User Comments - goulnik
goulnik
Posted on: Time to Go
August 31, 2007 at 9:16 AMre: user3764/brian85 - my perception is there are significant differences between China, the US and Europe in that respect. The US in a immigration country, and it seems to me that until recently most communities were eager to melt into the culture and ended up forgetting their respective dialects. But American-English borrowed a lot of from them, that's certainly true of early-mid 20th century immigrants. In many European countries by contrast, national languages are political constructs, imposed from the center, some of them fairly recent. In France, local dialects are looked down upon, they've been almost eradicated, and actively so - one of the ways this was done throughout the 19th-20th centuries is by displacing school teachers and other civil servants to make sure they didn't have any local root. In the areas bordering Germany, speaking a dialect that was shared with folks across the border was downright prohibited. The very name used to describe dialects is still derogatory, as if these weren't fully fledged languages that only the illterate would speak. One country that ddidn't do this is Switzerland, still multi-lingual and kept its dialects in the German speaking parts. The fact that many people in Europe do speak more than one language (outside the UK that is, though immigrant communities there seem to keep their languages) is different, it's got to do with country size, mobility, business etc. rather than family ties and dialects as such I would say. And of course there is no analogy to Chinese were mutually incomprehensible languages can share the same written characters and read their respective newspapers!
Posted on: Number Two
August 30, 2007 at 8:22 PMwhile we're about it, I found 便秘 biànmì / 大便不通 dàbiàn bù tōng : constipation, and 便闭 biànbì be constipated. with 拉肚子 lā dùzi that should pretty much cover everything!
Posted on: Number Two
August 30, 2007 at 2:33 PMiqichu, see Bill's reply above - it's all about toddlers wanting to go dàhào/dàbiàn
Posted on: Number Two
August 30, 2007 at 9:14 AMwande, I should have paid more attention. All the pieces are in the dialog, 我很急想【要】上厕所。
Posted on: Number Two
August 30, 2007 at 4:05 AMwande，I guess it would be something along the lines of 突然要大小便 tūrán yào dàxiǎobiàn but not sure what's the common way of expressing the urgency
Posted on: Number Two
August 29, 2007 at 8:47 PMthx henning, those 尸｜characters are quite visual (屎x/尿/屙) but I'd want to know which of 大便/小便, 小号/大号, 拉屎/ 拉尿 is more casual / formal, safer to use, assuming we really need to be explicit :-( Otherwise, is it better to use 上厕所 or just ask for 卫生间 / 洗手间 ? this reminds me I once had to have the strap of my Sony PDA fixed so I went into a shop run by Chinese people (this was in Europe) and asked them to have a look, they went to their backroom and did fix it,but when the guy returned he had this funny smile on his face which I didn't understand. I realized when I turned the device on a while later that I had been taking notes on the touch screen, last hanzi handwriting I had been practising happened to be 厕所 so this guy had clearly turned the thing on (which he really didn't need to)
Posted on: Chinese Celebrity: Bruce Lee
August 29, 2007 at 5:57 PMas it turns out, there is a recent lesson about Zhang Ziyi but it's an advanced one, 章子怡的魅力
Posted on: Number Two
August 29, 2007 at 4:53 PMchangye, that conversation does happen a lot between parents of young children, but between husband and wife, not in my book, thank you !
Posted on: Number Two
August 29, 2007 at 4:03 AMChinese suphemism （婉辞 wǎncí） is about the same as in French, but I had never heard of number 1 and 2 in English, first thing that comes to mind would be taking buses :-(
Posted on: Number Two
August 31, 2007 at 9:18 AMamber, you (i.e. CPod) asked for it with such a topic, right?