User Comments - tiaopidepi
tiaopidepi
Posted on: Fortunate Cookies
June 14, 2008 at 2:49 PM>>It is really sad that few Americans really know how Chinese food can taste.
Let's be fair--Western food in China isn't fantastic.
In Seattle, Chinese restaurants have two menus--one in English, one in Hanzi. I have had restaurants refuse to serve authentic dishes to me--fish head soup, for example--because they believe I won't like it. Just being able to read Hanzi doesn't qualify you to order real Chinese food.
This is not to say that the Chinese dishes are as good as you can get in Shanghai, because they certainly are not. But "American Chinese Food" is it's own, distinct (and disgusting) beast.
Posted on: Fortunate Cookies
June 12, 2008 at 3:34 PMFortune cookies in America often include lucky numbers you can play on the lottery. I recently saw cookies which tried to teach Chinese as well. On the back of the fortune it said something like "Today's Chinese Lesson: 很好 (hun how) means 'very good'."
Maybe CPod can work with Kid Genius (a.k.a. Steve Jobs) to develop an edible wireless memory device. Think flash RAM + RFID made out of glutinous rice. You could have fortune cookies which beam podcasts into iPhones.
How wonderful would it be to finish a meal and crack open my cookie to hear "大家好！我是Jenny!"* streaming from the iPhone I cannot afford to buy? I could then safely eat the cookie, podcast and all.
* Note that fortune cookie fortunes are invariably wrong, so I'd be likely to get an Advanced lesson even though I'm barely Intermediate (properly determined and certified by John's Test-o-Matic.) If I went to eat with a Chinese friend she would certainly get a Newbie lesson. It so often happens that someone else at your table gets the fortune you were really meant to have (which is why I refuse to eat fortune cookies with Changye's chubby dog!)
Posted on: Sightseeing at Tiananmen
June 11, 2008 at 3:26 PM@LostInAsia: I'll bite : ) The "rule" about prepositions is a rule, it's just a rule some people consider useless. I agree with you and your friend Winston--preposition placement is a silly thing to concern oneself about.
I myself am a linguistic descriptivist, one who believes that languages are fluid and changing beasts that should be described as opposed to controlled. The supreme beauty of English is that it was bastardized repeatedly by the French invaders. Now it's totally lost its focus by moving under American and thus global influence. It's a beautiful thing! Not even the "linguists" know where the language is headed!
Posted on: Sightseeing at Tiananmen
June 11, 2008 at 7:27 AM@Weibwo: nciku is cool, but the "character pad" is the reason I love studying Chinese on my Tablet PC. One helpful thing is that the tablet respects stroke order, which is great for learning (but not so good for finding weird characters.) I know Cpod's kind a Mac-Firefox place but if you can score a cheap used tablet the ability to write Hanzi is amazing.
Posted on: Hiking
June 10, 2008 at 6:19 AMI restrained myself earlier due to my desire to not add grease to an already stinky flame. But the thread's gone on and now it's late, I'm tired, and so I'll blather on a bit.
Jenny's English amuses me. She dances around the language like a moth around an electric light bulb. Yesterday, I laughed at the word she made up--"aerophobic"--which I didn't buy any more than Ken did. And yet, a quick search this morning shows that it is, in fact, an English word. Brava! I'm afraid to look up other words she has invented for fear that she'll be correct again.
As for Mr. Mircea Moldovan, the Romanian teacher of English and German who has written a couple Chinese dictionaries*, I believe he will just complain as long as people listen. Look back through his posts--it makes him feel good to be negative. But the posts are amusing on their own--look how he uses phrases like "my (humble) opinion" and "respectfully yours". Get it? Pretty funny, huh? Humble and respectful...haha.
*My Romani and Magyar are a bit nonexistent but I think the two books on Mr. Moldova's web site are Romanian-Chinese and Hungarian-Chinese dictionaries.
Posted on: One-on-One Basketball
May 30, 2008 at 4:02 PM@Henning: I agree that Windows XP's pinyin IME is pretty bad, but I think Vista's is nicer than Google's. I use Google's pinyin IME on my Mac because Mac (even Leopard) has *awful* input support.
One frightening thing about Google's IME: it secretly installs a network daemon running on your box. I realize Google claims they will do no evil but I have a feeling that they're trying to take over for Microsoft in the "scary big brother" category.
Posted on: When will he return?
May 28, 2008 at 3:24 AM@Architpol: In your "oops post" you used 种 (zhòng), instead of 钟 (zhōng). The former means to plant or cultivate, the latter means clock or time.
Posted on: When will he return?
May 24, 2008 at 9:43 PMSorry if I offend anyone by using Hanzi. I'm past the Newbie level, but certainly not Intermediate. I always enter what I am saying three times: hanzi, pinyin and english. Hopefully you can ignore what you don't want to read.
Posted on: When will he return?
May 24, 2008 at 1:07 PM孔子什么时候回来？ (kǒngzi shénme shíhou huí lai? -> (When does Confucius get back?)
Posted on: When is the meeting?
June 19, 2008 at 3:18 PM@Pat Metheny: CPod often prefers "natural" translation to "direct" translation. The sense of 我们什么时候开会 (wǒmen shenme shíhòu kāihuì) translated into English is "when is the meeting" or "when is our meeting". You could argue that the "correct" translation is "Us what time meet?" I'd argue in support of CPod's method--translate word order as well as word meaning.
Interestingly, I heard on the radio this morning that Beijing is renaming dishes which don't translate well. Mapo Doufu, which directly translates as "tofu made by a pock-marked old woman" is being renamed to appeal more to foreign visitors. Others, like "husband and wife's lung" are obvious candidates for whitewashing.