Category: Chinese (中文)

Word of the day – 聽筒

By Simon

聽筒 [听筒] (tīngtǒng) is Chinese for telephone receiver; headphone; earphone; earpiece and stethoscope. Its literal meaning is “hearing tube” – 聽 = to hear; to obey, and 筒 =　tube; cylinder.

I found this word in an online Chinese dictionary I came across yesterday which looks very useful. You can search for Chinese words or characters using their characters or pinyin spelling, and the entries include traditional and simplified characters, pinyin, recordings of the pronunciation, related words, and English and French equivalents. There’s even the option of inputting characters by hand.

The dictionary seems to be part of the Chinese Tools site, which contains a translator, text-to-speech, name translators for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan and other scripts, and other useful tools.

De bouche à oreille

By Simon

Last night we were discussing how to encourage more people to come to the French conversation group and we concluded that word of mouth is probably the most effective way – all the posters we put up around Bangor last Saturday have yet to bring hordes of new recruits. We also thought that the French version of word of mouth, de bouche à oreille (from mouth to ear), seems to be more logical then the English. Another way to say word of mouth in French is de vive voix (of live mouth).

Word of mouth in Chinese is 口耳相傳 (kǒu ěr xiāng chuán) or “mouth ear mutual spread” or 口口相傳 (mouth mouth mutual spread); in Dutch it’s van mond tot mond (from mouth to mouth) and it’s the same in German, von Mund zu Mund. In Japanese it’s 口コミ(kuchikomi) or “mouth com(munication)”, and in Spanish it’s boca a boca (mouth to mouth) or boca a oreja (mouth to ear).

What about in other languages?

Mandarin for all

By Simon

According to this report, the UK Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, would like all secondary pupils in UK schools to have the opportunity to learn Mandarin. One reason for this is that a poll of employers found that Chinese is the most useful language for employees to know after French and German.

The poll, conducted by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in 2008, found that 52% of employers wanted French speakers, 43% wanted German speakers, 38% wanted speakers of Mandarin or Cantonese, and 28% wanted Spanish speakers.

The UK government would also like there to be a greater range of languages offered in primary schools, including Mandarin, Arabic and Japanese.

Critics of these plans point out that the government should be worry about the ever decreasing number of pupils are studying any languages at secondary level, and that there aren’t enough teachers of Mandarin and other languages.

There’s an comment piece on this story in the Telegraph in which the writer claims that schools should concentrate on improving the English of pupils, rather than trying to teach them ‘difficult’ languages like Chinese. This is a common argument when languages are mentioned – many believe that today’s youth have poor English, especially written English, and don’t know their grammar, and therefore shouldn’t waste time learning foreign languages. Such opinions are often based on impressions, prejudices and are rarely backed up with evidence.

Are such arguments used in other countries?

Chinese in Liberia

By Simon

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.

Animated Chinese character dictionary

By Simon

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.

Chinese etymology

By Simon

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.

Word of the day – rhewlif

By Simon

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).

Taiwan to adopt Hanyu pinyin

By Simon

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.