There are a few things that I think I understand about Mandarin, or at least about speaking it as a non-native, that I didn’t understand back when it would have been most helpful. The following are things that I wish someone had told me three years ago when I was learning this stuff.

1. In pinyin, ü is not a u. It’s an i. I know, I know. It’s /y/. Well people don’t tell you that. They tell you, indirectly of course, that it’s related to u. That’s why it’s a u with ¨ on top. Well it’s not. It’s an i. Stop thinking of it as a u. Go “eeeeeeee” and then round your lips. i.

2. Also in pinyin, r is not r. It’s voiced sh¹. Get it out of your head that it has anything to do with r as you know it. Minimal pairs are your friend.

Continue…

My nephew suddenly piped up as we were driving down the road yesterday:

爱存不存！
Ài cún bù cún!
“See if we care if you don’t want to save”*

Sure enough, we were passing

one of the largest banks in China.

The joke requires rudimentary knowledge of both Pinyin and English, which elementary students have in spades. It’s a play on ICBC, of course, where the I is read as the sound of the letter in English (same as Mandarin for “love”, 爱=ài) and CBC is made into an abbreviation for 存不存 = cún bù cún. Continue…

Batur at Autonomous Region comments on Xinjiang Party Secretary Zhang Chunxian’s use of Uyghur (with original article).

The Economist has an article called Teaching Chinese: Mandarin’s Great Leap Forward on the increasing number of people studying Mandarin outside of China.

Meanwhile thenextweb.com tells us that Mandarin is now the second most important language for e-commerce sites.

And finally, the Omniglot blog has a hanzi puzzle for you.

The following is from the Twitter stream of @newsshanghai and it was too interesting to pass up. I’ve added spaces between the characters to keep it from triggering the NetNanny.

The tweets are in regards to some flowers left at the site of the recent fire in Shanghai that cost the lives of many of its residents. It’s been said that the fire was preventable, and many are pointing fingers in a specific direction, which we’ll see below.

Continue…

The following are posts or articles relevant to language in China. Each week we share a handful of links that we think are worth reading. If you see something we missed, please let us know.

A recent post by John over at WooChinese responds to an article in the Wall Street Journal about handwriting helps one’s memory, and takes it into the realm of learning Chinese characters. John has posted many good articles for Mandarin language learners.

For language learners wondering how bureaucratic Mandarin would render the verb in “fool around with a female reporter”, check out this translation from China Digital Times (h/t Danwei).

John Pasden (Sinosplice) puts up his take on Why Learning Chinese is Hard. In his classic thorough fashion, he includes a discussion of what “hard” means, learning curve comparisons of Japanese & Chinese, and a good summary of links to what others have said about learning Chinese.

Transliterationisms takes a look at stamp-out-everything-but-Mandarin pro-Mandarin campaign slogans in Singapore. 多讲华语，亲切便利 anyone?

Translation from this article (thanks Joel for the link)

The tone is a bit maudlin, but this article captures well the sense I often hear from adults that Pinyin is almost a secret code. They find it very hard to read (naturally, I’m not implying anything intrinsic to the script, just that if you’re not used to it, it’s rather slow going) and often seem captivated by the idea that kids in first grade can use it to write out comprehensible language, even, as in Huihui’s case, to express heartfelt thoughts.

——–

女儿第一篇“拼音日记”让母亲泪流满面

Mother bursts into tears at daughter’s first “Pinyin Diary”

2010-10-29 10:46:37

卉卉的“拼音日记”。

(Picture) Huihui’s Pinyin diary Continue…

The following is a guest post by Julen of ChinaYouRen

I saw this in Nanjing over the weekend and I thought it might be sinoglot worthy (since my own blog is mysteriously inaccessible these days).

It’s a remarkable double mistranslation effort in a tourist sign. The object are these balls that the Nanjing wall defenders employed to crunch the bones of the occasional visiting horde:

Continue…

The following are stories or articles from the past week that deal with language in China. We will try to post these once a week.

First there is The Grammar of Chinese Women by Deborah Fallows in which she gives her impressions on the all-too-common he/she mixup among English learners in China

We also heard about “Chinese cultural week” launched in Egypt’s university via People’s Daily Online 人民网 about an event at Ain Shams University جامعة عين شمس‎ in Cairo.

Looking to buttress your profanities and legal vocabulary? Check out Beijing attorney Pu Zhiqiang vs his police investigator as reported (Chinese) and translated (English) in China Digital Times. h/t Chinese Law Prof Blog.

Finally, the Dаlаі Lаmа has put in his two cents on the recent issues concerning language policy in Τіbеt. The debate continues.

You’ll just have to Google that last one. We aren’t big fans of being blocked here at Sinoglot.

A long while back I wrote a short series of posts on a small range of topics centered around the creation of characters, both modern an old. At the end of one such post, I mentioned that I had a solution to the problem, however I never got around to posting my solution, in part because I felt I couldn’t articulate the idea as completely as it seems to be in my head. Then a recent comment by 慈逢流 got me thinking an answer was fair. This post is my attempt to provide one.

The Problem: Limited Characters

There are a number of characters that have existed in traditional sources that simply cannot exist on computers today, at least not with any wide use. There are obscure characters like the rare family name ben 㡷, which is composed of 本 under 广. These are characters which are encoded in unicode, however unavailable at least on the device with which I am currently writing this post. That’s primarily a font issue, but it goes beyond that. A character exists, for example, composed 林, four times in a square format. Even if one were to create a font with this character, one would need to either have it replace another existing glyph, or assign it to a special use area and then do some fancy replacement string coding for it to be shown. Either solution is not really a solution. Font encoding as we currently know it is insufficient for the full range of Sinitic characters. Even if more glyphs were added to the Unicode standard, which is constantly being done, it is insufficient.

Continue…

I have a few friends who are in the very early stages of character acquisition. As a result a few questions have come up, such as “how many characters are there?” which inevitably leads to the question of whether or not someone could just go and make up their own character.

So to illustrate, I bring your attention to a character allegedly created by Du Dingyou 杜定友 in 1914. Leading up to the May Fourth Movement, it was a good time for characters, seeing the invention of 她 tā (she) by Liu Bannong 劉半農 a few years later and subsequently popularised by our old friend YR Chao 趙元任 (Zhāo Yuánrèn).

Continue…