User Comments - auntie68
auntie68
Posted on: 定做的噩梦
January 1, 2008 at 2:09 AMHappy New Year, everyone! I wonder if anybody could help me with this: One of the poor customers was upset because the 下摆 was not 弧度的, as he had requested, but 方的. Would be so grateful if somebody could clarify what this means. And this is asking a lot, but here is some additional vocab that I would really appreciated: For trousers: Cuffed vs uncuffed, Straight vs Tapered (is there a way for asking for "boot-cut" trousers?) For shirts: French cuffs vs plain barrel cuffs How to say, "Will you please try to make sure that the trousers break just about here?" Thank you so much! And here's to traditional Shanghainese tailors, who have a well-earned reputation in the Chinese world for being the very best in their craft. Ditto for Shanghainese cabinetmakers/joiners. Cheers and Selamat Tahun Bahru. Auntie
Posted on: Turn on the Light, Turn off the Light
December 30, 2007 at 10:10 AMHi Hannahlm, there is a pretty useful newbie lesson in the archives on "air conditioning" that includes some heating vocab as well: http://chinesepod.com/lessons/turn-on-the-air-conditioning/discussion All the best, Auntie
Posted on: Turn on the Light, Turn off the Light
December 30, 2007 at 12:01 AMHello again. If I'm not mistaken, it's better to stick with 关灯 (guan1deng1) or 闭灯 (bi4deng4) because these verbs convey a sense of switching or turning something on or off. But 灭 (mie4) seems to convey a more intransitive sense -- s'éteindre rather than éteindre -- hence 火灭了 huo3mie4le5 ("the fire went out") or 我们家里的灯突然灭了 jia1li3de5deng1tu1ran2mie4le5 ("the lights suddenly went out in our house. Hope this leaves you less, rather than more, confused!
Posted on: Turn on the Light, Turn off the Light
December 29, 2007 at 1:21 PMP/s: The word for "extinguish" is 灭 (mie4). As in 灭火 (mie4huo3). I think you could get a away with 灭火 to say "put out the candle flame". Amber, help!
Posted on: Turn on the Light, Turn off the Light
December 29, 2007 at 1:13 PMHello jackfrombelgium. I believe the verb for lighting a flame/candle is 点 (dian3), as in 点火 (dian3huo3; light a fire) or 点一支蜡烛 (dian3yi1zhi1la4zhu2). Sorry if the tones are wobbly; my Chinese is not so good. Lighting a joss stick is 烧香 (shao1xiang1), literally "burn incense". Cheers, Auntie
Posted on: 定做的噩梦
December 25, 2007 at 2:53 PMJust try not to move your head too much... sometimes it also helps if you don't open your eyes unless it's really dark. And it definitely is useful to have a helpful assistant who will make sure that nobody eats or cooks or even mentions any oily food anywhere near you. The traditional Chinese remedy for settling queasy, hungover stomachs is dried preserved plums (the extra salty kind dried not in plain salt, but in natron, the stuff that was used to preserve Egyptian mummies). If you are lucky enough to be in a Korean business hotel (4-star and up), there might be a little bottle of brown herbal liquid inside the minibar; that is Korean-strength hangover remedy, for the morning after Korean-strength drinking binges. Btw, aert, happy Xmas! My neighbours in Singapore are a nice Dutch couple, young people with two lovely children under the age of three, very new in their first posting to the tropics, and they celebrated Christmas in a way that I am told is also quite authentically Dutch: They flew to Bali to drink cold beer and iced champagne on the beach and sleep with their babies wearing nothing more than a T-shirt and a sarong or shorts. I like the way the Dutch do things! Warm Xmas greetings to all -- Auntie
Posted on: Handsome Boy
December 23, 2007 at 12:35 PMHello aert! I, too, appreciated changye's research. My personal way of explaining "酒悲" is that it conveys the idea of being drawn into a deep and melancholic -- and somehow, poignant -- kind of emotion with the help of drink. Not necessarily being "nasty drunk". I am not confident enough of my Mandarin to be sure about this, but I think it is not totally negative. Eg. Ernest Hemingway was probably a black belt in 酒悲. However, this will have to be confirmed by somebody who knows Mandarin a lot better than I do.
Posted on: A Taxi for Tired Feet
December 22, 2007 at 12:04 AMHello. Dear FuDaWei, what you wrote sounds right to me. Just for the fun of it, I'd like to explain that in Cantonese, the characters 的士 sound like "dtick-see", which to my ears sounds quite close to "taxi" because the little Cantonese catch -- the "-ck" -- approximates the "x" in "taxi". In Singapore, we pronounce 的士 in a slightly different way, i.e. the 的 is pronounced not as di1, but as de2. Di1shi4 sounds very "Beijing" to Singaporean ears. Happy weekend, all!
Posted on: A Taxi for Tired Feet
December 18, 2007 at 3:07 PMSorry to everybody apart from aert and changye who've had to tolerate my off-topic rambles, but I think it's worth mentioning that Singaporean Chinese don't cling to the Chinese language and tradition to the same extent as their overseas Chinese brothers in countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia. Simply because we aren't under any financial or social pressure from any indigenous majority as may be the case in other Southeast-Asian countries. In a way, our willingness to adopt English as the language of education sometimes reminds me of the Netherlands, where you don't appear to have any emotional or nationalistic problems with the idea of using English to teach Dutch university students where it seems practical. Just my thoughts...
Posted on: Ordering Chinese Take-out
January 2, 2008 at 2:04 AMMany thanks to changye for his wonderful multilingual New Year greetings, persuaded so many of the enthusiastic linguists on this BB to "come out and play"! P/s: Changye, a more "PC" way to describe the origins of Bahasa Indonesia might be to avoid the word "invented" even if the alternative -- "established as the national language of Indonesia" sounds clunky. The founding fathers of the R.I. could well have chosen Javanese, which had upwards of 75 million speakers, and was also already long entrenched (by tradition) as the "courtly" language through which authority was expressed. But I was told by an Indonesian friend that the founding fathers were worried that the courtly and highly stratified nature of Javanese -- with several layers of politeness, cf "keigo" -- were incompatible with the progress of the modern Republic, which was trying to start a clean slate for all with concepts such as "pancasila" (which they did in fact manage to entrench in Indonesian life). So instead, the language they chose to establish and standardize was the dialect of Malay which had for hundreds of years been the unofficial common language of trade and commerce from Aceh to Borneo, even spoken as far afield as Cape Town, Christmas Island, Madagascar, anywhere there were Malays, in fact. The decision does make some kind of sense, at least to me. Once again, I wish everybody on this BB a very good year ahead.