User Comments - zhenlijiang

Posted on: Tomb Sweeping Festival -- 清明

sorry that's wrong of course  清明节 is today.　祝大家周末快乐

Posted on: Tomb Sweeping Festival -- 清明

in relation to the significance of the shepherd boy, i was (am) trying to write a poem in Chinese about tomb-visiting which for obvious reasons is proving to be an enormous struggle. an element important to my poem i feel corresponds to the shepherd boy here.  but 清明节 was yesterday and the poem is nowhere close to finished. so i hope to keep working on it--and maybe impose on all of you by the end of july.

regarding why 夏目雅子, a woman, was cast for the part of 三蔵法師 in Monkey (they don't make TV like that anymore), i know some stories but am looking into their credibility.  that is an all-star cast btw.

Posted on: Tomb Sweeping Festival -- 清明

hi pete

just to let you know that all comments posted during that certain block of time, as bababardwan and thinkbuddha have pointed out, are missing across the boards and in the Activity Stream as well.  i certainly don't mind any of my comments during that time being lost, and particularly for the Activity Stream i think it's lower priority to retrieve. but it would be nice if you could retrieve the others--thank you

Posted on: Tomb Sweeping Festival -- 清明

bababardwan, i've been interested in 族谱 ever since i first heard about it being the basis for how children in each generation in a family gets named.  guess it's not the same thing as 家谱 (= family tree?).  hopefully someone can enlighten us.

pete, with 清明节 in Okinawa i believe it's different from the rest of Japan whose Chinese communities of course also observe that day.  like the food and architecture there to name other obvious influences to arrive via Taiwan, Tomb-Sweeping Day is part of Okinawan culture, observed i guess primarily on the main island.

Posted on: Tomb Sweeping Festival -- 清明

i was hoping for this--thanks pete.

only last april i realized just how strong Chinese culture is in Okinawa, seeing on the news that 清明节 is observed there too.

Posted on: Does it Have Bones?

changye, i should have known of course.  fantasizing is fine but Japanese scholars have no business getting involved, they should politely decline all invitations to participate.

Posted on: Does it Have Bones?

stupid question user deleted

Posted on: Does it Have Bones?

thanks changye for the useful info for us, always wondered about this. aesthetically i prefer the old version (same as Japanese), but i'm biased.

how come the viewer here does these weird little conversions to the text, like in all the comments here the character turns into 骨?  another one i've seen that happen to is 直.

Posted on: Can You Use Chopsticks?

suburbanite, thanks very much for the reference--i think i get the idea. 

of course "destroying the symmetry" wouldn't generally be a problem in China with the round tables.

yes i know how not-done eating with the left hand is in India.  when i worked with the special olympics delegation from India, within hours of meeting them at the airport i could tell they had noticed. but i guess everyone felt it was such a terrible thing and no one knew how to broach the subject. so a full 24 hours passed before one of the coaches finally asked "... are you ... left-handed?" and then "... is that ... normal?"  i felt bad for any discomfort they felt and tried as much as i could to use my right hand. i guess the organizers didn't think to match a right-hander with them.  happy to say they were able to overlook my glaring offense and we're still good friends.

Posted on: Can You Use Chopsticks?

joachim, just my two cents. i'm Japanese and left-handed for everything except scissors, needle and knife.  in my experience hanzi and Japanese (roman scripts as well) are meant to be written with the right hand.  strokes going from left to right written with the left hand feel unnatural, and just ever slightly burdensome (coming in) on the heart. you can't really maintain the correct posture or angle in relation to the paper, and over a lifetime the strain adds up.  if i were ever to study calligraphy i would make myself do it with the right hand.

with chopsticks my parents did try to get me to switch to the right hand but it really was too late at age 8.  living in Japan, i wish i were right-handed for chopsticks. i've been at traditional lunches or banquets where i could see my left-handedness was the one glaring error destroying the otherwise perfect symmetry of the entire occasion.  and i discovered i had unconsciously been rearranging the rice bowls and dishes in place on my personal lacquered dining tray (very bad manners).  parents used to be much stricter about correcting left-handedness in kids.  younger ones these days think it could be advantageous, like if they dream of their kid becoming a tennis or baseball pro or something. and so correct it much less now. but that's Japan. i'd also be interested to hear what it's like in China.