User Comments - goulnik
goulnik
Posted on: Business Cards (original)
September 2, 2007 at 10:23 AMI'm planning to have my business cards reprinted when I go to Shanghai, with Chinese on the flip side. Any suggestion where to go and how long this would take?
Posted on: Election Candidates
September 2, 2007 at 10:06 AMin another thread, AuntySue says that "Language cannot (these days) be changed very effectively by legislation, but it is changed easily and rapidly by popular culture and software." I'm wondering, in practice, who comes up with those transliterations (布希 / 布什 etc.) so that it becomes used by everyone, in PRC I could see 新华社 since it's controled by the government. Still, how do they go about it, what do they put into it? I guess for big brands it's part of the early PR so it would be PR agencies.
Posted on: Election Candidates
September 2, 2007 at 9:59 AMI wonder why the Chinese insist to use hanzi transcription of politicians, places etc. There characters they use often give a clue but sometimes it's still pretty hard to guess (默克尔 is pretty easy in a news article reporting on 德国总理访华 but out of context？）
Posted on: 亲戚称呼
September 2, 2007 at 8:20 AMJenny, 为什么比你跟头疼，倒是很简单！但是，离婚率越来越高，新建家庭越来越多，当然将有新称呼的 ;-)
Posted on: Election Candidates
September 2, 2007 at 6:49 AMalso 贫富悬殊 wide gap between the rich and the poor (pínfùxuánshū)
Posted on: Election Candidates
September 2, 2007 at 6:42 AMsome more relevant vocab， some from changye's post： 民主主义 democracy mínzhǔzhǔyì 预选选举 primary election (yùxuǎn xuǎnjǔ) 竞选总统 presidential campaign （zǒngtǒng jìngxuǎn） 布希 Bush (Bùxī, spread hope ?-) 宪法 constitution (xiànfǎ) 死刑 death penalty (sǐxíng) changye, I'm curious as to how you align you posts in Chinese on an 8-characters boundary? And also why, is it based on the Japanese way of reading vertically first? Frankly, for longer posts I find it a bit harder to follow.
Posted on: 亲戚称呼
September 1, 2007 at 9:36 AM嗲? 是不是幼稚的意思？跟亲戚称呼有什么关系啊？
Posted on: 亲戚称呼
September 1, 2007 at 7:18 AM但如今由独生子女简化了吗？ 反正我下个月来上海，访问了友好的近亲，我一定要准备了亲戚的名单
Posted on: Time to Go
September 1, 2007 at 6:12 AMYes, Alsace is a French region on the Eastern side, at the border with Southern Germany and the North East of Switzerland. It's been under alternating German and French rule for the past 150 years, returned to France after WWII. People actually had to choose sides after WWII but there are painful memories of those times. The dialect (Elsässerditsch) did survive and is now taught in some schools along with high German (Hochdeutsch), the officiall language of Germany. It's not that the dialect was the original German though, the two lived side by side, the former as vernacular (oral), the latter as the written language with French for the elites. Anyway it's now become an asset, with many locals commuting to neighboring Germany and Switzerland where employment opportunities and salaries are much higher. But it's indeed a beautiful area, you'd want to try its food and wines (mainly white). I happen to live there but that's not actually my 家乡。
Posted on: Lili and Zhang Liang 13: A Dad Gives Advice to a Broken-Hearted Son
September 3, 2007 at 4:34 AMThis lesson has 钻牛角尖 zuān (niújiǎojiān) translated as 'to obsess over a small thing' but both 现代汉语词典 and Wenlin have 'split hairs/reach a dead end' though the latter also have 'take pains to study and insignificant or insoluble problem' ： 费力研究不值得研究或无法解决的问题 So your definition is sort of half-way, and I'm sort of unclear, though the Expansion examples lean towards 'taking pains...' As I am probably splitting hairs, how do you say 'splitting hairs' as in arguing over details?