Tags: 学中文， study Chinese, Chinese character
This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Comics.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Mandarin Madness
May 31st, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Great cartoon! Like in English, breakfast is what we eat in the morning – it’s not about “BREAKing the overnight FAST”. It’s similar to when I learned the Chinese word for “exit” – and became hooked on the language:
http://mandarinsegments.blogspot.com/2009/05/in-beginning.html
June 3rd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Greg,
your comment makes no sense – Breakfast is exactly about BREAKing the over night FAST. That is why we apply the word to the FIRST meal of the day.
If you really want to illustrate some out of date compound words, try threshold – where we no long have a board across the door to HOLD in the THRESH (Straw), or cupboard, which is a box with doors to hold your plates, not a BOARD to hold your CUPS.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:53 am
Greg, I like your MANDARIN SEGMENTS. Nice job.
Nigel, I like your ideas about THRESHOLD… never heard that one before. Also cupboard…interesting stuff!
June 4th, 2009 at 7:25 am
Nigel, I hear where you’re coming from from – but I meant something a bit different. What I mean is that when we say the word “breakfast” we don’t actually pause to think that it is made up of “beark” and “fast”, and thereby work out that it means the first meal of the day. It simply is the word for the first meal of the day.
When people fly to London’s Heathrow Airport, they don’t think of the airport to once have meant “a row of heath”, it’s just “Heathrow”.
And similarly for “crisis” – as the cartoon says, “you can’t separate the two characters”.