User Comments - bodawei

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

'the relative lookup of 面包房 was:

Shanghai

100

Beijing

29

Zhengzhou

28'

Makes Zhenghou look like a hip, happening place. :)

I have no idea how you did these searches Baba but at face value it is interesting. So rj is right, I live in bizarro China where people don't refer to bakeries. And yet, as I say elsewhere, there are shops that sell cake and bread EVERYWHERE. And no, they are not relying on foreigners. Most foreigners don't like the bread - (eg. weird ingredients, too much sugar).

The QingYuan we go to does not make anything on the premises, but they do decorate cakes there. Big part of their business is bespoke decoration of cakes.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

Which reminds me, I loaded the new ios6 software mainly to explore the speaking Chinese capability. Pretty cool, but I can't think of why I would use it much. Except to demonstrate to ther people 'hey, isn't this cool?'

I'd be interested to know whether anyone thinks it has learning-Chinese potential.

I have used it when I get a letter from a Chinese friend and I play it to the rest of the family so everyone can listen to the letter without me sending it on. and to say 'hey, isn't this cool?'

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

Maybe they use voice to text software?

Actually, most old Chinese people are not much into computers. (Yes, I know Jenny says that her parents are right into it, but most of the stories I have heard suggest that they are technology shy.)

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

'Baidu's users include geeks as well as poor people and elderly Chinese who cannot type in pinyin,'

How do you use Baidu without typing in pinyin?

Matter or interest, where did this quote come from, sounds like a (slightly confused?) foreigner. Or maybe I am the (slightly confused?) foreigner. :)

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

'could it be that mianbaofang isn't showing up in Sichuan because google is just not used much there?'

As always Baba, I enjoy your input. Even if my smallish brain has trouble keeping up. :)

Re Google vs Baidu I don't really know how these counts work, I don't know the counting rules. Are they affected by whether or not Chinese people use one or the other? Or do they count 'documents'/sites etc. that use the term in question? Wouldn't matter whether Chinese people use Google or not, would it? It is the source material that is being counted. It is counting the number of references to mianbaodian in documents - not the number of people that use Google or Baidu.

My feeling is that almost no-one out here uses Google. I suspect almost no-one + a small number use it in the east. People know what it is of course, but as a practicality don't use it; Baidu is much easier to use for them. Why take the 麻烦 route?

If I am looking up something about China I would use Baidu more than Google, sometimes both.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

'麻烦你，我能买面包在那里？vs 面包房在那里？'

Exactly. Or nearly exactly. I would probably ask for the place that SELLS bread ..　那个卖面包的地方在哪里？　I can't explain exactly why, just a feeling for how these things are likely to be expressed. [As always, open to comment and correction from any poddies out there.]

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

Hi George

'the people here in Baoding would know that either a 咖啡厅 or 咖啡店 would refer to a coffee shop'

I see what you mean, as an intellectual exercise people know what the words mean. But if you have a little place that sells, tea, yoghurt drinks, and coffee, they probably do not refer to the outlet as a 咖啡厅, right? They tend to reserve this term for a foreign style place like Starbucks (but maybe that is what you had in mind).

八十五度 coffee shop chain (seems to be based in Jiangsu and Shanghai) - I don't know this one, sounds a bit like my regular, the 九十度 (90 degrees) chain (started in Changsha), and yes, I know 好利来; never checked their coffee.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

Hi Baba

Sure there are words in the dictionary, and they may sound like good translations, I'm just saying that I doubt that they are used. I'm not saying that they are not understood (answering George's point elsewhere here], although saying 咖啡店 about the coffee places I go to would draw a blank, just that it's not the best way to communicate about them.

(I don't make any claims about Shanghai - it may be sufficiently westernised for people to use the word 面包房 or whatever.)

For what it is worth, people in my family eat cake and we refer to these places as 'cake shops' [The ones we frequent are about 50/50 cakes and bread (but not bread as we know it], and I'm not sure that Chinese people do. Even if it is written on the hoarding I doubt that they refer to them by what is written on the hoarding. They refer to them by their brand name, then the name of the store: So it goes [Brand] [Locality] 店. This applies to lots of outlets, 'bakeries', coffee shops, restaurants, to name a few.

It's a cultural thing I am pointing to - the things we might expect in a bakery could appear in one of several different kinds of outlets in China. For example, although I don't eat cake, I snack on little bings made from corn. In Australia, if it was part of our culture, these would be produced by a bakery. Here they are sold at a 玉米饼店．　

My very good dictionary has a lot of words that are not in general use. You know you are in real trouble when the dictionary gives a description of the term rather than a single word. :)

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

George, you didn't get an answer, and that maybe is your answer. I don't think there is a word like the English word 'bakery'. This may be because bakeries (such as they are) were introduced to China and they don't yet quite fit in the culture as they do in ours.

Bakeries tend to be referred to by their business name, the chains anyway. One of my favourites is the QinYuan chain (top of my head I forget the characters, sorry.) They make a nice sago sweet for about 5 rmb.

Other places that sell bread and cakes (as you have noted) often just have the nature of their wares written up somewhere: 面包　蛋糕　etc. So I will go out on a limb and say that there is no word for bakery, yet.

A similar phenomenon with places that sell coffee - there is no real word for cafe, one that carries the same meaning as the English. I get my coffee most days at a place that advertises itself with a business name - it sells coffee as a small sideline alongside yoghurt drinks and various kinds of teas.

Yes I know some places in China add a Chinese translation of 'coffee shop' to their business name, but if I tried to direct a Chinese friend to the 咖啡厅 or the 咖啡馆 no-one would know what I was talking about.

Posted on: The Mysteries of 而 Revealed

'... and only obtained meaning when attached to a story. Even in ancient times the same quote from the Analects was attached to different stories and given widely different meanings by different writers'

Maybe this is true of all literature. Whether or not this is so, your post reminds me of my efforts with the San Zi JIng. I read it over a period of about four months with a Chinese teacher, with no greater ambitions really than to learn some Chinese. It took so long because of all the stories, the historical timelines .. and detours. A year later I still haven't finished my 'translation', a set of my own stories attached to the San Zi Jing text.