On the demons that haunt the Hanzismatter netherworld
If you sample the pleasures of Hanzismatter, it’s hard not to hit the subscribe button. Once subscribed, the rewards are plentiful. The posting rate is leisurely, one every week or two, and the content is always nectar for the bee in your schadenfreude bonnet. [...]
What you’ve always wanted to mutter as you watch yet another eyes-glazed new driver white-knuckle his way through an intersection, oblivious to the little girl he almost knocked off her grandfather’s bicycle and clueless to the chaos he’s created from having just stopped in the middle of the intersection while he got his bearings and [...]
Yesterday’s pop quiz was to “Fill in the blank to name that lighting fixture component. Write it down so you can go to the store and buy it. Better yet, try to find it in a dictionary without using the English word that you already know.”
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Jiùshì bǎ zhèige liàngde, [...]
… easier for Zhonglish speakers to understand the accents of wàidìrén (外地人 = Chinese from outside the big city), that is. The hypothesis would be something like this:
Since the first thing to vary in non-Beijing Mandarin is often the tone on a word [unsubstantiated impression -- it would be cool to know of an actual [...]
Sometimes you wonder about bilingual dictionaries. ABC has “fall flat” as the only gloss for wòdǎo (卧倒), but somehow you doubt that’s what YU had in mind for PBS:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
YU: Zěnmele, bǎobeir?
怎么了，宝贝儿？
What’s wrong, honey?
MRS: Lèi le.
累了。
She’s tired.
YU: Wǒ kàn yě shì.
我看也是。
Looks like that to me too.
MRS: Chī yīdiǎnr fàn ba.
吃一点儿饭吧。
Eat [...]
Add "Learn Chinese" to iGoogle