User Comments - auntie68

Posted on: Taking the HSK

Here is Singaporean Ministry of Education's character list, including when, if at all, each character is introduced:

http://www3.moe.edu.sg/cpdd/doc/chinese/CLSyllabus%202002%20%20Folder/b4/b4p1.html

I can't read any of the "HCL-only" characters! I am helping my friend's daughter, who is in Secondary One Express, with her Chinese, and they are still making the same mistake of trying to teach too many characters, without teaching the kids how to use them. After 11 years of this, I was unable even to give a taxi driver simple directions, or read the directions on a bottle of shampoo.

Posted on: Taking the HSK

Hi pinkjeans + helenhelen: Thanks for explaining to me the difference between O-levels and GCSEs! I did the O-levels (... in 1984!).

But I don't think there's any way that even the O-level standards could come anywhere remotely close to PRC Mandarin standards. No way!

Maybe your friend was referring to the "Higher Chinese" ("HCL") O-level, which is a more difficult paper than "Chinese as a Second Language" ("CL"). Only the top 10% of the students taking Mandarin are allowed to do this paper. Even so, HCL only requires 3,500 characters; not a lot:

http://www3.moe.edu.sg/cpdd/doc/chinese/CLSyllabus%202002%20%20Folder/hzsl.html

NB: About 80% of the students in Singapore would fall into one of the following streams: Express, Normal (Academic), and Normal (Technical). Only "Express" goes on to do O-levels; the "Normal" students are prepared for vocational training.

The symbol "CLB" represents the "CL B-syllabus", which is aimed at the students who are weakest in Mandarin (10%). "EM1/EM2" are the students who are so academically weak, all-round, that their syllabus focusses on basic literacy and numeracy.

Posted on: Cheering

This troublesome/grumpy Auntie's personal take on it is: What is so unreasonable about expecting a newsreader or anchorperson or event "MC" or commentator to get somebody's name right (or at least close to it)? Especially since nobody is expecting them to tackle the tones?

Unlike languages such as Thai or Cantonese or Korean, Mandarin Chinese has a near-universal, very very consistent, romanisation system. Even if the networks were to focus only on giving their front-line staff a few tools to avoid falling into the trap of pronouncing pinyin like their native, non-Chinese, language, it would make a huge difference.

Posted on: Taking the HSK

Wah! In my case, I don't deserve any congratulations because -- in theory -- I have eleven years of "Chinese as a Second Language" under my belt, which culminated in a GCSE "AO"-level pass.

Having said that, the standard was so low (especially in terms of the vocab) that I could barely read the CPOD "Intermediate" pdf's when I first discovered CPOD.

That's the beauty of CPOD. Especially where vocab is concerned. And maybe it's also an argument (of sorts) for CPOD to pay a bit more attention to teaching rules of syntax -- a.k.a. "grammar" -- to users who are not ethnic Chinese like I happen to be. What was being tested in those questions was... syntax. 

Sometimes I think that learning a language "like a child" is useful only as long as you actually are being immersed in the target language like a child ie every day, for most of the day. For the rest of us, it really doesn't hurt to be offered the chance to digest a few grammar rules, if these are presented in a succinct and practical way, in CPOD style. Oh well, this has probably earned me another scolding pm from John Pasden, so I'll stop here.

Posted on: Taking the HSK

Here is my best shot:

d,b,d,c for the word order exercise; 

and

c,d,b,b,b for the other one.

I found the word order exercise to be very difficult; reading the options made me feel dyslexic. 

Posted on: Antiperspirant in China

hi pinkjeans: I'm no "Cantonese/ Mandarin expert", but I'd like to contribute one Cantonese "smell word" in the hopes that it will be translated too by some kind person who really IS an expert:

"sairng" -- as in "fishy-smelling, and not in a good way"

Sorry, I'm such a newbie at jyutping, so I had to improvise.

Posted on: Characters in the Desert and Chinese Kitchens

Thanks for yet another fascinating Dear Amber! My family home in Singapore was built in 1949. Our religion used to be Taoism, so we had a big ancestral altar in the "public" part of the house. My grandparents prayed there; it resembled a tall sideboard. 

In the kitchen, there was a second, much smaller altar devoted to the Kitchen God (灶君 zao4jun1). This one seemed to be under the jurisdiction of the servants, although I seem to recall seeing my grandmother pay respects there too on occasion.

Has anybody else out there lived in a house with this kind of altar in the kitchen? I suspect that Kitchen God worship may be a Southern folk religion. Today the altar is no longer in use, and the alcove which it occupied is now used to store woks and pots and pans. But you can still see the elaborate tiles marking out the floor space where the altar was arranged (that part of the floor is several centimeters higher than the rest of the kitchen floor).

Posted on: Seoul

Ouch, uncle changye, Koreans are immensely proud of their Confucian heritage, I wouldn't have made that "middle course" observation in quite the same way! ;-)

As a (shamefully newbie) Newbie just learning the Korean language, and getting addicted to it, I find it very difficult to make sense of all those homonyms in Korean without -- secretly, shamefully -- referring to my hanja textbook, which supplies the Chinese characters behind Sino-Korean words, which still make up 25% - 30% of the modern Korean lexicon.

My personal impression, which matches your analysis, is that this abandonment of Chinese characters in Korea took place within a single generation:

During my business trips to Seoul in the late 90s/ early 2000s, I was struck by how comfortable any Korean person I met aged 40 and older (at the time) was with Chinese characters. Two of these people told me that they find it difficult to read a newspaper these days, without the aid of hanja/ kanji/ 汉字. 

I was equally struck by how anybody below the age of 40 seemed to be doing perfectly fine without Chinese characters. I was told by so many young people that, "nobody uses hanja anymore, only our parents or maybe Prof Lee over there who writes very deep articles..."

It will be really interesting to see how the Korean language develops in the next few decades, without Chinese characters. Perhaps it will be like the Hindi-Urdu situation, which has seen what is essentially the same language written using two different scripts, develop in two very divergent directions especially since Partition, which event gave each variant a strong political meaning over and above its linguistic values.

Curiously, Koreans seem to be very relaxed about letting many "western" words flood into their everyday speech. Many Korean films have titles which are direct transliterations of English words: "Acacia", "Apaateu" ("Apartment"), "Pone" ("Phone") etc etc.

There is a hilarious gag in the film "Marrying the Mafia III" where a Korean mobster complains that he can never remember English words. He goes nuts trying to remember the word for an orange (the fruit) -- "Ahhh! Del Monte!!! That's the word I was looking for!" -- and his long-suffering brother asks him, "And what colour is that Del Monte?". Without hesitating for a second, he replies, "It's orenji, of course... whassamatter with you?"

Posted on: I Just.... 刚 & 刚才（gāng & gāngcái）

@changye: My very little dictionary (时代－ 商务馆）also classified each of 爪子 and 爪儿 as nouns (名), it's just that the "root character" in these two words -- ie. 爪 -- was classified as "(素)" to distinguish it from the same "root character" pronounced as zhao3, which is truly a noun. The two 爪's were treated as separate "root characters".

Eg. so you know why it's 双爪 or 后爪 are not exact synonyms of 双爪子 or 后爪子 ？ Conversely, I think that one generally wouldn't hear zhao3zi or zhao'er? 

Posted on: I Just.... 刚 & 刚才（gāng & gāngcái）

@foleadu: These fundamental differences between Chinese and English notions of grammar can really be quite striking. Eg. all 形容词 are adjectives, but I don't think that all adjectives are necessarily 形容词.

And in my Chinese-only dictionary, 爪 with the reading zhao3 is classified as "(名)" (for 名词; ie a noun), whereas the entry for the same character 爪 with the reading zhua3 is classified as "(素)" (for 语素; ie a word element that is not stand-alone but has to be combined with another character eg. 爪子, 爪儿).

Chinese rules of Chinese grammar reflect notions which are important in Chinese syntax. I'm (happily) going through this "Grammar Culture Shock" now, at this stage of my studies! But it does answer a lot of questions, like where the 了 goes: Eg. 吃了饭 or 吃饭了？Chinese grammarians have complicated tests for determining whether a 词 is functioning as an adjective or a noun in context, eg. whether reduplication is possible, whether you can add 不, whether you can split it up the compound with a particle etc. It's not for the faint-hearted!

I'll let uncle changye explain what an isolating language is... good luck!