Archive for the ‘Chinese’ Category
Impress Your Friends with Little Effort
Wednesday 18th October
One of the most common questions I am asked when people realise I’m into Japanese and Chinese is…
“How do you tell the difference?”
Well, I will answer that for you right now and you will be able to impress your chums and associates. You won’t have to have even an inkling of what the writing means, but you’ll still be able to differentiate.
Both languages use what are known as ‘Han’ characters - pictographs developed during the Han dynasty in China. However, the difference is quite clear once you know what to look for.
The Chinese use the characters directly - one character per syllable, each character expressing a simple concept. Characters can be combined to construct more complex ideas:
你忙吗？ - you/busy/(question)?
“Are you busy?”
我要喝茶 - I/want/drink/tea
“I want to drink tea”
Japanese, however, took the Han characters and integrated them into their already existing language. The existing language had a grammar which was not compatible with the Han characters, so a second set of characters exists, called hiragana. These characters are simpler and spell the spoken grammar phonetically. These characters are the key to telling the difference as seen in a repeat of the above phrases in Japanese (with grammar characters highlighted in green):
忙しい です か - busy is (question)
“Are you busy?”
In this example, we see that the character 忙 (busy) is identical between the two languages. However, in the Japanese, it’s surrounded by many of those less complex ‘grammar’ characters.
And so for the next phrase:
茶 を 飲みたい - tea (object marker) want-to-drink.
“I want to drink tea”
We can again see an identical character - 茶 (tea). But again, the hiragana characters are used to mark the object of the sentence and change the simple 飲 (drink) character into ‘want to drink’.
Note that the Japanese do not put spaces between their words - I have added those to aid understanding.
Side by side, you should be able to spot these grammar characters due to their simple construction. Have a go… with some snippets from today’s news. Answers in the comments.
1. ついに始まる番号ポータビリティ
2. 日本议员集体参拜靖国神社
3. あなたのネットワークを保護するために必要な対策はこちら
4. 中国宣布对台农产品大幅优惠措施
5. 北高市长候选人择吉日登记
6. 謎の電波障害解消へ、米空母周辺
In the next installment, I’ll show you how to read all those Japanese t-shirts which look like this:
デザイナー
and this:
ベスト・ムジック・クラブ
There’s a neat trick involved.
Memory
Thursday 22nd June
After posting the 64 Chinese characters I’d learned on Tuesday evening, I was asked “I’m impressed - but how many of the 64 stayed learned???”
Well, I tried writing them all this morning from my worksheets and the answer is… 57 characters, two half-characters and a duh.
The four characters I didn’t remember were:
错 cùo - bad, used in 不错 not bad!
谁 shéi - who?
做 zùo - do, make
板 bǎn, part of 老板 lǎo bǎn - boss.
The two half-characters were:
师 shī. I remembered the left half, but not the right. I also didn’t remember that I had a memory aid for this - it’s part of 老师 lǎo shī - teacher - and I had an image of a teacher dancing with a mortar board (look at the right half - it almost works) with a knife in his hand (because the left half is the symbol for a knife).
说 shūo - speak, say. Another one I had a memory aid for, but forgot. The left part (which I got) is the radical for speaking. My memory aid sees the right half as a TV set on legs with an old-fashioned two-part antenna. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help if I don’t remember I have the memory aid!
The duh is:
老 lǎo - part of 老板 lǎo bǎn - boss and 老师 lǎo shī teacher. It’s a duh because I actually wrote the whole character, but at half its proper width and then couldn’t remember the right half of it. That’s mostly because there isn’t a right half!
Chinese
Tuesday 20th June
Do you know how to learn 64 Chinese characters in a week?
Practice…
I just counted my week’s worth of papers, and there are over 60 sheets of A6 filled with characters and pinyin transliteration.
Ah well… it seems to be working. And they’re not wasted sheets because they’re the backs of sheets which would have gone into the recycling bucket.
10 points to anyone who spots an error!
Shi
Friday 19th May
Chinese has fewer syllable sounds than English - some 1700 instead of around 8000 - but the tonal system helps to differentiate words. However, sometimes a story will make sense only when written down as in this example…
First in English:
Story of Shi Eating the Lions
A poet named Shi lived in a stone room,
fond of lions, he swore that he would eat ten lions.
He constantly went to the market to look for ten lions.
At ten o’clock, ten lions came to the market
and Shi went to the market.
Looking at the ten lions, he relied on his arrows
to cause the ten lions to pass away.
Shi picked up the corpses of the ten lions and took them to his stone room.
The stone room was damp. Shi ordered a servant to wipe the stone room.
As the stone den was being wiped, Shi began to try to eat the meat of the ten lions.
At the time of the meal, he began to realize that the ten lion corpses were in fact were ten stone lions.
Try to explain this matter.
Then Chinese:
施氏食獅史
石室詩士施氏,
嗜獅,誓食十獅.
氏時時適市視獅.
十時,適十獅適市.
是時，適施氏適是市.
氏視是十獅,恃矢勢,
使是十獅逝世.
氏拾是十獅屍, 適石室.
石室濕， 氏使侍拭石室.
石室拭，氏始試食十獅屍.
食時, 始識十獅屍, 實十石獅屍.
試釋是事.
Pronounced as follows…
shī shì shí shī shǐ
shí shì shī shì shī shì,
shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
shì shí shí shì shì shì shī
shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
shì shí, shì shī shì shì shì shì.
shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì,
shǐ shì shí shī shì shì.
shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shí shì.
shí shì, shī, shì shǐ shì shì shí shì.
shí shì shì, shì shǐ shì shí shí shī shī.
shí shí, shǐ shì shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
shì shì shì shì