feeling quite strongly these days that it’s only worth learning vocab one can immediately apply, i’ve focused the latest bout against the vast ocean of characters upon simply those terms used for cooking. i shall be in exile soon, trapped in a pseudo-urban sprawl that is otherwise known as the countryside. an odd title since it largely resembles the rest of this city and extends nearly from changzhou’s downtown to that of wuxi a short train ride away.

at any rate i have little choice on the matter. as such i’ve decided to use my time as wisely as possible. none of the future in-laws speak mandarin, or at least not in any form with which one may communicate with a foreigner such as myself. in that respect it is rather countryside, not a one of them having any pressure or reason to really learn to speak proper mandarin. i suppose it’d be like in south australia overtook michigan and forced us all to speak their unique blend of english. i may understand nearly all of it but can in no way replicate it on my own. and so part one of my ‘holiday’ plan is to work on my wu through a systematic process of documenting the major sound changes. jiang to gang, bei to bo, tou is dei etc., though it’s not on all words. if it were i may leave my ‘wu is a language, not a dialect, you moron’ camp that i’m otherwise so comfortable in.

in addition to documenting in some IPA-esque transliteration system yet to be devised, and of course in addition to digesting the second half of 赤壁 and a handful of other films, i’m planning to take on the world of chinese cooking, bringing us back to the problem.

烩, 烧, 炖, 焖. braise, braise, braise, braise. ay, there’s the rub. i’m set on a number of other cooking terms. and even if i can’t say the process, i can follow it. the goal though is to be able to listen to someone explain a recipe, in chinese, and then know exactly what each method refers to. maybe i need to see it to really know. but a definition would help.

to be honest, i’m not really satisfied with what dictionaries are telling me, either because they contradict each other or because it’s just too damn vague. if you have an explanation, please feel free to drop a comment. otherwise i’ll just learn the characters and log them in as “a form of cooking stuff” until i can see what someone does when they’re saying that word.