First, let's talk about the blog's weird name.
This is a very brief translation with the help of an internet dictionary (many thanks to yahoo) from the blog I already have. As you might guessed, it's in Chinese.
Secondly, the even more weird URL.
That's the Pinyin (no worries, the explaination of the vocabulary will be presented soon) of the name of my other blog.
As to the word Pinyin, explaination may be very tedious, anyone who hasn't the patience can just go with "a status of a Chinese word".
Here it comes.
There are two systems in modern Chinese: one for the pronounciation (please correct my spelling, I'm not very diligent with dictionaries), the other for the presentation (for vision). The system used for the pronounciation is called Pinyin, and the system used for the presentation is called Hanzi. People everywhere mess up the Kanji, which belongs to Japanese, with Hanzi, which, as I just explained, belonges to Chinese. There's nothing to blame, since the Japanese actually developed their visual presentation system for words from ours (felling proud of being a Chiese~). There're two types of Hanzi used nowadays: simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese, but as to most Chinese, the simplified one is used in daily life. Only a small part of China (such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, and yes, Taiwan is part of China, a part which can't and shouldn't be parted from China) still use the traditional ones officially.
OK, so much for the babbling background information and explainations.
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I have always found the concept of Chinese pictoral words to be very interesting. Is there an image for every single word I would recognize in English? If a person's name has a character assigned to it, what would happen if another person had the same name but splled it differently? And when do you use characters versus written words? I greatly admire anyone who is fluent in multiple langauges. I have tried to learn Spanish and Italian (at different points in my life) and I have never been able to maintain it. What dialect of Chinese do you speak? My friend often comments that she speaks Mandarin but can read in Cantonese better.
ReplyDeleteThrough centries of evolution in our word system, a lot of the characters aren't pictoral any more (or is it just my lack of imagination?).There are characters with multiple ways of pronounciation, so people do get confused with names contained with such characters. Actually, the Pinyin system is only used in dictionaries and textbooks to indicate the way to pronounciate the characters. As to the dialect of Chinese, I speak Shanghainese (Shanghai dialect, if there's not such a word) and if I am lucky enough, my guess of your friend from Hong Kong might be right, or your friend didn't learn her Chinese at mainland China
ReplyDeleteAh i love studying different languages! my best language besides english is spanish (out of necessity of course, i live in california), but i also spoke some italian when i went to europe and Japanese when i hosted a foreign exchange student. I also learned how to write a little kanji. Chinese though...i've never tried. it looks and sounds really difficult. great blog.
ReplyDeleteThanks for educating us a little about the Chinese language and what the written characters are called (Hanzi). I'm a little familiar with Japanese. They, too have word characters (Kanji) and phonetic characters (Katakana). They also have characters for foreign words and can write in Romaji (English characters-like these). Does Chinese also have these?
ReplyDeleteI am certain that I will very interested throughout the sememster in your educating us on your language. Although, I don't understand URL's, I still found your writing able to hold my interest. Thanks for giving us a peak into who you are.
ReplyDeleteTo Donna:
ReplyDeleteToo bad, Chinese don't have a system indicating words or phrases from other languages, we just make them sound like it. There are examples I can show you if you are interested.
To Julie:
A URL is just the formal name of a website's address, I'm just being lazy.