User Comments - changye
changye
Posted on: Birth by Chinese Zodiac
January 28, 2009 at 1:46 PMHi zhenlijiang,
P/S. That said, a poor memory sometimes works favorably for you. For instance, you can enjoy reading the same mystery novel several times. This is not a joke, at least. for me.
Posted on: Birth by Chinese Zodiac
January 28, 2009 at 1:35 PMHi zhenlinjiang,
You are right. I have a very poor memory, so repeated "encounters" with a big word is the only way for me to memorize it. I'm afraid that I'm not diligent enough to read a Chinese dictionary page by page, but I always try to glance over other words listed under a direction character when I look up in a Chinese dictionary.
I don't recommend that elementary learners do this, but it would be beneficial for intermediate and higher level learners. Honestly, I still have a lot of (easy) characters that I can never correctly remember their tones. I sometimes think learning languages is just a matter of memory. I wish I had a good memory!
Posted on: Seeing off an Old Friend 渭城曲
January 28, 2009 at 1:07 PMHi pete and zhenlijiang,
Thanks for the interiguing topic and the links. I love music. I don't know if it could be called "absolute ear" in the sense of musical pitch, but I think it's possible that Chinese people generally have more sensitive ears than Japanese people's, since their languages have a more complicated pronunciation and tonal system than those in Japanese.
I'm afraid I have a poor listening comprehension skill and have attributed it to the simple pronunciation system of my native tongue! Incidentally, I wonder if there is difference in the "absolute pitch hearing ability" between 北京人 and 广东人. As you know, Cantonese officially has nine tones, and putonghua only four. I guess that Cantonese probably have better ears than northerners, haha.
Posted on: Pregnancy Series 2: Pregnancy House Ar-rest
January 28, 2009 at 12:09 PMHi pete,
Don't worry, that's just for fun. Actually, there are a lot of rather dubious "authentic" etymoloeis of Chinese characters, as you know, shown in books and dictionaries written by scholars. Quite a few characters still don't have the accepted etymology. Some scholars even say the shape of 且 indicated "a penis" in ancient times. I just love it, though, haha.
P/S. Incidentally, "士" (a man) originated in the shape of "a penis". This seems to be the accepted etymology of this character.
Posted on: Birth by Chinese Zodiac
January 28, 2009 at 11:32 AMHi zhenlijiang,
I've also used 岩波中国語辞典 bofere. I remember it's a rather unique dictionary, where all the words are shown in piinyin alphabetical order just like ordinary English dictionaries, regardless of what Chinese character a word begins with.
This dictionary was edited around 1960, so I guess the author was probably deeply influenced by the "get rid of Chinese characters" movement in China at that time, which led to him to employ this system. If 毛泽东 had known the dictionary, he would have loved it.
I have two a little uncommon Chinese dictioinaries. One is 基礎中国語辞典（by 講談社）, where all the words are arranged in order of A-I-U-E-O (Hiragana) based on Japanese readings of Chinese characters. This might be helpful for beginners, but I don't think using this dictionary would enbale you to make progress in learning Chinese. Don't ask me why I bought it, haha.
Another one is so-called "reverse dictionary" (逆引き辞典). It's called "逆序词典" in Chinese. This is very useful for me, at least. You can see a lot of related words in the same page, for example, 鲍鱼，比目鱼，黄花鱼，鲸鱼 under the character "鱼", or 办法，兵法，方法，做法 under "法". Furthermore, it's also convenient when you don't know how to read the first character in your target word.
Posted on: 麻将风波
January 28, 2009 at 10:43 AM陈博士，你好。日本也有同样的说法。每隔六天有一次“赤口”，还有大安，佛灭等等。就像中国的一样，赤口在日本也被认为是不吉利的一天，但是最不吉祥的还是佛灭。很多日本人避开佛灭日举办婚礼，相反，大安日最受结婚情侣的欢迎。当代日本人一般不盲目相信迷信，不过讲究吉日的习俗在日本社会中还有影响力。话虽这么说，其实在佛灭日办婚礼可以让你省钱。为了促销，婚礼会场一般给这种“不怕迷信”的顾客大优惠。你敢不敢？
Posted on: Gong Xi Fa Cai!
January 28, 2009 at 10:41 AM....self-deleted.
Posted on: Pregnancy Series 2: Pregnancy House Ar-rest
January 28, 2009 at 9:58 AMHi leeht,
Thanks a lot for the link. I've just finished watching all the etymologies shown in the site. That's just interesting. I'm impressed with the imagination of the guys who created the website.
Incidentally, I didn't know at all that "楚" also meant "pain" until I saw the site today. For me, "楚" is a character used in the word "清楚" (clear), or the name of a ancient country in China, 楚国.
Posted on: Seeing off an Old Friend 渭城曲
January 28, 2009 at 5:42 AMHi bababardwan,
Looks like that "々" is used in modern Chinese too. They say that "々" is possibly a variant form of the cursive form of "〃".
Posted on: 麻将风波
January 29, 2009 at 4:18 AM陈博士，你好。哎呀，没想到是你才十九岁，比我小三十来岁。可是你汉语写得比我好多，我听到你叫我“老师”就觉得太尴尬了！对了，我想问你一下。“博士”这个名是在中国女生专用的名字，还是男女兼用的？仅供参考，“博士”在日语中只指“Ph.D”的意思，所以名叫“博士”的日本人非常罕见。说实话，第一次看你姓名的时候，我以为你是博士生或者是学者，真的！