Listening comprehension

Unfortunately, my headset broke recently so I cannot chat on Skype with native speakers at the moment. Therefore, I am watching Taiwanese variety shows. You can find a TON at Sugoideas. They are all posted on Youtube, and you can either watch them online or download them using a website like KeepVid.

康熙來了 is a good one for listening. They do interviews of famous people in Asia. 天才衝衝衝 is very funny, but there is less conversation.

Aside from variety shows, the website also has Taiwanese dramas. So if that is what you prefer, they have a bunch of those as well in the same format.

I'll leave you with this video from 娛樂＠亞洲. It may be a bit girly, but I find the woman's voice very easy to understand and it is great practice for me.

Increasing Vocabulary

So I've been using Ubuntu in Mandarin for quite a long time now, and one thing I have yet to master is OpenOffice. My OpenOffice Word is in Chinese but I don't understand a lot of the vocabulary just because I haven't taken the time to look them up. Therefore, I am going to learn all of it in one fell swoop.

Click to enlarge

I have taken pictures of all of the words in the menus for both the English and Mandarin version. I am working now on putting each picture side by side with it's equivalent in the other language as seen in the picture above. It's taking forever, but hopefully I can learn some more technical vocabulary from it.

OpenOffice remains one of the few programs on my computer that I have yet to master in Mandarin. Most of my programs do not have too many options, so it usually doesn't take very long to learn the new vocabulary used in them.

Putting your computer in the language you are learning is a great way to increase your vocabulary and grow accustom to the sentence structure. However, you MUST take the time to look up the words that you do not know, otherwise you will never advance.

Mandarin progress

Seeing as I do not make posts often enough, I have decided to make blog posts about my progress in learning Mandarin. I got the idea from the language blog of a friend, here.

So I suppose I will show some of the methods that I use to learn Mandarin and maybe post some sentences from video games that I play or books that I read that I find interesting. Let me know what you think and what you would like to see more of on my blog.

No more pinyin!!

Ok, so I met another pinyin-only learner today and I've finally had it. I'm making a post about it!

I'm not going to go over all of the reasons why learning Mandarin with pinyin only is a bad idea, but I'm going to look at one reason in particular today: Pinyin ambiguity.


So you think you can learn Mandarin by only learning the spoken language and getting by with just pinyin? Ok, so let's try it.

What does "shi" mean? ......
......
......
Go ahead, take your time. CNS11643 shows 193 different characters for the pinyin combination "shi".

Ok, so with single characters, it's not possible. Let's try something else...

"Wo de niao shi lüse de."※
How about this one? What does this translate to? Could it be 我的鳥是綠色的, "My bird is green" or could it be 我的尿是綠色的, "My urine is green"? We don't know. There is no way to tell.


Does "hanyu" mean "the Chinese language"(漢語) or "the Korean language"(韓語)?

Is "lianxi" 練習、聯繫、連繫、or 憐惜?

Does "mao" mean "cat"(貓) or "hair/fur"(毛)?

Does "gaochao" mean "excellent"(高超) or "orgasm"(高潮)? (O_o)

Does "yinhe" mean "The Milky Way"(銀河) or "clitoris"(陰核)? (囧)

The tones change the meanings of these words. There are so many of these that I can't even begin to count them. If you know any good ones please leave a comment and I may add it to the list :)

Using pinyin to type in Mandarin is ambiguous and leads to mistakes and misunderstandings. Not only that, but you lose out on all of the culture and understanding of the language. Learning Chinese characters is not hard unless you make it hard.

......plus if you learn them, you'll be regarded as a genius in the eyes of most East Asians. Everyone loves attention :)

※ You'll probably see the "ü" written as "v" or simply "u" by most people.

Loss of tǐng

Today we are going to look at . Surprisingly this character is not included in most fonts, so don't be alarmed if you cannot see it on your computer. I will be using an image instead of the actual character to avoid any problems.


is pronounced tǐng. It is made up 丿(piě) and 土(tǔ, earth). Originally, this character was made from 人(rén, man, human) and 土(tǔ, earth) as you can see below.
(人) + (土) = ()


So why are we talking about this character? Well, it usually serves as a phonetic component for characters. However, since most people no longer recognize it, they now see it as 壬(rén) or 王(wáng,wàng), which is incorrect. Let's look at a few characters where is used.



Be sure not to write these with 王 or 壬, the differences are very slight, but they are nonetheless there.


Here are the same 4 characters in 小篆.


They were even harder to spot the differences back in the day.


Here is the rule as stated by the Taiwan Ministry of Education（台灣教育部）



※CNS11643 shows several pronunciations, however I believe they are all based on similar-looking characters, e.g., 正(zhēng)、壬(rén)、王(wáng,wàng)、and 玉(yù).

髒＆臟→脏

Next on our list is a pair of characters that were merged into one in the simplification process.



髒(zāng, dirty) is a 形聲 made up of the semantic 骨(gǔ, bone) and the phonetic 葬(zàng). It's pretty straight forward...an association of filth with bones. As an extra bonus, 葬 means to inter or bury the dead, so it has association with the meaning of 髒.


Next is 臟.



臟(zàng, organ) is also a 形聲 made up of the semantic 肉(ròu, meat) on the left and the phonetic 藏(cáng, zàng) on the right. Again, pretty self-explanatory. The meat radical is very often used with parts of the body.


On to the simplification of these two beautiful characters.



So here we have 脏. It's semantic component is 月, which can either be 月(yuè, moon) or 肉(ròu, meat). You can find more about this simplification in my previous post here.
It's phonetic component is 庄(zhuāng) which is the simplification (or variant) of 莊(zhuāng).

So while the semantic part of this character is arguably accurate, (you still have to guess whether it is moon or meat), the phonetic part is less accurate than its traditional counterparts. What's more, we have even more confusion since 脏 has 2 pronunciations and 2 meanings.

I don't want dirty organs :(

聖→圣

Today's character is 聖 which means "holy, sacred, saint, sage". It is a 形聲 so let's break it down. (It can also be considered a 會意)



So we have 耳 along with 呈. It's meaning is interpreted either as a 形聲 or a 會意.

形聲：The semantic component is 耳(ěr, ear) and the phonetic one is 呈(chéng)
會意："the person who speaks 呈 into the ear 耳 - sage".


So how did they decide to simplify this one? Take a look.



So what's wrong with this? The character already exists. 圣(kū) is a 會意, "to till the ground 土 with the hand 又 - till".


So isn't it nice that what once was holy is now just scattered dirt? That's some nice imagery.