Via the chinese@kenyon.edu listserv, two articles in which American journalists write lazily about Chinese in ill-considered English. The issue at stake: whether or not Massachussetts should provide ballots on which candidates’ names are rendered phonetically into Chinese characters. (Everybody seems to agree that voting instructions, at least, should be provided in Chinese.)
First, excerpts. The [...]
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“鬻”
I remember one of the things that I really enjoyed when I was still actively studying Chinese (as opposed to “learning by osmosis,” or being lazy, which is more or less all I do anymore) was finding new characters that were just flat-out cool. Wenlin helped with this, since its character dictionary has got all [...]
Nan Luogu Xiang (I, II)
I’ve never been able to find a satisfactory translation for “neighborhood” in Chinese. There are some words, like 社区 or 邻里, that get one of the aspects - the “location” aspect, generally - but there’s nothing with the dual etymological heritage of “friendly/neighborly conduct” (the original meaning of the word) and “place where people live [...]
The Eight Hots and the Eight Nots
From Xinhua English comes my favorite sentence of the day:
“How could that boiler be a cremation furnace?” Zhang refuted.
(For what it’s worth, I think this article is probably true - there’s no evidence supporting the claims that the Chinese government has an anti-FLG concentration camp at Sujiatun. I’ve dealt with the Epoch Times/Far-Loon Goons [...]
stall 2
To everyone who’d been nagging me to update, I explained that of late, my life has been for the most part pretty boring, and that unless you wanted excerpts from my notes about textual variations in Zhuangzi, or the functions of 了1 and 了2 in Modern Chinese, you wouldn’t like any updates I wrote. [...]
an update
To everyone who’d been nagging me to update, I explained that of late, my life has been for the most part pretty boring, and that unless you wanted excerpts from my notes about textual variations in Zhuangzi, or the functions of 了1 and 了2 in Modern Chinese, you wouldn’t like any updates I wrote. [...]
feral sinologues
You’re not allowed to bring guns into the Great Hall of the People. It says so in Chinese, right at the top of the sign at the entrance.
Some of you may be thinking that you could still bring in a handful of ammunition and be all, “Ha, gotcha, suckers! You didn’t say anything about bullets!” [...]
…so, you want to learn Chinese?
First, a disclaimer: this is not intended to be authoritative, or anything even near authoritative. These are merely my own opinions and observations, culled from about 5 years of studying Chinese. Take them with as large a grain of salt as you should everything else on the internet.
So, you want to learn Chinese? Great - [...]
resurgence
We’re reading A Q Zheng Zhuan, “The True Story of Ah Q” by Lu Xun, in my Modern Chinese Literature class, and while it is a wonderful story and undoubtedly one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century, it is fucking hard.
“Modern” is something of a misnomer; it’s not written in classical Chinese, [...]
school and art projects
I never liked art class when I was in school.
It always just seemed to me that one could only make so many collages; could only have one’s parents help with so many dioramas; could only get into so many arguments with one’s teacher over whether or not creativity was something that could be taught. There [...]