User Comments - auntie68
auntie68
Posted on: 简体字与繁体字
February 18, 2008 at 9:42 AMartkho, thanks for the 繁体 － 简体 examples. I believe that the traditional form of 报 (bao4) is still preferred (and even cherished!) on the mastheads of many Chinese-language newspapers around the world. Including quite a few very famous papers whose house style for articles is strictly based on simplified characters. vavictus -- for some simplified characters, the sophisticated and stunning woman looks like she lost some excess weight in the right places. Only tweaking you. Some simplified characters look a bit childish and stark to me after I've had the chance to see the traditional form. Yet others look refreshingly stylish and succinct to me, the traditional forms looking slightly bloated by comparison. For me (at least!), there doesn't seem to be an absolute standard whereby "this is always bad", and "that is always bad". I even love Japanese kanji and Korean hanja... it's like seeing familiar characters after they've been made-over, with great skill and expression, by an inventive stylist/ art director who works for "Vogue"... The spelling of your name -- "Kho" sounds "Malaysian" to me, is that where you were born?
Posted on: 简体字与繁体字
February 18, 2008 at 6:49 AMI'm willing to run the risk of being slammed by some outraged newbie for going on to add that nothing is absolute about Chinese characters. Simplification, as a process, is barely 60 years old; things seem relatively stable now, but I recall that when I began primary school in 1976, it was only the second year that simplified characters were taught in schools. And the first year where hanyu pinyin replaced bopomofo zhuyin. My shell-shocked Chinese teachers, who had been brought up in the traditional system, struggled to teach their students new forms which they had themselves learned in a hurry only weeks before. To this day, I feel for them; they handled the changes with grace. Barely three years later, the Ministry of Education -- for the sake of consistency and out of pragmatism -- repealed those characters which Beijing had deemed "over-simplified", and so some of those simplified characters in our Chinese textbooks acquired additional strokes, overnight. None of this change seems to have led to any lasting harm... Chinese as we learn it in CPOD is in itself an innovation, it was not so many years before 简体字 that the idea of writing colloquial Mandarin would have seemed quite insane to many Chinese in China.
Posted on: 简体字与繁体字
February 18, 2008 at 6:36 AMDear CPOD, thank you for yet another lesson that taught a whole lot of "Advanced" vocabulary whilst at the same time dealing with a potentially emotive topic in a very balanced and thoughtful way. I guess I am a product of my country's 写简识繁 approach towards both systems, which means that neither system is ideologically "better" than the other. Meaning, nobody here would be arrogant or crass enough to 看不起 anybody for taking an interest in traditional characters. At the same time, we don't give this choice the kind of political "baggage" that makes it so emotionally difficult for many Taiwanese to even accept the validity of simplified characters alongside the traditional ones. So I am still struggling to get a grip on the simplified characters, but learning to read traditional characters eventually is definitely a goal too. Here I am fortunate because it is much more difficult for somebody raised in the "traditional" system to decode simplified characters, than for somebody like me to recognize a word in its traditional form. This has to do with the fact that the traditional characters include more elements, and hence more clues to the precise meaning of the character. Once again, thanks! For practical reasons, it is accepted that simplified characters are about
Posted on: To Love or Be Loved
February 18, 2008 at 5:00 AMhello wei1xiao4, changye's hanzi posting was definitely worth reading. It's a tongue-in-cheek (I hope!) perspective on how Chinese women use "guilt"/"obligation"/"control" buttons to test their boyfriends and husbands. Chinese-style love has to be tested regularly so that you can be sure it's still there. Not very pc, though, I have to warn you! But there was enough truth behind what he wrote to make it truly, wickedly funny. The final bit ties in with a story that John Pasden just posted on sinosplice.com about some offer Mao Tsetung is supposed to have made to give the West 10million Chinese women. There's no way I could do justice to changye's writing, so I'll leave the translation to him. Hope that's okay. Btw, since we've tackled "sadist" and "masochist", could anybody please tell me how to say "safe word" in Mandarin? Surely if we only learn one word under that topic, that word should be number one? Thanks!
Posted on: 马丁· 路德 · 金
February 17, 2008 at 7:47 AMErm, so did I. In fact, I didn't even do this lesson because I know that it will be too difficult for me. Bokane, you are a genius. Hard not to be inspired by you as I labour away on Mandarin today as if I didn't spend 11 years studying in school as my official "second language" (yeah...).
Posted on: To Love or Be Loved
February 17, 2008 at 7:42 AMIn Singlish, verbatim: Got free milk, why buy cow?
Posted on: To Love or Be Loved
February 17, 2008 at 7:40 AMDear Jenny, Protective Singaporean Mother say: "Why buy cow when can get free milk?" Hmmm...
Posted on: Valentine's Day
February 16, 2008 at 12:22 PMYessss!!!!! ;-) nicolas, 20/20!!!!! (+mention: "Brilliant, show them, nicolas!" avec un accent britannique genre 007...) ;-)
Posted on: Valentine's Day
February 15, 2008 at 1:47 PMcasie -- Oops! And thanks for setting me straight. I gave poor Mr eyux that (unnecessary!) warning because I actually own a dictionary that defines 纪念日 as "anniversary"... even though my Chinese is not so good, as an "overseas Chinese" I was a bit shocked and didn't like the idea of anybody confusing his wedding anniversary (--> happy!) with a memorial (--> sombre). Thank you, casie!
Posted on: 简体字与繁体字
February 18, 2008 at 10:11 AMHello user3919. I myself am struggling with Chinese characters daily, despite being "overseas Chinese", but here are two suggestions that you can try: 1. Try writing the new characters out on a piece of paper. Not once, but a few times, until it feels "natural". 2. Another thing which you can try is looking at the main character's entry in your dictionary, if you have a good dictionary where the entries are organized by hanyu pinyin (and hence by sound). Even just looking at the character compounds -- without getting too stressed out, just relax -- will give you a "feel" for how that character works on its own, as well as with other characters. If your dictionary organizes entries by hanyu pinyin, quite a lot of the time you may find that the entries above -- and below -- are for characters which sound quite similar, and are which are only a radical (and/or) a tone away from your "target" character. No harm looking at those -- again, without too much analysis -- to see how that character's "cognate" functions. If you are lucky, you will end up getting quite a good sense -- instinctively and natural, not analytically -- of what is unique about your "target character". Don't hesitate to just drop this if it doesn't do anything useful for you. Good luck!