User Comments - auntie68
auntie68
Posted on: A Taxi for Tired Feet
December 18, 2007 at 9:50 AMDear Jenny, Yay! I'm so happy. I hope that as you are explaining this fascinating process, you might at least touch on a very special form of written Chinese, which is Cantonese. Cantonese uses "traditional characters", but at the same time, it also has undergone some very significant evolution because it is essentially a spoken (vs written) language which has -- nevertheless -- been written down. I really hope that you will introduce some of more unique Cantonese characters, both those which are pretty ancient, as well as those which are incredibly modern because they represent "phonetic" values rather than a "lexical chunk". Thank you CPOD!
Posted on: A Taxi for Tired Feet
December 18, 2007 at 5:52 AMI am really enjoying this pan-lesson thread on 麒麟's! Thank you changye and aert. Wikipedia.org. has an interesting entry on simplified Chinese. Like changye says, the number of words simplified was relatively limited. This Auntie seems to have entered the Singaporean school system at just the perfect time to be clobbered by a number of key changes concerning the Chinese language: In my first year of primary school (1976), my Chinese textbooks used zhuyin ("bopomofo"), but the very next year, hanyu pinyin （汉语拼音）was introduced and my poor teacher had the trauma of learning the new system at the same time as her 6-year-old pupils. Next thing we knew, all the characters were simplified, but a few years later some of the characters that had been "over-simplified" were restored to something closer to traditional Chinese, and my poor, poor teachers had to re-learn them so that they could teach them to us. Hm, the history and policy of simplification is probably worth a lesson on its own, what do you think?
Posted on: 藏传佛教
December 16, 2007 at 3:10 PMDear changye, star trek is the best. Before I bought my own place, I shared a "bachelor" flat for two years with my brother, who was a real trekkie. Every prickly thing in our household was smoothed over with Star Trek wisdom... Btw, one visit in dua puluh tahun is very little! Do please consider another visit, if only to see what has changed. Okay, ciao, Auntie
Posted on: 藏传佛教
December 16, 2007 at 3:50 AMZhou sunn, changye! Please let me tell you a secret that isn't really a secret: My favourite Qilin is the one tnat is on a can (or two, or three, or more) of ice-cold Kirin beer. My other favourite mythological creature is the Singha that lives on cans of Singha beer (nearly 6% alc). My country, Singapore, is named after such a lion. Btw, your darling Patricia would look fine stepping out with a young Singha, don't you think?
Posted on: 藏传佛教
December 16, 2007 at 2:08 AMYou're welcome, aert. Btw, have you ever seen any Chinese artists' depictions of qilins before? You can find some imagines in wikipedia, under "Qilin". They really are more like chimerae (sp.? I never studied Latin!), looking almost amphibious, even, with the dragon scales. For me, that explains why one version of the character might have used the "fish" radical. Happy sunday, all!
Posted on: 藏传佛教
December 15, 2007 at 7:08 PMHello aert. In the context, do you think that budala could be "Potala Palace"? This is only a guess on my part; I haven't even listened to this lesson or even opened the pdf! Cheers, Auntie
Posted on: World Records
December 12, 2007 at 4:42 AMDear aert, Yay! I love power, as much of it as possible. You know, if you are comfortable with hanyu pinyin, the same number of strokes (more or less) could produce actual Chinese characters. I was a slow and reluctant starter with "typing" Chinese, but ITABC's "predictive" feature makes it seem so easy. Hope this tempts you!
Posted on: Turbulence
December 10, 2007 at 1:13 PMSelamat malam, changye! I like old Kiyo, I have a real-life one "working" for me, and life is better for it.
Posted on: Hold the MSG
December 10, 2007 at 10:21 AMDearest, dearest aertm you are so much more than even the best bourgeois gentilhomme, you raise the tone of the CPOD bb (in a good way) with your points of view.
Posted on: A Taxi for Tired Feet
December 18, 2007 at 2:59 PMHello again. Dear aert, I'm falling asleep even as I type these words (long day!), but would like to help you put the Singapore situation I described in a proper context. Okay, let me try -- Singapore can't be defined as a Chinese-speaking society, not by any measure. In our school system, every subject is taught in English except... except for Chinese. Not only that, "chinese-language" schools -- private or otherwise -- have been abolished. English is the language of work and education. I was "clobbered" by many important changes at a time when Chinese was the language of the home for the majority of the population. Being a member of a minority group -- Peranakan Chinese -- it was a strange experience trying to learn Chinese from teachers who were trained to teach it as a "mother tongue" rather than as a foreign language (which to me it was). In one year with CPOD, I have learned more Mandarin than I did over eleven years of studying it in school as a "second language". Some forty years on, the language landscape in my tiny country has changed so much that my brother and his wife will be paying very high tuition fees in order to enroll their toddler in a preschool that promises "bilingual" pre-school education, with arithmetic (gulp!) being taught exclusively in Mandarin by specially-trained teachers imported from the PRC. Just to give the little boy a chance to make friends with the Chinese language before he goes to a real school and Chinese becomes only one subject out of many! Okay, time for bed and zzzz... all the best -- Auntie