User Comments - tingyun

Posted on: Classical Chinese vs. Modern Chinese

Yep, it's been something like 3-4 years since I've actually studied a cpod lesson, but I'll always have fond memories of learning here. I actually exhausted the archives of advanced and media lessons (easier to do back then, naturally) before I moved on - it was a great deal of fun.

Classical Chinese is not their specialty anyway, and further, to quote another classical expression: 人非圣贤，孰能无过！过而能改，善莫大焉。("people are not sages, who can be without a mistake? Make a mistake and then correct it, there is no higher virtue!"). I'm just hoping they implement the last part of that expression. ;)

Posted on: Classical Chinese vs. Modern Chinese

Hi Tal,

Yep - My point is just that if you want to make a hero out of a brilliant conqueror, don't try to dress it up as something egalitarian. ;)

Hi Doodle,

We don't seem to disagree on anything - I did say "much like most emperors who seized control rather than inheriting it" (that is perhaps the only possible area of disagreement, I think you can't compare her to ones that inherited within a stable succession). I didn't mean any of those random stories - to me, random incidents of violence against isolated individuals will never stand as significant in the contexts we are talking about.

And agreed on her very, very impressive ability.

Posted on: Classical Chinese vs. Modern Chinese

I just hope we don't have to go another round with arguments like "a professor says understanding meaning is more important than pronunciation" or "we were taught this way, some people say it this way, we reflect the real Chinese language spoken on the streets" - all are just silly in the context of quote from an ancient language taught by a language learning website with a responsibility to get things right, and ensure that if their students decide to quote from a classical text, they do so without sounding uneducated and do not, to borrow another classical expression, 画虎不成反类狗 (try to paint a tiger and end up with it looking like a dog - ie imitating in a manner that makes it neither this nor that, giving people cause to laugh at you)

I rather hope they fix this - they just have to check a few dictionaries, and then reflect for a moment on how the similerity between 不亦说乎 (Where 说 is pronounced yue4 and stands in for 悦) and 不亦乐乎 got some middle school teachers confused in the first place, and then everything should make perfect sense to them.

Posted on: Classical Chinese vs. Modern Chinese

It's from 论语 lun2yu3. I'll make a quick annotation of difficult characters and translation for you, to hold you off until you get your full lesson ;)

Original:"子曰：学而时习之，不亦说乎？有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎？人不知而不愠，不亦君子乎？"

Annotated: 子(indicates Confucius)曰(yue1, said, says)：学而时(means 'frequently' here)习之(means 那，这, here refers to that which you studied))，不亦说(here read yue4, standing in for the modern 悦)乎？有朋自远方来，不亦乐(le4 ;) )乎？人不知而不愠(yun4, angry)，不亦君子乎？

Translation : confucius said: Studying and then frequently practicing/reviewing, is it not a very joyful thing? Having people who share your values come from distant places to visit, is it not a very happy thing? When people do not understand you and yet you do not get angry, is this not a person with good morals/upright behavior?

Note that the final 知 here is a bit ambiguous - you might be able to make a case for interpreting it as standing in for 智 instead of representing the modern 知 (similar to the 说 stands in for 悦 - in ancient times alot of the chaacters we love had yet to be born in or come into their own). My own research is not in this field (classical Chinese philosophy), and I lack the expertise to decide whether that would be a viable interpretation or not, so I kept it as 知 in the translation.

Posted on: Classical Chinese vs. Modern Chinese

Hi Johny,

No blame at all for them initially getting it wrong - please see my first post, where I explain the origin of the mistake and ask them to fix it.

Some blame for the first reply (where cpod said "有的学者认为读“lè”，有的认为读“yuè”") - making up a nonexistent scholarly debate to try to support your position goes against the trust cpod users place in the employees here. I assume this was an honest mistake (ie, they simply assumed their position had to be viable), but it is recklessly arrogant to assume your opinions are always going to be viable without first checking reputable sources.

Some blame for the second response too - it was very kindly written, and I know Vera meant all the best, but that collection of internet posts did little but alert one to the fact that yue4 was in error (except in the minds of middle school teachers), and it was a clear distortion to imply it showed there was scholarly debate on both sides. More importantly, at that point (if not much sooner), cpod should have simply realized it is time to consult the authoritative reference works, not search around internet message boards or write replies that attempt to justify their position with quotes for the obvious proposition that 'meaning is more important than pronunciation'.

A quick review of the classical dictionaries (or even reputable modern ones) should be enough to convince them of their mistake. Failing to admit this and correct it for the benefit of the students would seem to only arise from 1 of 2 causes - either they still believe they are correct, against the weight of all expert opinion and the simple logic of the situation, or they want to avoid admitting a mistake at any cost. Either is worthy of some blame, and I am sure my attitude on this shows clearly.

Naturally, though, I remain really impressed with cpod and its excellent staff - this is where I spent my first years of chinese language learning, and I have all sorts of nice things I could say about each and every one of them. But there is no harm in admitting a mistake - classical chinese is naturally a bit far outside the expertise of modern language teachers, and everyone makes mistakes. I'm hoping they simply fix this, and I will then have nothing but praise for them and all the great work done at cpod.

Posted on: Classical Chinese vs. Modern Chinese

Haha, my moot court teacher from law school would be ashamed of me. ;). For someone who like to be careful with his Chinese I make all sorts of random careless errors in english - just too lazy to proofread...

Posted on: Classical Chinese vs. Modern Chinese

Hi Podster,

Simultaneous posts - I think you made all the points better than I, and much more succinctly (I'm afraid I couldn't resist a chance to describe the old 反切 system of marking pronunciation).

Posted on: Classical Chinese vs. Modern Chinese

Hi johny,

Interesting post - I'll reply point by point.

1) Well, truthfully it was far from all middle schools to begin with. My girlfriend (who went to a top middle school) learned it correctly. And the post cpod links to has different middle school teachers noting that their schools (西安铁一中 and 西安高新一中) have recently changed the way they teach to le4 (the teachers misinterpret this as a change in the standard rather than a correction of an error, but such is of no import). So this will likely soon be confined to a portion of a few generations (the portion unfortunate enough to have teachers with a poor classical education).

Second, the error is by no means universal as a practical matter. In particular, the vast majority of those who received a good classical education would be unlikely to make this error (the post in cpod's link who states that pronouncing it as yue4 will cause people to laugh at you is not completely wrong, though they are unlikely to do so outloud). Basically, the question is whether you want to sound well-educated or not - and if you really want to quote from ancient Chinese, best not to do so like an uneducated country bumpkin. ;)

2) naturally - the Chinese of 2,000 years ago was completely different in sound! There are various reconstructions of what ancient Chinese may have sounded like, but we don't really know.

What we mean when we talk about correct 古文 pronunciations is actually something else - essentially, you could think of it as making sure that things that sounded the same 2,000 years ago still sound the same now. This is because of the way ancient Chinese left us pronunciation guides - they didn't have pinyin, instead they used a system called 反切. Best to explain with an example - if an ancient Chinese commentator wanted to tell you how to pronounce 东, they would write "德红切". What we do is look at the two characters before the 切, and take the consonant of the first one and the vowel and tone of the second. So the first is de2, we take the d, the second is hong2, we take the ong2" and we have 东 dong2 - which of course is slightly incorrect in the tone - we'd have to adjust for the older system of tones. So you see how this system has preserved the fact of things that once sounded close continuing to sound close, as it defines every sound relative to others. But even when sounds drifted a bit, the most significant preservation lies in the idea that when there were multiple pronunciations with different meanings, this is preserved too. This is all a bit of a simplification, but gives the general idea.

Ok, so how does this work in the case of 乐? In ancient times, there were two pronunciations, which whatever they actually sounded like, were ancestors to the modern sounds le4 and yue4. Le4 was used for happiness, yue4 for music. And actually, the exact same division operates in modern Chinese - these same two meanings divided along the same lines. Modern Chinese say le4 to mean happiness, yue4 to mean music.

Which is what makes this particular error so absurd - because it consists of modern people thinking that things were different in ancient times (because they are confusing 乐 with 说, which had a yue4 pronunciation ancient times but not in modern), and then purposefully abandoning their modern speech habits and reversing things to try to imitate an ancient accent - when in fact they would have been right to simply use their normal pronunciation. It is the perfect storm of silliness. ;)

Note that according to most ancient dictionaries 乐 has a third version, a yao4 pronunciation that has disappeared from the modern language but should be used in reading some ancient expessions. Honestly, if someone neglected to use that I would have NO problem - I'm not sure there is that much need to go out of the way to preserve dead pronounciations. But the case of pronouncing it as yue4 here is just too absurd.

3) Certainly! There is nothing about the discussion here, or anything I have said, that could be cited as evidence of what scholars think on any issue. Rather, one should go to the sources I have cited (in particular, the dictionaries). Note that "scholarly debate" i was using to rebut cpod's original assertion that 学者 disagree on the pronunciation (which is patently false), I did not mean "scholarly debate" in the sense of intelligent discourse, which happens as well on the internet as elsewhere. I of course do not mean one cannot learn anything from discussion on the internet - rather, the point is you cannot (as cpod did) say that there is not an academic consensus, or that different scholars (学者) say different things, on the basis of internet posts of random people.

Though this point is largely mute, as the internet discussion they link to is actually overwhelmingly against their own point (as i described above), and paints this yue4 pronunciation as the relic of confused middle school teachers. (I should note - I have the utmost respect for school teachers dedication - but they are most certainly not experts on classical chinese)

Posted on: Classical Chinese vs. Modern Chinese

Hi Mike,

Yah, normally I'd be a little more gentle, but Cpod's response on this issue is hard to take seriously.

I mean, if you are going to use random internet discussions as your evidence, at least make sure it supports your case. To summarize what they link to as "middle school teachers, college teachers or professors all have different views on it" is, well, hilarious, and makes me wonder whether they even read their own link.

Their link actually trots out several middle school teachers, all of whom express surprise at the le4 pronounciation, or express the belief that this is a recent change.

Then, the one college professor who actually gives an opinion on the correct pronunciation states, not once, but twice, that yue4 was NEVER correct in this context, that this was always a mistake - "全错了".

"“有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎？”中的“乐”应该读lè。“乐”在这里从来就没有通假过“悦”，它要表达的就是快乐的意思。根据对古汉语的研究，“乐”一旦读成yuè，一般就指乐器，从来没有快乐的意思，“以前关于‘乐’读yuè的教育全错了”。"

Then the post ends with a statement that asserts meaning is more important than pronunciation (undoubtedly true), then a bunch of random posts later where people talk about how pronouncing 不亦乐乎 as yue4 will "贻人笑柄" ("give people reason to laugh at you"), and then a bunch of posts exploring the pronunciation of 乐 in other passages and ancient texts.

So Cpod's statement that there is disagreement among middle school teachers and college professors is true - in the sense that college professors say the middle school teachers are wrong, and were always wrong. ;)

Not that I think polling random college professors is some kind of accurate way to address this problem - random 'college professor' is really not that much better than random 'middle school teacher' on this issue. 古文 is a specialized research topic, of which there are experts - like, for example, the hundreds of experts who participated in the compilation of 汉语大词典 (there is a reason we scholars of ancient China rely on it as the most authoritative and respected dictionary of ancient Chinese language), or the smaller, but still qualified editorial teams of the other ancient Chinese and even respected modern dictionaries. And they all agree that it is NOT yue4, but rather le4 in this expression.

Though what is most surprising is the opinion expressed by Cpod that this issue started with the《咬文嚼字》article I cited (declaring yue4 the most common language mistake of 2008), and that "When we were in school, ‘yue4' is the only pronouncation". 汉语大词典 was compiled and published from 1975-1993, and I think the other dictionaries I cite were all published before 2008. Just because you were taught something in middle-school, does not mean it was EVER correct, and the article that brought the error to public attention did NOT create some kind of a new pronunciation competing with the old standard. No, your middle school teacher was simply wrong and mixing up two similar expressions. Sigh - Too bad Confucius did not foresee the inability middle school teachers to remember the difference between学而时习之, 不亦说乎 and 有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎...

I'm still hoping Cpod just admits the mistake and corrects this - the first line of 古文 that Cpod users learn should not contain such a glaring error. I understand the desire to save face, but sometimes there are more important considerations in play - like teaching paying, dedicated customers correctly.

Posted on: Personal Finances

Hi Romontana,

The complicated truth is that there really is no sharp, binary system of neutral/full tone, and much divergence on what constitutes a neutral tone in the first place.

Here, most dictionaries do indeed list 老实 as being neutral, 老是 as being full fourth tone, But let's take 老实 for instance - if it was really a fully neutral tone, then it would sound very similar to 老师, just weaker on the final tone (since technically a neutral tone following tone 3 gets pronounced at a high study tone, although short). But it doesn't usually sound like this - 实 in 老实 seems to maintain something of its second tone, rising quality, though it is weaker than would be expected.

Turning to 老是, most dictionaries are going to tell you it is full tone, but cpod listing it as neutral also makes sense, because the 是 is certainly weak here, yet it just as certainly maintains a fourth tone quality. The end result is that even for someone who would pronounce both as 'neutral' , 老实 and 老是 are going to sound rather different, and even for someone who would maintain 老是 is neutral, there is still going to be a definite 4th tone tendancy.

For point of comparison, try listening closely to the sound of words ending in 子 - these are often pronounced with completely neutral tones - and you will notice a pattern of how the neutral tone, in its purer form, sounds different after each different preceding tone, with little influence of what its original tone was. Then, listen to other words that are neutral, and you will discover that while some also behave like this, for others 'neutral' seems to be more of a way of describing the weakness with which they are pronounced, and they manage to retain a sense of their original tone.

Then, the question becomes how weak before one is declared neutral by a dictionary, and apparently that line has usually been drawn somewhere between 老实 and 老是. But there really isn't too much that is real there I think, and in the context and rhythm of most sentences (barring special emphasis placed on the word) 老是 is likely going to sound pretty far down the neutral scale.

The above are just the observations of a fellow learner - I wouldn't usually chime in on a topic like this (too far outside my expertise), but since you've been waiting a week for an answer I thought perhaps any answer might be of some help.