User Comments - kanjihanzi

Posted on: The Powerless Phones

Jenny and all,

Thanks for an up-to-date lesson. Cell phones never get out of the way, so to say :-)

I am aware of the fact that there is no 100% official Mandarin pronunciation, but there are more difference between the various CD:s, nciku etc. and here - all supposedly Genuin Spoken Mandarin - than one would expect.

When Jenny says meídiàn le here it is more meídià(n) le, i.e. the n is gone or almost silent. I here some examples of this now and then, but just as much or more with the n clearly pronounced.

Is there any ruling for this out there? Which one should one go for?

Happy 2009!!

Posted on: The Person Component

Okeydokey. It's seems like the storm has ended here. Not a single comment in two days!! :-)

Anyhow: I have added the first more comprehensive post to my own Component Show. Its' silent, it's long, totally video deprived and it can possibly be boring too. As I am totally unpredictable - even in my own eyes :-) - it came out as something entirely different than what I had planned: A Bloody Kanji Lesson! For student at JapanesePod101. But of almost 100% equal relevance for students of Chinese/Hanzi and ChinesePod.com.

The Hanzi Kanji Hub

direct link to Kanji Lesson One

I am all ears re: comments, but I think it would be intrucive to add the comments here so use the blog (or email) for your thoughts and suggestions.

Thanks and Happy New Year!!

Kanji Hanzi

Posted on: Stuffy Room

Yeah, I know, Jervin.

But that's the problem with Low Cash Flow: can't use all the alternatives the rich guys/gals employ to get even more money ;-) Guess my day will come too.

Best,

KanjiHanzi

Posted on: Stuffy Room

Very nice lesson, as usual. As a new 'customer' I must say that I am very impressed by the quality of the material here. My only objection is the price of the premium service (which is the only one I could consider): $29/month is steep in these recession times no matter the quality.

That said.... Since 'we' where into character recently - anyone remember The Radical Show :-) (and I can't understand the extremely negative reactions to that rather cute little video) - I can't view the stuffy mēn - mèn 悶/闷 character as Heart Inside/Between Gate. I see nothing but a slightly slanted and distorted smiley locked up there ;-)

Happy Holidays to all!

Posted on: The Person Component

Hello all again, and in particular indyinasia who added a couple of points

1) Oh, yes! I didn't mean to say that there is NO GOOD handwriting in Japan. There is and Japanese Penji is a very interesting art form to be compared with the traditional Shodo (brush calligraphy). Once again too little data, but my feeling is that Japanese Penji artists are more experimental and 'brave' than their Chinese collegues. What has strikken me is that there ALSO is so much really lousy handwriting to be seen almost everywhere, in particular considering the available tradition to write beautifully.

Yes, I have heard about these Japanese brushpens, but all I have is the PITT artist pen from Faber-Castell which is very much aimed at manga creativity. Still, it doesn't produce the results I am looking for. It's extremely difficult to write small characters - as in normal handwritten text - and it's too stiff to be flexible enough. My wife is going to Beijing in early January so she will be forced to go hunting for a really good fountain pen, which I think is THE TOOL.

Thanks for your interest in The Kanji Hanzi Hub! Will put up the first Component Analysis later tonight or tomorrow.

Also thanks for linking to the very interesting article at

http://epa.psy.ntu.edu.tw/EPA/members/publications/Yeh_Li02.pdf

I have only read the first pages so far, but I will print it out and read it later. As a student of Kanji I have never had any motivation to dive deep into radicals, but I guess there is more use of these when studying Chinese.

Re "Sino-Japanese Idioms"

Yes, that's very interesting. I have a nice little book called Kanji Idioms where it seems like most of the stuff is taken from Chinese idioms once upon a time. Nice little Four-Letter-Words :-) And I am sure there are many books on this in Mandaring too.

Hmmm.... seems like Kanji Idioms have stopped being printed and bundled into Kodanshas Dictionay of Basic Japanese Idioms, (and forget the Children label thay have added) which is one of the few books from Kodansha on learning Japanese that I don't own.

Let us know about the progress of your idioms.

Posted on: The Person Component

VERY interesting timing :-)

(Sorry to be long-winded in my first post here...)

I dropped in here to see how much ChinesePod offered in terms of written Chinese, and here I find this.....

Many years ago I started to study Chinese characters (CC) in the disguise of Kanji, i.e. the Japanese version of Hanzi. This was nothing more than a recreational and aesthetic pursuit (since I consider CC as one of the most beautiful creations in the history of mankind).

As a mere coincidence I landed in the Japanese camp with James W. Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" as my vehicle to learn CC/Kanji. This is a strictly component based technique to memorize kanji with stories as the aid to learn and memorize all the primary 2000 characters used in Japan.

As another not planned extension I thought I might as well learn some Japanese while I am getting to know the script, so I started to decipher Japanese books just as some people knit or solve crosswords. After a couple of years I could READ not too complex Japanese.

Then a year ago I decided to REALLY learn Japanese for real - speaking and listening too - and hit the wall. Bang! I seriously doubt if there is any other language as hard to learn as Japanese. Boy, did I wish that I had picked Chinese back when I started to learn a language to complement the CC!!

So this summer I made a sharp turn and started to learn Mandarin instead. After learning the sounds, tones and pinyin, Mandarin is a piece of cake compared with Japanese. Even if I don't remember the key words for all the 2000+ characters I learned I find that almost every simplified CC just slips into my memory with no effort at all!. Great!

Since I had planned putting something up on the web for a while this comedy :-) prompted me to at once publish The Kanji Hanzi Hub at

http://kanjihanzi.blogspot.com

Does this seem like something of interest?

I mean: I am rather peculiar since I LOVE writing Kanji/Hanzi. It's a pure pleasure. Too me. Looking at what some students of Japanese - and even some native Japanese writers - produce as the (hand-) written language, it seems like a sinking ship :-) I haven't seen so much samples from China, but I have a feeling that neat writing is still more common in China than in Japan. Wrong?