What is ‘stroll’ in Mandarin? Jeffrey Xu, Annette Lee get super competitive translating English and Chinese words

Those who follow Felicia Chin on Instagram would have seen the newly-minted All-Time Favourite Artiste's videos of her hubby Jeffrey Xu learning English. 

The series features clips of the Shanghai-born actor reading English signs, pronouncing tricky words, and learning his tenses, and to date, Feli has shared eight clips of Jeffrey’s English learning journey. 

As such, it would totally make sense to put his newly acquired language skills to the test, right?

Earlier this week, local actress and influencer Annette Lee posted a video of herself and Jeffrey going head to head in a challenge, in which they compete to see who is faster in translating random English and Chinese words. 

For those who don't know, Annette is way more fluent in English than in Mandarin so it makes for a pretty fair challenge, we believe.

“My beautiful wife, Felicia, is gonna test us on Chinese words and English words today. [She’ll see] who can translate [them] faster,” said a nervous-looking Jeffrey at the start of the video. 

He had nothing to worry about though. The video, which is less than two minutes long, has proven that all the practice Jeffrey has put into his English has not gone to waste. 

Although Annette got the first question correct, accurately translating ‘sense of mystery’ from Chinese to English, Jeffrey quickly took the lead with a hot streak. 

He correctly translated ‘discount’ from English to Chinese, and ‘kangaroo’ from Chinese to English, impressing both Annette and Feli, who sounded like a proud teacher behind the camera.

Then, when he was able to translate ‘xiang ri kui’, which is 'sunflower', in no time at all, it prompted Annette to ask: “Did you read a bunch of children’s books? The kind where they teach you the names of plants and animals?”

Turns out, Jeffrey had a perfectly sweet reason for getting the question correct. “No, it’s because Felicia likes sunflowers,” he said matter-of-factly.

The last question required Jeffrey and Annette to translate ‘stroll’ into Chinese,  but Jeffrey misheard ‘stroll’ as ‘straw’ and so he said ‘xi guan’.

Both Annette and Felicia burst into laughter as they realised that Jeffrey had confused the two words, which we guess to a non-native speaker, can sound quite similar.

The video ended as Annette and Feli tried to repeat the word ‘stroll’ for Jeffrey, with emphasis on the double ‘L’s. 

The clip has garnered more than 41.6K views on TikTok to date, with many netizens asking the trio to do more of such videos. 

Well, Jeffrey did comment on Annette’s IG post, asking those who would like to see a second part of the challenge to comment ‘2’. 

As of press time, more than a hundred of Annette’s followers have demanded a part two, so hopefully we’ll get to see a sequel to this video soon?