Ryan has been studying so much lately and we’ve got tons to show you all! Today’s word: TIGER
For those in China:
While translating our Super Bowl comic Mx and I were using our good old Google Picasa and again the Google translation from Chinese to English made us laugh.
加油 jiāyóu in Chinese means “GO!” or “COME ON!” But literally in English it means to add more fuel. 加 means to add and 油 means fuel. For whatever reason, Google decided to translate it as “Refueling…” which came out really funny!
This was another Google translation that made us laugh from last Christmas.
This is the jiāyóu entry in NCIKU.com which is by far the best Chinese/English dictionary on the web today.
Oh. and if anybody noticed in the last frame of the comic on the right side is a poster identifying the place that I was able to watch the Super Bowl for many years in Shanghai. Good old Malone’s American Cafe. Frankly speaking, I only went in there for the Super Bowl. (Ok I went in a couple of other times…) Great place for a Super Bowl Breakfast!!
You can subscribe on iTunes too! Just search for Shanghaihua or Shanghainese!
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Child Life in China“For when we first go into a Chinese city many of the boys and girls will run away and hide themselves, afraid lest we should catch them and do some dreadful thing to them. Some of them will run after us, calling Yang-kwei-tsz, which means something like ‘ foreign evil spirit,’ and other bad names, and a few will pick up stones and throw them at us, trying thus to drive us away. But why are they angry when they see us coming into their cities ?’ you will ask, ‘ and why are they afraid of us ?’ Principally because we are not Chinamen, and have come from another country. The Chinese very much dislike people of other countries coming and trading, or having any other dealings with them, and most of them would be very glad if we were all driven out of China to-morrow. Englishmen and other foreigners would not have got into the country at all if it had not been for a great war which we had with them. England was victorious, and so she obliged China to open several of her ports to trade with foreigners, and to allow them to live there. And ever since, all that our nation or any other has gained from China has always been at the point of the sword, or because they were afraid of us. So it is only natural that they are not very pleased to see us walking about the streets of their cities.
We try to win their friendship in many ways. Having learnt their language, we are soon able to say a few kind words to the children, and then we often give them some little English pictures, which delight them very much. What a number of questions they always have to ask us! ‘Is there a sun and a moon in your country ?’ they inquire. ‘ Are there hills and trees ? ‘ ‘ Why do you not have black eyes like ours ? Have they faded out ?’ ‘ Can you see with them several feet down into the earth, and know where gold and silver is lying ?’ ‘Why do Englishwomen have such large feet, just like men, instead of “golden lilies” three inches long?’ ‘Why do you wear your hair in such a strange fashion, instead of having it glued down on wire shapes ? ‘ ‘ Why do foreign ladies wear coverings over their heads when they go out of doors ? It is just like the men!’ These and very many more questions are constantly asked and answered.”
What a difference 100 years make. Even in Shanghai there were a few times when school students would flood you and not let you get away. Crazy.
Book found here.
You can subscribe on iTunes too! Just search for Shanghaihua or Shanghainese!
Loading ...CNNGo has been a late comer to the world of the China Blogosphere but they are really a great source for info about Shanghai and Shanghainese.
One of their articles the other day really sheds light onto young Shanghainese and their motivations for getting married and motivations for not getting married or their motivations for waiting to get married.
In Shanghai a house equals marriage and marriage equals a house. But marriage in Shanghai doesn’t end with just a house:
“In a survey recently release by Tencent on pre-marriage costs in six major Chinese cities (the costs involved in buying a house, house decoration, home appliances, furniture, a car, a wedding banquet, the honeymoon and the cost of gift and dinner), Shanghai came top, costing an average of RMB 1.4 million per couple.”
Read more and find out the 4 reasons that Shanghainese are delaying marriage.
On Mastering the Form and Use of the Most Frequent Words in the Mandarin Language
Chinese Recorder Volume 39
Published 1908
BY REV. D. WILLARD LYON, M.A.
“IN spite of the fact that learning to write Chinese is confessedly difficult, the advantages which accrue therefrom bulk so large that nearly every language schedule calls for more or less of it. Little thought seems to have been given, however, to determining what characters should be learned first. The student, though supposedly giving his main energy to the spoken language, is set the task of writing all the characters, frequent or infrequent, in some book with whose difficulties he is wrestling, or is told to practice some one’s list of frequent characters whose order of frequency is determined as much by we”n-li as by mandarin usage. The result is that by the time he has laboriously mastered his first five hundred characters he finds that he knows many which do not occur frequently enough in his daily reading to make it easy for him to retain them in memory, and that, furthermore, his stock of really frequent characters is so incomplete as to make it impossible for him to write many of the very simplest sentences in Chinese. Discouragement under such circumstances is not only natural but almost inevitable.
In the hope of being able to discover some means by which this disheartening element in the early toils of the language student might be largely eliminated, the writer, in connection with his work in the Kuling language school last year, addressed himself to finding out what the most frequently used characters in mandarin are and arranging them in an order suitable for ready acquisition. At the same time the more fundamental objective of facilitating an earlier mastery of the idiom which gathers around the commoner words was persistently kept in mind. The necessity of this latter motive was made the more evident by the observation that not a few who possess a fairly comprehensive vocabulary are very indifferent speakers of the language. The writer has even known some who, though able to write their thousand or more characters, are unable to compose a smooth Chinese sentence. Neither a large vocabulary, therefore, nor the power to write many characters, is in itself a great desideratum.* Ability to use in a correct and idiomatic way the words he learns is, after all, the chief test of the successful student.”
If this kind of scholarship was going on 100 years ago… why is there only NOW a massive interest in the study of Chinese!?
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