User Comments - bert2

Posted on: Travel Wedding

That's quite a difference. But as soon as you are able to read the whole sentence your expressions were found in, you can tell what context they were used in and exactly what they mean. In my view, that would be a lot more interesting than the number of results.

Posted on: Building, Establishing, and Creating

我不同意。看词典不够。中文的词语会有很细微的差别。真的要明白词语的意思，你要么读很多中文，要么就问问题、听词语的解释。

你愿意只听汉语的话，就去Upper Intermediate、Advanced、Media等。

Posted on: Building, Establishing, and Creating

When you 创造 something, it's something new that didn't exist before. So it's limited to absolutely innovative people. :)

There is no general verb "to create" in Chinese.

Posted on: Building, Establishing, and Creating

Maybe it helps to remember that the character 作 from 创作 is also found in the word 作品 (work of literature/art).

Posted on: Building, Establishing, and Creating

As you say, 创作 is used more concretely for works of art or something definite that requires creativity.

创造 may be more general and abstract, but I'm not sure here, because 创造性 and 创造力 mean creativity, too.

These words are also related to creating: 创新，造成，制造，创出，创造成，创造出.

Posted on: Building, Establishing, and Creating

In the ABC dictionary, 建造 and 盖 (gài) both have "build; construct".

Could one say 建造 describes the process of building more generally, perhaps stressing the result, while 盖 focuses more on the concrete steps required to build a house?

As in: 这个房子是我自己盖的。

Posted on: Punctuation Marks

You can find some info on these in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation

I coudn't find "‖" in there. It seems to be used in computing, as old PCs have it.

Posted on: Punctuation Marks

Interesting question. I know for sure that Old Chinese (2000 years ago) didn't use any punctuation, not even full stops. Classical Chinese, the one that was used parallel to modern Chinese up to the 20th century, seems to be about the same as modern Chinese in terms of punctuation.