being different from the Latin one, and so not only can we not understand it spoken, but we can't even try to read it. I think it may have to do with the Church's preference for Latin over Greek for writing, but I can't be sure.
January 7, 2019
1

@Dana

Hi, Greek? Why Greek? Do you know the reason of this ? :)

January 7, 2019