User Comments - changye
changye
Posted on: Hong Kong Visa Run
March 30, 2009 at 8:35 AMHi reigau
I'm sorry for my late "nitpicking", hehe. "黄" doesn't have 草字头 (grass radical). Actually "黄" itself is a radical. Please look at its ancient form shown in the website below. Incidentally, the original meaning of "英" is "flower, petal", but the character is almost exclusively used in the sense of "hero, outstanding person, British" in modern Mandarin.
http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterASP/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E9%BB%84&submitButton1=Etymology
Posted on: Does it Have Bones?
March 30, 2009 at 8:07 AMHere is a useless information for western lerners. Please take a look at the 骨 in today's picture. The small "口" in the upper part of the character is located on the left side in modern Mandarin, however interestingly enough, it's located on the right side in Japan.
Historically, the "right" variant precedes the "left" one. The 骨 characters in small seal scripts (小篆书) and clerical scripts (隶书), which appeared more than two thousand years ago, commonly have the "口" on the right side, just like the Japanese kanji "骨".
I don't know exactly when the location of "口" changed, but at least the 骨 in 康熙字典 (1716) is the same as that used in modern Mandarin, that is to say, "口" is on the left side. The one in 广韵 (1008) has something like "人", instead of "口", in the middle. It might be a transitional form, hehe.
I guess that the location of "口" changed sometime in the past because of calligraphical standpoint in China. Perhaps the "left" type was easier to write. More importantly, the "left" type has one less stroke count than the "right" one. The less, the better ... ?
http://chinese-characters.org/meaning/9/9AA8.html
Posted on: Does it Have Bones?
March 30, 2009 at 3:35 AMHi vm3u
The character 骨 is usually not used solely, just like some characters such as 父 (fu4)，母 (mu3)，男 (nan2)，and 女 (mv3). So "a bone" is always called 骨头 in Chinese.
Posted on: Clearing the Table
March 30, 2009 at 1:55 AMHi stanimal
The most basic form of the sentence is "拿餐巾纸来" (bring napkins), and you can make it more specific/polite by adding some words, for example, like 请再拿点餐巾纸过来.
Posted on: Can You Use Chopsticks?
March 30, 2009 at 1:23 AMHi thenorthface
Does the word 山东棒子 connote derogatorily too? Incidentally, I hear that there are a lot of 山东人 living in 大连 (da4lian2)/辽宁省 (liao2ning2sheng3) here in northeast China.
Posted on: Broken, Busted, and Smashed
March 29, 2009 at 11:27 PMHi tanick
My try is
为了准备考试我花了整整十二个小时了。我快要崩溃了！
准备考试 is often abbreviated to 备考.
Posted on: 李敖吴宗宪对决
March 29, 2009 at 12:48 PM我有一个爱好，就是观察中国愤青们充满爱国热情的言辞和行为。这个消遣比在动物园观看大熊猫好玩得多。我很愿意承认我真的是个闲人，哈哈。其实这种不大高级的爱好有另一个好处。虽说骂人话较多，但至少我可以学很地道的中文。这才能叫“一举两得”！
Posted on: Fingers, Food and a Mystery Video
March 29, 2009 at 12:03 PMLight487, congratulations! Your dream has come true. The problem is how to keep yourself motivated to diligently learn Chinese after coming back to Australia. So what rjberk said is right. You nedd to come back to China again in a year. 加油！
Posted on: Can You Use Chopsticks?
March 29, 2009 at 9:57 AMHi dunderklumpen
The "some utensils" in the dictionary probably don't include a lot of things. My dictionaries only show 一只箱子 (box), 一只手表 (watch), and 一只竹筐 (bamboo basket) as examples.
Even native Chinese sometimes make a mistake in choosing a measure word. Actually some measure words are infrequently used, and people often make do with versatile ones such as "个".
As for 把, it's a very "graphic" measure word, which can easily remind you of the handle of a knife. So I suppose that most native Chinese would say "一把刀", perhaps.
Posted on: Does it Have Bones?
March 30, 2009 at 8:55 AMHi zhenlijiang
Yeah, that's why I said "please take a look at the picture" in my comment. Probably it's a problem caused by something related to Unicode. Or perhaps this only happens when using browsers with Japanese characters. I use Firefox (Japanese).
There are a lot of this kind of "subtly different" characters besides 骨 and 直, e.g., 花，延 and 差. And this is one of the reasons some stupid scholars are trying to standardize the forms of Chinese characters used in China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan.