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好好学习天天向上 (hǎohǎo xuéxí tiāntiān xiàngshàng). Mao Zedong’s calligraphic exhortation to schoolchildren, carved into a thousand school gates, translated into the most iconic Chinglish construction ever: “Good good study, day day up.”
Unlike “long time no see,” this phrase is *never* used seriously in English. It’s an inside joke — Chinese people use it self-deprecatingly, foreigners use it to show familiarity with Chinese culture, and everyone laughs.
But humor is a legitimate linguistic pathway. Plenty of English borrowings started as jokes and normalized. “Je ne sais quoi” was pretentious before it was vocabulary.
My argument: “Good good study day day up” won’t become standard English and doesn’t need to. Its value is different. It’s a shared cultural reference point — a shibboleth. If you know this phrase, you know something about China.
Not every import has to be invisible. Some can wave a flag.
**Verdict: Cultural shibboleth. Keep as-is.**
了解更多：什么是中式英语？
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