User Comments - sushan
sushan
Posted on: Hiking
June 9, 2008 at 9:03 AMI was suspicious about the term 徒步旅行 since it has fewer than a million hits on Baidu while 爬山 has more than ten million. But the first Baidu hit was the marvellous Douban site, and there is a good explanation of it.
As long as we are splitting hairs over English defs, can anyone in UK tell me if there is any difference between hiking and trekking?
I love the Chinese word for picnic:
野餐 ye3can1 - 'wild meal'
Posted on: Seoul
June 9, 2008 at 8:40 AMRead a very interesting article today about South Korean 'wild geese', families who live separately with mothers and young children in English speaking countries while the fathers stay in the country to work. (Wonder if this phenomenon could occur in China.)
When discussing the cultural reasons for this the article mentioned the mother of 孟子 meng4zi, who is a very well known 4th century Chinese Confucian scholar. His mother moved three times to find the best environment for her son's education.
on wikipedia I found a 成语 cheng2yu3 about her: 孟母三迁 meng4mu3san1qian1. Mengzi's mother three moves, to describe how important it is to have the proper environment for a child's education
Posted on: 理想女人
June 7, 2008 at 12:15 AMall right, but two guys discussing their love lives are never going to say 'lady of one's heart' or 'lady of one's desire'. Unless this conversation took place a hundred years ago. Can you come up with a modern colloquial equivalent?
Posted on: Chinatomy: Chinese Gods and 'Shanghai Diaries'
June 6, 2008 at 7:14 AMInserting links: first select the text that you want to point to the link. Then the link options become available.
Posted on: Hungry Traveler: Xinjiang
June 5, 2008 at 9:17 AMJohn, you were right. I found a picture while searching for pictures of Xinjiang candy. They are 烤包子, kao3bao1zi
Posted on: Seoul
June 5, 2008 at 12:14 AMChinese Hanzi is much richer in meaning than Hangul but the phonetic problem is the same. Foreign language textbooks with target language written in phonetic Chinese are a horror. 好罗 麦 那么 一丝 脱么 and such, just to make up an example off the top of my head.
kim chi in my town is known as 泡菜 (pao1cai4)。 The single thing I envy those living in 中国 东北 is the Korean food!
Soju (thought it was made from sweet potato?) would be a great lesson topic. I envision a native Korean and Japanese discussing its merits or disputing its origin in Mandarin....
Posted on: 众志成城 抗震救灾
June 4, 2008 at 12:36 PMHere in Chengdu it was 中国 加油 四川 雄起.
雄起 is 四川话 and the meaning is similar to 加油.
Posted on: Seoul
June 4, 2008 at 5:47 AM南大门 (nan2da4men2) and 东大门 (dong1da4men2) are great areas for 购物 (gou4wu4). Even better, they sound almost the same as in Chinese! Namdaemen and Tongdaemen.
Posted on: Seoul
June 4, 2008 at 4:55 AMI was also confused by 首尔 shou3er3; thought the city name was 汉城 han4 cheng2. I like 汉城 much better.
Posted on: Regional Accents Part II
June 10, 2008 at 5:41 AMThere are a couple of Youtube videos that test one's Sichuanhua listening ability. The test is given in Mandarin so they are a bit hard to follow unless you are upper intermediate at least in Mandarin. After taking one Sichuanhua class I got about a quarter of this Intermediate level test correct.