Can any of you decipher the Chinese characters on this cube, which was bought in an antiques shop in Bucharest. The characters look like Small Seal Script to me.

China is apparently one of the largest overseas investors in Liberia and there are numerous Chinese people working there. As a result some Liberians have started learning Chinese and some of them are keen to visit China if they get the chance. Lessons are taking place in the Samuel Doe Stadium in Monrovia, and in the Confucius Institute, which opened in the University of Liberia in December 2008.

If the locals learn to read Chinese as well they will be able to understand the Chinese versions of the numerous agreements that are signed. There is even a Chinese language radio station there for the Chinese migrants and expats.

There are more than 20 Chinese language schools in Africa at the moment, according to this report.

Arch Chinese is a very useful site I came across the other day. It includes a Chinese character dictionary which provides animations showing how to write six thousand traditional and six thousand simplified Chinese characters, and gives you pinyin pronunciation (with audio recordings), stroke counts, English translations and examples of words and phrases that use each character. You can search characters by pronunciation, radical, English words, etc.

It can also character worksheets in PDF format, converts pinyin with tone numbers to pinyin with diacritics, and keeps track of the characters you’ve studied. You can even add your own characters and phrases, and import and export word lists to/from the flashcard function.

Yesterday I found a useful looking website about Chinese Etymology which shows variant forms of characters including Oracle Bone characters (甲骨文 jiăgŭwén), Bronze characters (金文 jīnwén) and Grass script characters (草書 căoshū). Some characters have many forms in the older versions of the Chinese script – up to 50 or so in some cases.

It also has information about the etymology and history of characters and written Chinese.

Another useful website I came across recently is a Chinese text annotation tool, which adds pop-up annotations containing pinyin transcriptions and English translations when you move your cursor over the characters in a Chinese text. The annotations can be applied to web pages or to Chinese texts pasted in the box on that site.

The Welsh word rhewlif was mentioned during Iolo Willams’ programme, Byd Iolo, on Radio Cymru yesterday. At first I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about, but then I realised the word was a compound of rhew (frozen) and llif (flood) and guessed that it meant glacier. He was in Patagonia at the time, so the context helped. It’s great when you can work out what a word means without having to look it up.

Another Welsh word for glacier is afon iâ (ice river). The equivalent in Irish is oighearshruth (ice river/flow) and in Chinese it’s 冰川 (bīng chuān) – ice river.

The English word glacier comes from the France glacier, which is apparently from Savoy dialect word glacière (moving mass of ice) and is related to glace (ice).

According to this report, hanyu pinyin is to be officially adopted in Taiwan from the beginning of next year.

The main romanization systems currently used in Taiwan are Wades-Giles and Tongyong Pinyin. However, as they are not taught in schools, mistakes and misspelling are very common, and it’s not usual to see the romanized name of a street written in several different ways. The Wade-Giles system was devised by Thomas Francis Wade, a British ambassador to China and Chinese scholar, in the late 19th century, and refined in 1912 by Herbert Allen Giles, a British diplomat in China. The Tongyong Pinyin system was invented in Taiwan and adopted in 2000. Hanyu pinyin was developed in China in the 1950s and was adopted as the international standard for romanizing Chinese in 1979.

It hanyu pinyin is adopted for place names as well as street names, Taipei will become Taibei, Kaohsiung will change to Gaoxiong, Hsinchu will change to Xinzhu and Keelung will change to Jilong, along with many other changes.

You can find details of places names in Taiwan at:
http://pinyin.info/taiwan/place_names.html

This is a positive development, however it remains to be seen whether local governments in Taiwan will be more consistent in their use hanyu pinyin than they have been with Tongyong pinyin.

The other day I heard about an interesting video on YouTube that shows the ancient forms of 36 Chinese characters via an animated cartoon in which the characters come to life. The commentary is all in Mandarin, but there are some English explanations in the information about the video.

Yesterday I was talking to a former colleague who grew up in the UK speaking Cantonese and English and whose family comes from Hong Kong. He told me that when he meets Mandarin-speaking Chinese people, they tend to assume from his appearance he will understand them when they speak to him in Mandarin. He doesn’t. Sometimes Japanese people assume he’s Japanese as well.

I’ve seen similar situations in Taiwan and China involving Overseas Chinese who don’t speak Mandarin, or only speak it a little bit, being talked at in Mandarin by people who find it hard to accept that people who look Chinese don’t understand or speak Mandarin. At the same time, it can sometimes be difficult for Chinese people to accept that a Westerner such as myself can speak Mandarin.

Have you had experiences like this with Mandarin or other languages?

A professor at Michigan State University has created a free online role-playing game that teaches you Mandarin Chinese, as well as introducing you to Chinese culture, according to this report.

Within the game you inhabit a virtual version of China where you can visit markets, read newspapers, watch television, chat and trade with other players and even get a job, and there are plenty of help with the language the culture. Players start out as tourists and can become residents or even citizens of the virtual China.

This sounds like a good idea that might appeal to quite a lot of people.

Do you know of games that teach other languages? Have you tried any of them?

I’m currently in Bangor, Gwynedd in search of a new place to live – I plan to move here soon and will be starting an MA in Linguistics at Bangor University in September.

Bangor is one of the smallest cities in the UK and is an attractive place with views across the Menai Strait to Anglesey (Ynys Môn) and along the North Wales coast. Students make up a significant proportion of the population, at least during term time, and at least half of the permanent population speak Welsh as their first language, which is one of the reasons why I chose the course in Bangor.

Welsh has now ousted Mandarin as the dominant language (apart from English) in my head. Mandarin dominated for many years, even after I left Taiwan. Now when I try to say things in languages other than Welsh, they come out partly in Welsh, or with Welsh word order, which tends to confuse people. There aren’t many people around, as far as I know who can follow a Mandarin/Welsh mixed conversation. Well, I do know one person who could.

On the train on the way here today I heard some people talking in an unfamiliar language. As I usually do, I tried to work out which language it was. At first I assumed it was Spanish or Portuguese as I saw Iberia Airlines tags on their bags and they looked Hispanic. When I listened more closely, I realised it wasn’t either of those languages, though there did seem to be a few Spanish loanwords, which made me suspect it was maybe Quechua or one of the other indigenous languages of Latin America. Unfortunately I didn’t have a recording device to hand, otherwise I could have posted a recording here to see if any of you recognised the language. I suppose I could have asked the people what language it was, but where’s the challenge in that?!