Link roundup — 12 September 2011

中秋節快樂! Happy Mid-Autumn Fesitval (中秋節). Happy Peh Goeh Che (八月節). Happy Chuseok (추석). Happy Tsukimi (月見)?

  1. In the spirit of the holiday, there’s an LA Times article about mooncakes 月饼 being the fruitcake of China. Frankly we’re big fans of the red bean mooncakes.
  2. The Independent has an article about language learning in Pakistan, among other places. A quote:

    There’s been some noise this week in the southern Pakistani province of Sindh following the announcement that from 2013, learning standard Chinese will become compulsory for all students

  3. Time has an article on why some languages sound so fast, touching once again on the topic of syllable loads.

    Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94 [with Vietnamese arbitrarily set as 1], was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second.

  4. A proposed Linguistics site is up on StackExchange, a question and answer site that’s an offshoot of StackOverflow, a programming Q&A site. There’s also a proposal for a Chinese Language & Usage site. Both of these need more votes in order to be made official. Have a look.
  5. Finally, if you don’t like the Starbucks mooncake, maybe you’d like a green halal mooncake.

Another take on OCR

Ok I admit it. I watched Star Trek when I was younger. And universal translators were damn cool. Of course a part of me hated the idea, since learning the language is almost as much fun as actually using the language, at least some times.

So I’m a big fan of things like Pleco‘s OCR. I only wish more people were providing such tools. It would be insanely useful for quick-skimming Korean, for example. Today, somewhat late to the game I admit, I came across WordLens. While not really related to China or Chinese in any way, it’s still pretty cool and worth sharing.

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Crickets, Birds and Cuckoo Calls

The image on the right is of a crosswalk speaker. I’m not actually sure what these are called. Unlike in America where you press a button at the crosswalk to make yourself feel like the light is changing faster, in Asia these buttons play sounds to let people who are visually impaired to know when it’s safe to cross. This particular one, located by Taipei Main Stations 台北車站, reads as follows:

⠝⠧⠂⠕⠴⠈⠑⠨⠐⠒⠕⠌⠐⠅⠌⠈⠊⠵⠄
南北向-布穀聲
⠙⠯⠄⠑⠡⠄⠑⠨⠐⠒⠝⠪⠈⠅⠪⠐⠊⠵⠄
東西向-鳥叫聲
⠑⠽⠂⠛⠥⠄⠁⠻⠄⠖⠐⠑⠡⠄⠊⠶⠐⠊⠵⠄
行人專用-蟋蟀聲

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Reflections on Taiwan

I just spent a short week in Taiwan visiting friends and looking into grad programs. I kept seeing things that I thought would be post-worthy.

I’m still going to write about a few as individual posts, but I thought I’d share some general impressions here.

1. Taiwanese often say 和 as hàn. As my friend Jason pointed out, this is in fact a well-documented phenomenon but one I’d not encountered before.

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Literally

A week or so back, Victor Mair posted at Language Log under the title of Google me with a fire spoon. It’s all about the problems of machine translation. The post grabbed my attention because I love fire spoons.

In case you’re not familiar with 火勺 (huǒsháo), this is what they typically look like: Continue…

Dao De Jing Illustrated

I don’t remember how I came across this a little while back. It’s not the newest thing out there anyway. At any rate, it’s something I thought I’d share. Rather than describe it myself, here’s the intro from the site itself:

I began studying the Dao De Jing in college in 1980. I lived in Taiwan and China for 3 years in the mid 1980s and immersed myself in the subject. In 1988 I received an MA from Yale in Asian Studies. I’m not sure if this background makes me more or less qualified to say anything profound about the Dao De Jing. The Dao De Jing Warns against trying to define it. Ironically, it is one of the most translated and discussed texts in the history of literature.

For this blog I have selected lines from Laozi’s text. Each illustration includes my chinese calligraphy version of the text incorporated into the painting. I translate each line and discuss it in an informal way. There are literally dozens of worthwhile english translations of the Dao De Jing. Google it if you want a taste.

Feel free to comment in any way you are inspired to.

Pretty killer for a visual interpretation of a book I’ve read a thousand times in my grad studies. If you dig the style, the artist (Dante Cohen) has another site that’s worth checking out.

English names, made easy

I was on nciku recently for the first time in a while. They’ve got a somewhat new system up to help people choose English names. Certainly better than the books most academies have on hand for such a purpose. Maybe, however, not as good as people choosing their own from a somewhat limited mental lexicon. I’m talking about you, Seven, Eleven, Coffee, Twelve, Overlord, Hitler.

According to the site, my name is Finnegan. I’m totally fine with that.

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The Elderly

note: Sinoglot readers rock. Seriously. You guys have consistently provided good discussion, which is what we talked about wanting, what seems like ages ago, when we decided to put this site together. We’ve all been a bit busy these days so the posting has slowed down. To remedy that, I have a few quick posts I’m going to throw up here in hopes of getting some more discussion going. This is the first. Thanks for kicking ass.

I’ve written elsewhere about trying to talk to the elerly in China. On a trip to Henan province last year i was somewhat surprised by the fact that I could actually understand people and communicate with putonghua. I thought that this was a strictly southern phenomena, being unable to talk to anyone over 50, but today it seems to have crept further north than I’d otherwise thought.

Today I was talking to a friend of mine from northern Jiangsu province about dialects and communication. She was saying that her parents, not yet 50 years of age, cannot speak standard Mandarin. I figured it was not a big problem since it was still beifang-hua, so to test I had her run through the usual phrases I make everyone say. Not terribly surprisingly, it didn’t sound much like Mandarin. It was clearly a northern dialect but one that I’d have a hard time to understand in the context of a real conversation. Not yet 50.

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Re-learning Arabic numerals

A quick post during another of my few breaks these days. I just dug this up from my photos as I clean my hard drive out. No one ever teaches you how to deal with numbers when you’re getting ready to head to China for the first time. Sure, 一二三四 is all well and good, and maybe even banking numerals are covered in your undergrad Mandarin class, but 1G.P?

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Signs in Bathrooms

I worked at a place in a kind of shopping mall back in 2008. With very VERY few western foreigners in town, there was no shortage of funny English signs, and this often meant signs in public restrooms pleading for one behavioural change or another. But actually, it’s the signs in Chinese that I really appreciate. Two of the first characters I ever learned were from such a sign: 匆匆冲冲, flush quickly.

Anyway, I stopped by a private Chinese academy the other day to see a friend who studies there and saw this above one of the urinals:

走进一点儿
zǒujìn yīdiǎn’er

不然我就告诉大家,
bùrán wǒ jiù gàosu dàjiā,

我看到了你的一切。
wǒ kàndàole nǐ de yīqiè

“step forward a bit, or I’ll tell everyone I saw your junk”

I was trying to remember if I’ve seen any particularly poetic bathroom signs, such as you find about grass on public parks (the sleeping grass has delicate feelings, or whatever), but I couldn’t think of any.

How about you guys? Got any good Chinese language signs you’ve seen in the local public restroom?