User Comments - aert
aert
Posted on: 送孟浩然之广陵
November 8, 2007 at 1:30 PMDear Chinesepod It became too repetitive to express my appreciation after every lesson, so I stopped doing so. I also withdraw my request for translations of the advanced lessons, having discovered since that you can call up lots of older (upper-)intermediate lessons which have translations. They will keep me going when there is time for them, and this depends on the difficulty of the advanced lessons. So far, I have been able to keep up with the daily fare (except for the ba1 gua4 lesson (ID 0668), which left too many uncertainties here and there). Anyway, because of age, distance from China and concentrating on reading rather than speaking I sort of gan3 jue2 xiang4 mo4 sheng1 ren2 in the Chinesepod company, which I, for one, am hugely enjoying.
Posted on: 送孟浩然之广陵
November 8, 2007 at 8:33 AMhi kqueller fantastic site! And the further links it gives open a whole world! Thank you very much.
Posted on: Internet Slang
November 7, 2007 at 11:40 AMhi goulniky, thx for the reference to more examples, gj! You are always a goldmine of information! Chinese puns will be too tough for me. But in New York I enjoyed the so-called "Slurvian" (= slurred English). Here are some examples (you can't stop me if you know them, sry): A: I saw a woman hanged in China. B. Shanghai? A. Mm, about two feet from the ground. A. My wife went to the West Indies. B. Jamaica? A. No, it was her own idea. A. I took my girlfriend out in my new car. B. Chevrolet? A. Once in a while omg, I must get back to Chinese!
Posted on: Are you OK?
November 6, 2007 at 7:06 PMDear Aunty and hi Pulosm The whole discussion started from the meaning of the Special Olympics slogan (see above somewhere). The question was whether xing2 was to be taken as alright in the sense of "good", or as "can, able to cope". There was an amusing confusion about this, cleared up by Clayroup (nice assonance), and it must be taken in the 2nd sense (approximately). This left the problem how to express the notion "intrinsically good" in Chinese. If this is impossible, the Chinese (and Pulosm) may well be right, because when you come to think of it, the notion involves a contradiction in terms. Unlike notions like round or triangular, the notions good and bad are relative to human beings: the outcome of a fight is considered good by the victors and bad by the vanquished. To call something intrinsically good or bad means going beyond human judgement, and belongs to the mystical, apropos of which Wittgenstein (anticipated by Laotse) said "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent". The slogan of the late 1960's was a kind of implementation of the command "love thy neighbor", and this command came from the mystical realm. In the West, this realm has been filled by Christianity and by a long range of philosophers. I believe little of what they say, but they still had me fooled by making me uncritically accept a notion "intrinsically good". The Chinese were wiser, but then, they had their Laotse in the 5th century BC while we had to wait for Wittgenstein until the 20th AD. And if they adopted Buddhism, this is at least an ideology that does not require you to believe in miracles such as the immaculate conception, walking on water, rising from the grave and ascending to heaven. It preaches not an in many cases quite impossible love, but compassion. As to evil, Buddhism places it right in the world, where it is. It does not assume a supreme being, which forces Christianity to blame it on original sin, forgetting the evils of earthquakes, tsunamis, epidemics, etc., which in my opinion refute the intelligent design people. The Greeks blamed Pandora, who opened the box that contained all the evils. Only hope (smuggled into the box by Prometheus) remained. So we may hope that the Chinese authorities, with such a long history of level-headedness behind them, may achieve the "harmonious society". So far, China has been more successful than any other country in reducing extreme poverty. But when I read about "boob jobs" in one of the lessons, I was wondering whether they got their priorities right. I hope China will not become too much Amercanised. Warning: it was either Oscar Wilde or Bernard Shaw who called the USA "the only country in the world that passed from barbarism to decadence without an intermediate stage of civilisation." Long ago I leart in high school that China, when conquered by foreigners, had always managed to absorb these in their own civilisation. BTW I forgot to mention that Buddhism is kinder to animals than Christianity ever was. What with what you hear about the bio-industry nowadays, you feel like becoming a vegetarian. I haven't got that far on the way to salvation, but get my proteins largely from eggs. I've been on more than long enough now, and as in my last communication, end with chickens. The ones I get my eggs from are free-range.
Posted on: Are you OK?
November 5, 2007 at 10:20 AMpulosm, so rich a language as Cinese must have a way to express the notion "intrinsically good". Could something be done with shan4 as in shan4 e4 "good and evil"? There is an expression shan4 liang2 ren2 shi4 "people of good will".Or could perhaps hao3 be used after all by putting hen3 before it? But all this would would not catch the American shade of meaning in "an alright guy", which is analogous to the meaning in the 60's slogan "acceptable, to be respected as is",. BTW I should not have used the expression "rules can be broken" but rather "the interpretation depends on the context and/or situation". These discussions are fine, instructive and amusing, but not really the place for semantic analysis, which cannot be done offhand.
Posted on: Are you OK?
November 4, 2007 at 5:09 PMPS And don't worry about the farm's chickens. A bird's wing, as an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation, was regarded as a leg. The chickens didn't understand all those long words but managed to learn the slogan by heart.
Posted on: Are you OK?
November 4, 2007 at 4:43 PMSorry, that should have been OK resp. not OK.
Posted on: Are you OK?
November 4, 2007 at 4:33 PMpulosm, thanks for trying! You're certainly right that something American comes into play here, but this concerns the expression, not the concept "intrinsically good". Even in English "he's good" evokes the question "good at what?", and, unlike OK, does not cover that concept. You have to add a noun to get your meaning across. The mother would say "Johnny's a good boy". Strangely enough, the word "bad" does not have this limitation: there was at one time a pop number the lyrics of which consisted entirely of the words "I'm bad" repeated over and over again.. My native language is Dutch, and parallels English here. Of course, in certain contexts rules can be broken, eg. in Orwell's Animal Farm the slogan "Four legs good, two legs bad". Here both adjectives could be replaced by OK.
Posted on: Are you OK?
November 4, 2007 at 12:41 PMpulosm, it isn't a question of the meaning of an English phrase, but of the application of expressions like "good, alright, OK" etc.in any language. Neither does the notion "being yourself" come in here, at issue is only "you as you are". In the late 60's the idea (by no means new) was that for negative things like alcoholism, criminality, etc. society rather than the individual was to blame. It follows that the individual, the victim of society, was OK and only to be pitied if there was anything wrong with him. A change in social structure would do away with these problems. Shifting blame has always been a favorite pastime of mankind. But to come back to language: "ÿou're OK" will resonate with you if you think of a mother varnishing over bad behavior of her child, "Johnny couldn't help it/meant well/ was incited by bad companions" etc.etc., in other words "Johnny's OK". .
Posted on: 输入法
November 9, 2007 at 11:23 AMDear Chinesepod Fate decided that I should have to break my resolution to stop thanking you for every lesson, but you have a way of coming up with surprises. The title of today's lesson first made me think that it had a business character and had to do with import regulations, For the rest I refer to my belated thanks to Auntie (ID 0678 Special Olympics). I had forgotten where I had made the request about fonts, so I had to go through a lot of my own prose, some of which I now regret. They say that wisdom comes with the years, and I am still waiting for it. Anyway, thanks just once more!