User Comments - aert
aert
Posted on: 城市的乞丐
December 3, 2007 at 9:33 AMIn Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Man with the Twisted Lip" a respectable journalist becomes a fake beggar. Has Conan Doyle been translated into Chinese?
Posted on: Chinese Breakfast
December 2, 2007 at 3:58 PMHi Chinesepod Thanks for sending the name of the lesson(s) to my IN mail box again (I hope the above parentheses are superfluous). Earlier today I still took my roundabout way to the lesson. I conclude that you work even on Sundays. This would highten my appreciation of Chinesepod if it weren't already boundless!
Posted on: Chinese Breakfast
December 2, 2007 at 2:23 PMHi Changye This morning, drinking the first of my 7-10 cups of coffee (with plenty of sugar and a little cream) and of course the first and best of my daily series of cigarettes, I was guided by my dear friend Patty to today's lesson. Though nowadays I cannot face actual food in the morning I clicked on the site you mention which did not make my mouth water but was a feast for the eyes not as much as my beloved Hokusai but in quantity equally amazing.
Posted on: Winter Fun
December 1, 2007 at 10:39 AMHi Changye Thanks a lot for the explanation! So the reference of yang2 is not "sunshine" or "vigor" but just "Yang".— another step on the way to learning to think the Chinese way. I have a long way to go yet. As you probably know, in the West 13 is the unlucky number and Friday the unlucky day, and in Holland 11 is the "gekkengetal" = "lunatic's number". I heard (but never checked myself) that some hotels in the USA have no room #13 and no 13th floor, to make it easier to accommodate the superstitious, and a Canadian friend of mine absolutely refused to travel by plane on any Fri. 13th. I don't know how these ideas arose. Possibly the fact that 5, 11and 13 are prime numbers has played a role.
Posted on: Winter Fun
November 30, 2007 at 3:08 PMHi Changye My Chnese-Dutch and Chinese-Russian dictionaries also have chong2 yang2 (besides chong2 jiu3 and zhong1 qiu1). I understand "double nine" and "mid autumn" but wondered what exactly "double yang2" refers to (sunshine? vigor?). My search had no other result than that yang2 with reference to seasons also occurs in yang2 chun1 "spring" with the interesting but unhelpful extensions yang2 chun1 bai2 xue3 "intellectual art and literature" and yang2 chun1 mian4 "simple noodle soup". Well, there was another result: an interesting half hour. Thanks!
Posted on: Winter Fun
November 30, 2007 at 11:35 AMHi VenusJin The DOUBLE SEVENTH day reminded me of a text I had read in E. Haenisch's course of the gu3 wen2 with which I started on Chinese.Text no. 52 starts with the words jiu3 yue4 jiu3 ri4 wei2 chong2 jiu3 jie2 "the 9th day of the 9TH month is the DOUBLE NINE festival". It goes on to tell that on that day the teacher leads his pupils onto a hill and points out various landmarks. As this texts is quite old, I don't know if this custom still exists. BTW the last no. of The Economist (Nov. 24th-30th) has on p. 66 a piece on "China's public holidays".
Posted on: Winter Fun
November 29, 2007 at 12:37 PMHi VenusJin Thanks for the traditional calendar! I likr this sort of thing and will copy it. One remark: in the upper right part of the character zhe2 "hibernation" you have what by itself is jin1 "pound". My dictionaries have wan2 "bullet, pill" here. The character you give I found only in Oshanin's Chinese - Russian dictionary (nr.8734) as zhe4 "sting (as of bee)", colloquial "jellyfish". This dictionary dates from 1952 and has the traditional script. Your comment makes a fine lesson even better!
Posted on: Thanksgiving
November 28, 2007 at 5:56 PMHi Amber (1) Thanks for your comment. If asked, I wouldn't have known whether gen1 could be used here, too (though seeing the sentence, I would have understood it.) BTW, gen1 sometimes has to be translated "and", eg. wo3 gen1 ta1 shi4 di4xiong "I and he are brothers" (in English you would say "he and I"), so the score he2 - gen1 is now 2-2. (2) I don't want to spoil your English: the correct order of the second part of the sentence is "being together with the family", but I put "together" at the end because yi1qi3 is. (3) You did better than I by translating just "with", leaving out my "(to be)", Having started with the gu3 wen2, I still think of coordinating conjunctions as verbs, but with one exception the grammars and dictionaries of modern Chinese (in so far as I have seen them) distinguish "conjunctions", "adverbs", "prepositions" and "postpositions" as Chinese parts of speech (besides verbs, nouns, pronouns and adjectives). If we say just "with", then the next point becomes easier to explain to English speakers. (4) The only verb that is left in the second part of the sentence is zai4, which therefore must be the "head" of the sentence, modified by the preceding he2 jia1 ren2, in accordance with the rule "modifier precedes modified" in Chinese. So the zai4 corresponds to the word "being" in the translation. Now modifiers can usually be left out, and I wonder if you could say zui4 zhong4yao4 de shi4 zai4 yi1qi3 "the most important thing is to be together" for instance, if you and your friend want to go on long train trip on a certain day, and for that day you can only get seats in different compartments, but for the next day you could get seats in one and the same compartment. If that would be correct Chinese then the sentence is easy to explain. But one never knows, with language... If you are busy, forget the question. I have plenty of other things to learn yet.
Posted on: Thanksgiving
November 27, 2007 at 6:24 PMhi Sebire (and others) All problems with he2 will vanish if you think of it as (1) a verb "to be with" OR (2) a conjunction "and". The second meaning develped from the first. So the whole sentence runs as follows: "The most important thing is being with the family together." Other Chinese dialects use for the conjunction other words: tong2 "be the same as" or gen1 ""heel; fo follow". One of the many interesting traits of Chinese is that very abstract notions are often expressed by elements also having a less abstract meaning. Thus the indirect object can be expressed by gei3, which also has the less abstract meaning "to give to".
Posted on: 城市的乞丐
December 4, 2007 at 6:43 PMHi Changye, Your transcription of "Holmes" must be Japanese. I don't know Japanese and was baffled until I remembered reading something about f automatically replacing h before u. The Chinese transcription of proper names is a chapter apart, I once found the English -son transcribed xun4 in Pearson, sen1 in Simpson and song1 in Nixon in an article on names. I always read myself to sleep with any kind of short story, mostly stories I read before and liked.