User Comments - simonpettersson

Posted on: I want coffee!

Well, Mandarin has received a lot of influence from Manchurian (Cantonese enthusiasts often call Mandarin a Chinese-Manchurian blend, contrasted with the relatively "pure" Cantonese, which ironically uses many more English loan words today). I'm guessing a lot of words and characters in use today originate there. Other sources are probably Sanskrit (religious words like "菩薩") and maybe Mongolian? I think the vast majority of words imported after the abolishment of 文言文 and the introduction of 白話 are English, though, and these are the ones that are the most visible today (lord knows they stick out like a sore thumb to me). I think a lot of the older loan words are hard to spot, and many are probably single characters used in many ways today.In general, though, before Western imperialism, China was loaning words to other languages (Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese &c.) rather than borrowing them. as most new concepts arose in China rather than abroad.

I'm sure Changye has a lot better information, though. I'm just speculating.

Posted on: To bag or not to bag?

When I went to the US and went to the supermarket, I remember seeing the clerk packing my bag for me. I was both a bit embarrassed (oh, you don't have to do that) and annoyed (you don't know how I want it packed, and you're wasting my time when I could be packing while you're registering the stuff). Truly, supermarket culture is diverse and interesting!

By the by, at my local supermarket in Foshan there are no plastic bags to buy. You either buy a cloth bag or bring your own.

Posted on: Adjusting the Temperature

"Celsius" is misspelled in the vocab.

Posted on: Chinese Fruits

Since coming to China I've had all sorts of things I'm still convinced are not edible.

Posted on: Separable Verbs

I would like to stress that I never said anything about grammar not being useful. My explanation is also one of grammar. The "grammar is not useful" thing is entirely Bill's idea.

Posted on: Separable Verbs

Fair enough. I don't actually object to the classification. Whatever floats boats, really. I find it strange and a bit backwards, myself, and I thought I'd elevate my subjective feelings to an objective standard, because that's what the Internet is all about. I could never resist an opportunity to call bullturd.

Wshoey said my comments helped a bit, so I'm satisfied with that. I hope you and the 情温 ladies didn't take offense from my little Godwin. You know I love you, I hope.

Incidentally, if you do have time at some later point, I for one would be really interested in hearing more in-depth about the usefulness of the classification.

Posted on: Separable Verbs

Although you do ask how does 吃饭 differ from 吃肉...I don't really know, but it seems to differ...for instance if someone called me and asked me what I was doing and I said 我在吃肉....wouldn't that be a little weird?

It certainly would, but that doesn't mean there are any grammatical differences. The difference is purely social. The difference between "吃饭" and "吃肉" is like the difference in English between "Watch TV" and "Watch 'Ally McBeal'". One is more specific than the other, but they're grammatically equivalent. You add the "TV" because "watch" needs an object, just like "吃"*. My point is that treating these constructions as one word is unnecessarily complicating things and means you need to make special rules. If you treat them as two-word collocations, there's no controversy; they behave just like other words. No need for any special rules. You might as well say that "Watch TV" in English is a "separable verb", which means that the past tense is "Watched TV" (吃过饭) instead of "Watch TVed" (吃饭过) and so on. It makes as much sense. The reason this confusion appears is because Chinese doesn't have spaces.

*Okay, you can say "I'm watching", but it sounds really creepy, especially on the phone, and it doesn't convey watching a show of some kind the way that "I'm eating" conveys eating a meal of some kind, as opposed to candy or one's heart out.

Posted on: Separable Verbs

So you mean it's easier to think of "睡觉" as "to sleep" and then memorize a bunch of special rules on how it behaves than to think of it as "to sleep a sleep" and go about your business? In fact, this is probably even easier coming from English than from Swedish, as English has so many of these collocations. It's just that in Mandarin you say "sleep a nap" instead of "take a nap", "swim a swim" instead of "take a swim", "tie a marriage" instead of "tie the knot". I don't see how this is different from remembering that in Mandarin you say "drink soup" instead of "eat soup".

And it's weird that John (who obviously know they're really just verbs coupled with objects) refers to these as "obligatory objects". Granted, you cannot use 吃 or 结 without an object (though it doesn't have to be 饭 and 婚), but you can certainly use 睡 and 游 without any objects.

Posted on: Separable Verbs

I CALL BULLTURD!

There's no such thing as a "separable verb". The category was invented by a misogynist grammar nazi who thought Mandarin grammar wasn't difficult enough (because, honestly, it's pretty simple). To complicate matters, he (I'm sure it was a "he") invented a category of verbs and created a bunch of special rules to make students suffer.

Here's the Simonpettersson lesson on separable verbs: "Some transitive verbs have very strong collocations with commonly used objects."

Here's the bullturd nazi version: "Some two-character compounds look and behave exactly as though they were a transitive verb coupled with an object, but they're not! They are actually one single word, not two words, as you'd expect from the way they behave. Because this one single word behaves in ways that other words do not, we have to have these special rules. If we apply these special and complicated rules, we can make the word behave just as if it was two words. But it's not. That's very important."

If "吃饭" is a "separable verb", in what way does it differ from the verb-object couple "吃肉"? Or is "吃肉" also a separable verb? What about "吃豆腐"? Or how about "去香港"?

Posted on: Bank Transactions

My parsing attempt: 需 and 要 are two different words here.

您只需: You only need to

在…前: in front of

您要选择的类型: the type you want to choose

打勾: make a checkmark

就可以了: and then that's fine