Consider the use of profanity quotative here. To take it directly from the definition in the ABC Dictionary:

cèi v. <coll.> (1) smash to pieces (2) attack; beat the shit out of

Emphasis mine. Maybe it’s only fair that the ABC doesn’t mince words — the description seems rather appropriate for this morning’s character venture.

All I wanted to do was to write the everyday word cèi, meaning to smash/shatter. The process of finding the appropriate hanzi is usually simple enough:

1. Look up the pinyin in the open-sourcish CE Dict (which, while not always reliable, has lots of stuff and is conveniently available through MDBG‘s interface)
2. If that fails, get up and find cell phone and type it into the incomparable Pleco, where I’ve got at least four dictionaries at my disposal.
3. I almost never have to consider a step 3 at this stage in my hanzi (il)literacy, since I find almost everything I want. But see below for details.

Not today. Continue…

The following was originally posted on Nothing Undone, a sister blog for Classical Chinese. It was originally meant as a reference for beginning students.

A number of characters are used in 文言 for the sake of negation. The following are the major ones and when they are likely to occur.

Remember that grammar and usage wasn’t ever really standardised, and that you’re likely to see variations on some of these depending on the country in which the text was written as well as the time period and of course author.

For a more detailed explanation on some of these, see this article by Edwin G. Pulleyblank, “Emphatic negatives in classical Chinese”.

A bit late to the party on this one, but a few days ago Danwei had a great translation from Hecaitou’s blog on the futility of blocking dirty words. Creative stuff:

Hecaitou originally wrote: 不 矢口 亻十 么 日寸 候 ， 亻奄 口斤 言兑 矢豆 亻言 也有 辶寸 氵虑 敏 感 字 节 白勺 言兑 氵去 ， 于 是 ， 亻奄 学 会 了 扌斥 字 ……后 来, 亻奄 米青 礻申 分 歹刂 鸟~”

Danwei translation: “I don’t know when it was that I heard that mobile phones are also being filtered for sensitive words, therefore, I learnt to split characters… later on, I became schizophrenic”

For those still wondering what’s going on, Hecaitou takes characters that can be broken into parts which are also characters in their own right — and he simply breaks them up. The result is visually clear but hard for an unsophisticated character/phrase-blocking program to understand. Compare

Original: 不 矢口 亻十 么 日寸 候 (9 characters, meaningless gibberish)

Read as: 不知什么时候 (6 characters) Continue…

Welcome to Nothing Undone. As the header says, it’s an experiment in teaching myself literary Chinese. Through this site I’ll be providing useful readings from classical times as well as glossaries and flashcards in various electronic formats.

Who am I to be doing this? My most relevant qualification is what I’m doing with most of my time these days. I’m a graduate student studying at a well known Chinese university, spending most of my days with my face stuck in a book written long before Gutenberg dovetailed his first joint. This is primarily an outlet for what I’m learning and what I think may be of use to others who may not have the time to enrol in full time classes.

In a similar position? Have something to add? Leave a comment with your contact information and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

An article in the Lijiang Weekly News (丽江新闻周报) recently caught my attention: party secretary of the municipal party committee Wang Junzheng 王君正 has stressed the need to avoid the “eight legged news report” style of journalistic writing.

“Eight legged news reports” 新闻八股文 are a play on the eight-legged essays 八股文, a style of essay employed in the imperial examinations during the Ming and Qing that has become synonymous with pedantry and lack of innovation.

Continue…

Say you come to China speaking no Mandarin. You settle into some place where the Mandarin spoken is not exactly pǔtōnghuà (普通话 =  standard Mandarin as it’s “supposed” to be spoken). Might be out in the countryside. Might be in a city where the dominant language is, say, Wu rather than Mandarin. Might even be in Beijing if you get deep enough into the hutong.

Inevitably you come across someone who tells you you’re saying things wrong: maybe they tell you “10” is not sí the way you and the locals pronounce it, but is supposed to be shí; maybe they say “blood” is xiě or xuè rather than xuě as everyone you know says it.

But you are linguistically enlightened. Continue…

In a certain way it’s difficult to use the “wrong” method in second language acquisition (SLA). I’ve seen very motivated students succeed with methods that some would say are the worst that SLA has to offer.

With this in mind, consider the language-teaching pamphlet or newsletter: plagiarize bits and pieces to show some of the target language; do a few translations; dig into a word or two — all without knowing anything about your learner’s level, motivations, goals, etc. It’s the blunderbuss approach to second language acquisition. It might not be my first choice in methodology, but, per the “no-method-guarantees-failure” logic, I won’t try to say that it has no value to anyone anywhere.

Still, when your pamphlet’s method is term-for-term translation and you screw up the translation, it might be fair to say that your value starts to approach zero.

Continue…

I told my son to brush his teeth and he said “我的牙刷没了。”   I suddenly
realized this could be interpreted in two ways, “I lost my toothbrush”
and “I brushed my teeth off” (“I brushed my teeth until they were
gone”).

我的 (my)
牙刷 (toothbrush)
没了 (gone)

我的 (my)
牙 (tooth/teeth)
刷 (brush (v))
没 (until it/they was/were gone)*
了 (particle of completion)

*This is a complement of result; complements of result are put after verbs to show the result of the verb.  Another example would be 吃胖 (eat until you’re fat).

The normal interpretation of this sentence is “I lost my toothbrush”, so it’s not a classic garden path sentence, but it has a reasonably salient garden path interpretation, kind of like a fork, where one path leads to the garden, and one doesn’t.

Can anyone think of other two-or-more-character nouns where the last
character(s) also have verb senses? China satellite map