User Comments - silktown
silktown
Posted on: Anybody home?
October 26, 2009 at 9:45 PMA British Hallowe'en tale.
[Doorbell rings.]
Kids: Trick or treat, mate.
Dogupatree: Treat, please.
Kids: Eh?
Dogu: Treat, please.
Kids: No... you're supposed to say "treat" if you want to give us something nice, or "trick" if you want us to do some mischief to you.
Dogu: Why?
Kids: Eh?
Dogu: Why?
Kids: It's fun!
Dogu: No it's not. It was a harmless bit of American fun which you lot have turned into a way of demanding money with menaces and...
Brighter kid: C'mon, let's go, he's weird.
Nastier kid: Yeah, we'll get him later.
Slow kid: Trick or treat, mate.
Chinese friend [from kitchen]: What do they want?
Dogu: 他们说我很奇怪. Tamen shuo wo hen qiguai. They're saying I'm strange.
[She appears.]
Chinese friend [stares witheringly]: What do you want?
Kids: Nothing. [They leave.]
Chinese friend: You are a soft man.
Dogu: Yes, and you've got pig blood on your hands.
A cod Hallowe'en etymology: 奇怪 qiguai (2,4) = strange. qi a headless corpse dancing on the gallows where its head still hangs. guai heart radical plus bottom half of a corpse dancing on its tombstone. Very strange.
Posted on: Where is the Supermarket?
October 16, 2009 at 11:14 AMHi, Mepple.
There isn't a hidden meaning in the word "maps". I think the "" are there to emphasise the word. Imagine somebody saying it loudly: "We don't need no stinking maps!". (NB the grammar is very colloquial, too. Formal English might be: "We don't need any useless maps.")
Thanks, rj.
I'd just written a post asking you why you were talking about badges. It rings a bell, now. I haven't seen "Blazing Saddles" for over 30 years.
Posted on: Where is the Supermarket?
October 15, 2009 at 11:07 PMrj,
我也不喜欢恶臭獾. Wo3 ye3 bu4 xi3huan1 e4chou4huan1. I don't like [wicked] stink badgers, either.
There's been very little research into their habits. I wonder why?
Posted on: National Day
October 5, 2009 at 6:37 PMHmmm. Heady stuff, this military glamour. Red uniforms, black uniforms... where does it all lead?
F......, fa....., fas...., fashion! 小心！
P.S. Are there doggie-treats in those pretty white pistol holsters? No guns, please.
Posted on: National Day
October 5, 2009 at 1:22 PM红裙子白鞋子穿的女人！ 请来英国！ 民主很无聊，首相 Gordon Brown 很丑。
Girls in red skirts and white boots! Please come to Britain! Democracy is boring and our Prime Minister is ugly.
I'll get down from my tree and roll over for you. Woof! Woof!
Posted on: Pinyin Section 4: R
July 18, 2009 at 9:44 PMThanks for posting that clip, RJ.
What an inspiring man! He didn't retire until he was 85, and he's still working hard at 102. Best of all, he's still lively - laughing and joking all the time. (He was a banker!)
Worth watching.
Posted on: Lessons and Comment Policy
July 13, 2009 at 10:26 PMUsers can set text colour themselves. So, why don't we colour code the comments?
E.g. black = language related; red= question for CPod; blue = culture ; purple = ramble/anecdote/humour; green=rant. (Just 2 or 3 categories might be better.)
Then readers can find the stuff they're interested in quickly.
Doesn't need a technical solution. If someone decides the convention, we could start tomorrow.
Even if people don't follow the rules very well, it can't make things worse. And it'll look nice, in a psychedelic kind of way.
Instant scrappy version of Henning's idea, I suppose.
Posted on: Explosion
May 21, 2009 at 3:14 PMNoise kills goats...
"A large number of goats in Taiwan may have died of exhaustion because of noise from a wind farm.
A farmer on an outlying island told the BBC he had lost more than 400 animals after eight giant wind turbines were installed close to his grazing land.
The Ministry of Agriculture says it suspects that noise may have caused the goats' demise through lack of sleep."
At least the Mandarin for goat is easy: 山羊 shan1yang2 = mountain sheep.
Posted on: Kaixin Wang Farm Thieves
October 28, 2009 at 11:29 PMAlthough the many accents of a country sound very different to a native, they can sound very similar to an outsider. E.g. US Southern drawl and New York are radically different, but to me there's something obviously American about them.
Sometimes, you can pick out a few simple physical rules about holding your mouth tongue etc., which help give you the "sound", the "twang". E.g.
- Australian: nasal!
- Indian English: keep your lips pulled tight against your teeth
- Southern Irish: keep your tongue right up and touching your top front teeth
- French: purse your lips out as far as you can (except when you say "i", then pull them right back)
Some accents seem to have several dominant positions. Makes it much harder, because your brain and muscles aren't used to switching between them as natives do thousands of times a day.
Any thoughts about Chinese?
I've noticed two key tongue positions. Once I noticed these, a Chinese friend (who'd spent months saying "No! not like that!"), began to say "Yes, you've got it!" (yes, it was an "'enry 'iggins" moment and she loves "My Fair Lady").
1) tongue hard against bottom teeth for a powerful "x" and "q" (I now find this easy)
2) tongue up, just behind ridge in roof of mouth - lots of sounds, esp. the fiendish "zh" (also "sh" and "ch" to contrast with "x" and "q").
I'm no linguist and maybe I'm writing rubbish, but at least I can now speak something some Chinese people can understand, sometimes.
Any other "key" tips for sounding more Chinese?