手语基础 cover
I recently picked up a book on Chinese sign language called 手语基础. “Practicality” was not a major consideration in the organization of the book; it seems to be written by linguists for linguists. If I needed the book to actually communicate in Chinese sign language I’d probably be pretty disgusted with it, but since my interest is primarily academic, I’m enjoying it.
In its second chapter the book talks about fingerspelling (also called manual alphabets). It runs …
My end of the term pragmatics/semantics paper looked at the use of the English word “my” in certain constructions and compared it with the corresponding “我的” constructions in Chinese.
When you say “my X” in English, it could actually mean a variety of things, but we generally expect it to mean something like “the X that belongs to me.” Such is the case for “my book,” “my blog,” my hand,” etc. When X is a societal unit or …
Love can be a motivation. I’m not talking about learning how to say enough for “one night love,” I’m talking about this:
I am learning [language] so I can tell you how much I love you and have it mean more than if I told you in English.
I wonder how many years of study it will take…
Post Secret is still cool.…
I’ve been living in China a while now… long enough to observe the long-term deterioration of my own native language abilities, as well as those of my fellow English speakers. This deterioration can take different forms, one of which is a general decay of one’s vocabulary. Although it is a very real phenomenon (the other day I used “export” when I meant to use “deport,” which is really kind of pathetic), this kind of loss of mastery is due to …
I recently got an e-mail from Albert Wolfe, the guy behind Laowai Chinese. In the blog Albert shares his experiences learning the Chinese language. He has lots of great observations that I recommend any beginner take a look at.
What especially caught my attention was a recent post on tones. This is because Albert has employed some of the same tone mnemonics that I myself devised and relied on once upon a time.
Albert writes:
Once you learn
…
Ever since I started doing my Chinese pun posts, I’ve been deluged with requests for more*. So today I am finally getting around to posting one that I’ve been seeing for something like a year in an ad on the subway:
药材好，药才好。
Only good ingredients can make good medicine.
The pun is with the words 药 (medicine), 才 (an adverb meaning something like “only if”), and 药材 (medicinal ingredients). You have two three-character phrases with exactly the same character pronunciation, …
People’s Daily has an article on the changing Chinese language entitled 49 obsolete Chinese words (part 1, part 2, part 3). The really annoying thing about the article, though, is that it tells you the English translation of the obsolete words without telling you what the actual Chinese words are. (The second most annoying thing about the article is that some of the words are definitely still in use.)
After Ken of ChinesePod blogged about the …
The triple ‘dui’
Today on ChinesePod there was an intermediate lesson called Growing Affections. A commenter named Trevor Morley called attention to a linguistic phenomenon which he aptly dubbed “the triple dui” (that’s “triple 对,” not to be confused with “triple DUI“). This “对对对” is something I’ve noticed myself, and I’ve been observing it for a while.
对 means “right,” and as English speakers, I think it’s pretty easy for us to understand how …
I had my third Critical Discourse Analysis (批评性话语分析 or CDA) class today. I was really starting to wonder what was up with that class, but I finally got it straight. You see, having no prior significant exposure to the field, I had this simple understanding of “discourse analysis” as basically “analyzing discourse.” It goes a bit beyond that. But CDA is even further removed:
Critical discourse analysis has made the study of language into an interdisciplinary tool and can
…
I regularly ride the subway to get to ChinesePod headquarters, and on each ride I am subjected to the advertising played on those flat LCD monitors. One of the ads I see a lot is for Jacob’s Creek, an Australian wine. I noted that the Chinese name is 杰卡斯.
杰卡斯 is obviously a partial transliteration. 杰 is chosen for its sound and favorable meaning of “outstanding,” and 卡 and 斯, both chosen for their sounds, are commonly used in …
John has lived in China for
11.8
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
All Posts