User Comments - changye

Posted on: 《杜拉拉升职记》

看到《杜拉拉》这个名字使我联想到一个词 ....... 拉肚子(la1du4zi, have loose bowels).

Posted on: The Magic Word 把

Hi tarcy

Thanks a lot for your very logical explanation based on the theme-opinion principle. I've read the comment three times. I think that's really worth reading a few times.

Posted on: Quiet for the Baby

Hi calkins

As you explained, 没有睡觉 means "didn't sleep", and 睡不着觉 "can't sleep". There are several ways to say "can't sleep" in Chinese, such as 睡不着，睡不觉，and 睡不着觉. Exactly speaking, 睡不着 is "can't fall asleep", 睡不觉 "can't sleep", and 睡不着觉 is just a mystery for me, hehe. For the record, 睡不好觉 means "can't sleep well".

我昨天晚上都睡不着觉。

Posted on: The Magic Word 把

Hi tarcy and little_fan

Thanks a lot for your helpful comments. I don't know the logic behind them, but one of my grammar books gives a supportive explanation about the "把～" structure. It says that "把 + unfavorable action" is often used when you imply it was done mistakenly. In other words, "把 + unfavorable action" is emotionally "neutral". Conversely, "航空公司弄丢了我的行李！" might be more appropriate when you are very angry, hehe.

Posted on: Business Card Gone Wrong

Here are the numbers of Chinese characters that has the same pronunciation (tones are not taken into account) in one of my Chinese dictionaries, which lists about 13,000 characters in it.

For example, "yi" was divided into four different sounds in ancient times, and was later consolidated into one, which is the reason there are a lot of characters that has the sound "yi" in modern Mandarin.

yi ......155
ji .......140
yu .....130
xi ......118
zhi ....109
qi .......96
shi ......87
yan ....85
wei .....84
ju .......80   
wu .....66
hu ......62
gu ......60
yin .....60
bo ......56
you .....54
ying ....53
xu ......53
zi ........50
jing .....49
chi ......48
qu .......47
jin .......46

Posted on: Business Card Gone Wrong

Hi bababardwan

《施氏食狮史》 is written in (grammatically) perfect Chinese, although I don't know if it's "natural", hehe. The most tricky parts are "适" and "是". "适" is used in two senses in this poem, i.e. "go (verb)" and "just (adverb)". "是" means "this, these", but not "be" here.

As for Chinese perakun, it's very weak in (properly) displaying multi-reading characters (多音字). Perakun is very useful, but it's not necessarily an ideal tool for newbies and elementary learners.

Posted on: Business Card Gone Wrong

I hear that 《施氏食狮史》  was made by a Chinese scholar who opposed eliminating Chinese characters in the first half of the 20th century. He demonstrated how stupid complete romanization of Mandarin is by showing an extreme example he made.

In reality, there are not so many "perfect homophones" in modern Chinese owing to four different tones. Additionally, there are a lot of two-character words used in modern Mandarin, unlike classical Chinese, which also help reduce the number of homophones.

This "homophone problem" is worse in Japanese than in Chinese. As you know, Japanese contains tons of Chinese words, but　unfortunately (?) Japanese is not a tone language.

To make matters worse, Japanese has less consonants and vowels than Chinese, which is a primary reason why Japanese has so many homophones. That said, thanks to Chinese characters, you have no difficulty distinguishing them in written Japanese, at least.

Actually, the worst "homophone problem" exists in Korean language. Korean people have already abandoned using Chinese characters despite the fact that Korean contains more Chinese words than Japanese does. So, it's not "homophone problem", but "homonym problem" in Korean.

Fortunately, Korean has more kinds of syllables than Japanese, and therefore Korean has less homonyms than Japanese, but you would encounter much more homonyms (not homophones) when reading Korean texts due to the disuse of Chinese characters.

Posted on: The Bride Makes Soup - 新嫁娘

stepmother 后妈 (hou4 ma1)

Posted on: Rise and Shine!

床上用品 (chuang2 shang4 yong4 pin3) bedding

Please be careful not to call it "上床用品".

Posted on: 谋杀案

如果是侦探小说的话，最“不可疑”的人才是个最可疑的人。按这个道理，我怀疑李加良警官可能是个真凶！他想要陷害陈瑶，但是我猜不到他那么做的动机。很可能李加良年轻的时候被陈瑶拒绝过一次。从那时到现在，他一直抱怨陈瑶和她丈夫。结局如何？