I can understand and speak a bit of Mandarin Chinese. Theoretically I can also read and write a few characters. It’s rough going. Chinese is hard.
As you may know, I have been trying to learn Mandarin Chinese.
A previous post talks about how it started.
This post talks about how it’s going.
Upshot: I took the official HSK 3 test and the HSKK Beginner test on Sunday. I think it went well!
Here’s what I’ve been doing for the last two months to prepare.
Update July 12: Scores are in!
HSKK Beginner: 85/100.
HSK 3: 284/300.
Yay! 🙂
Continue reading Learning Chinese in Singapore in 2022: How It’s Going
I have been trying to learn Mandarin since before I moved to Singapore in 2008. I have made embarrassingly little progress.
That’s starting to change.
At a cost of SG $245, I have registered for HSK Level 3 and HSKK Beginner in mid-June 2022. The HSK is the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, the standardized test for Mandarin Chinese. HSKK is a separate speaking test.
When I take the test, I will have been studying Chinese either for twenty years, or two months, depending on how you count. I’m good at languages, but this is going to be tough. I am taking stock of the resources available to me and trying to decide what to do and how. This process includes reflecting on all the things I’ve done before.
I think I would call this very useful, well-made thingy a plastic cutlery basket, not a health chopsticks cage.
Health
The word “health” is not typically used as an adjective, except to describe a few very abstract things like insurance. The adjective “healthy” is typically used to describe things you eat, drink, or do that are beneficial to your health, and would be just as inappropriate, though probably funnier. I do not think the product name needs a word corresponding to “sanitary” or “hygienic” because those words connote disposable things or substances whose purpose is to clean the body or disinfect something.
Chopsticks
To my ears it always sounds strange to use plural nouns as adjectives.
Cage
A “cage” is totally enclosed, and usually has something alive inside, whereas this thing is open on the top.
Altogether!
便万家 (biànwànjiā) means “convenient 10,000 home”
品位生活 (pǐnwèi shēnghuó) means “quality life”
餐具收纳 (cānjù shōunà) means “tableware hold[er]”
卫生筷子笼 (wèishēng kuàizi lóng) means “hygienic chopstick container”
MADE IN CHINA
at Taizhoucity Huangyan Area Xidelai Plastics Factory
I love books. I love languages. I built welovetranslations.com. You can read this post on that site!
This collection of translations of Bill Watterson’s The Revenge of the Baby- Sat probably got started when I went to Italy in 2002 and chanced upon a copy of the Italian translation.
Undoubtedly I bought the Portuguese one in Portugal in 2004 and the German one in Germany in 2008. My husband fetched me the French one from France at some point or other, having somehow determined that the contents were the same even though the cover was different. A neighbor kindly brought back the Chinese version for me when she went to visit family in Beijing recently.
Seeing Calvin’s words in other languages that use the Roman alphabet is one thing; seeing them in Chinese characters is quite strange.
Below are images of the six different book covers: French, Italian, Portuguese, German, English, and Chinese.
There are translations available in other languages, including Spanish (ISBN 9786075271170), Dutch (ISBN 97890542562), and Czech (ISBN 9788074490798), as well…
When my husband took me to a squinchy Japanese restaurant that had high chairs at a bar-style counter, the server laconically instructed me to put my bag “downstairs”, which meant “on the shelf under the seat of the chair”.
I have heard English teachers eager to hold students accountable for their spoken language deride this common Singlish use of “downstairs”, but it’s wonderful (and typical) in its succinctness.
If you use the preposition “under”, you have to include a noun for the preposition to be, well, positioned in front of. If you use the adverb “downstairs”, you’re just saying something needs to go below something else, and letting context do the work of indicating what the something else is.
Chinese has a phrase approximately meaning “down side” which can be used the way the server was using “downstairs” to adverbially indicate “under something”. It also has phrases meaning “up side”, “behind side”, “opposite side”, etc., and you can say “located opposite side” without needing to say “located opposite the hotel”, for example, the way we can say in English that “the receipt is in the bag” or just “the receipt is inside”.
I get the sense that Chinese relies on context more than English, or at least relies on context in ways that English doesn’t, since a large proportion communication in any language is always shared context.
The Mandarin expression 厉害 (lìhài) means ‘awesome’ or ‘powerful’, among other things.
I heard the expression several times while watching Kung Fu Yoga, so when I next looked at this mug, I saw it in a whole new light, even though I’ve had it for years.
I toured the New Jersey plant belonging to Lehigh Press (a Von Hoffmann company) at some point when I was working in the production department of Princeton University Press (2005–2008).
The place was full of huge, expensive German printing machines and stacks and stacks of different kinds of paper.
The company printed the book cover (but I think not the pages) for some of our titles. They also printed Harry Potter book covers!
Before we left, they gave us some company-brand swag stuff like this mug, plus samples of things they’d printed with fancy techniques.
Lehigh Press closed down in 2008.
It was home to the country’s largest vacuum collator, an assembly-line machine that uses suction force to stack sheets of printed paper or plastic film in order.
That was awesome.
Reading Magic promotes the idea of teaching literacy from the top down rather than from the bottom up. The author believes parents and teachers should start with stories, then sentences, then words, then letters; that children who can sound out words in a book but who don’t understand them aren’t reading, but that children who tell a story using the pictures on the pages to make their own meaning are.
Although I don’t think Mem Fox is all wrong, I think she’s misguided.
I definitely believe parents should read to their children, and that amazing, wonderful, terrific things can and do happen when reading is part of the family routine. “Read to your kids” is a message that deserves to be shouted from the mountaintops, and to be listened to and enacted.
However, while it may be the case that literate, supportive families can immerse children in books to such an extent that some bookwardly inclined children learn to read effortlessly and joyfully—accidentally, even!—at age 3 or 4, that is not a helpful one-size-fits-all solution to the general problem of literacy instruction, and in particular, encouraging children to interact happily with texts until they get the hang of reading is not a practical strategy that teachers can implement in their classrooms. Teachers really are better off with “letter A makes a as in ‘apple’, letter T makes t as in ‘table’, and when you put A and T together, you get ‘at’.”
The tone of the book is self-congratulatory and anecdotal; there’s no science or statistics here, so I don’t feel there’s much reason I should believe what Mem Fox has to say, even if it sounded intuitively correct, which it doesn’t; in fact it contradicts my experience as a reading teacher.
For more on what I liked and disliked about the book and why, see below.
Let’s have a look at a strange sentence.
My class today was fun.
Which word is “today” modifying?
It’s an adverb, and the verb is “was”, so “today” must be modifying “was”. Easy, right?
Not so fast!
I think the sentence above is trying to say:
The class I had today was fun.
in which case “today” is modifying “had” because otherwise we’d say
My class was fun today.
So if you say “My class today was fun,” you’re either using Chinese syntax (which requires adverbs to go in front of verbs) to say that your class was fun today, or you’re using the word “today” to modify a verb that’s not technically even in the sentence but buried inside a possessive adjective.
You could say “Today’s class was fun,” using “today” as a noun but transforming it into a possessive adjective; then you’d be missing “my”.
In Chinese, I believe you could say “My today’s class was fun” because apparently there’s no rule against doubling up demonstratives like that; I’ve heard people say things like “my the other one is nicer”. In English.
In Singapore maybe you could also get away with “My today class was fun.” After all, “today” is an adjective on all the signs outside restaurants that say “Today Special”. Such signs are of course attempting to say “Today’s Specials”, but they not only fail to transform the noun “today” into a possessive adjective, they also fail to pluralize “special”, an adjective acting like a noun.
Why do we even have different parts of speech? Words change part of speech constantly, and people “misuse” them, and start fights about whether they are in fact misusing them or not, and yet we all manage to understand each other anyway. Most of the time.
Maybe the concept of parts of speech survives for entertainment value—and to provide jobs for English teachers!
Speaking of which, back when I was a teacher for a company called I Can Read, I posted about using “I can…” to test whether a word is a verb. The word ‘window’ hilariously failed my test.
Or so I thought. Shakespeare would disagree.
Antony and Cleopatra (IV.xiv.72):
“Wouldst thou be windowed in great Rome…?”
(a) Shakespeare is awesome,
(b) the internet is awesome, and
(c) you learn something new every day!
The sign for this restaurant is a visual pun. It says “five” in English and the character that is serving as the “E” says “five” in Chinese. Genius!
17 photos below!
