How do you say Happy New Year in Chinese?  新年快乐！ Xin1 nian2 kuai4 le4.

How about making a new years resolution to learn more radicals?

Check out this great resource.

http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/Radical_index.htm

PS Chinese New Year is coming, too!  It will be the year of the Ox 牛 ／niu2

It’s that time of the year! What time is that? Of course it’s the time to start practicing how to say Merry Christmas in Chinese.

圣诞快乐/shèng dàn kuài lè.
Say it a few time to get it in your head. Someone suggested that if you repeat something 60 times, it will become natural to you. I agree with this statement. but you can just sit down and say something 60 times. I had to be in context and spaced at proper intervals. The context part makes sense, but what those proper intervals are, I’ll leave that to the linguistic statisticians. Just practice and use it as much as you can.

Let’s break that down:
圣诞节/ Shèng dàn jié/ Christmas.
圣 / Shèng / Means “holy” or “sacred” Think “Oh holy night”
诞 / dàn/ Means birth. So 圣诞 means holy birth, talking about Jesus Christ
节/ jié / is “festival” or “holiday”

So 圣诞节 essentially means Christmas Day.

Now here’s a test. If you already know that 新年快乐 xīnnián kuài lè mean Happy New Year, then what do you think 快乐/ kuài lè means? Right, “happy” or “merry.”

Now let’s put it all together and say it in unison:
圣诞快乐/ shèng dàn kuài lè/ Merry Christmas!

Note that there is no 节 in there. Any guesses as to why?

It’s been a while since I’ve found an exciting new Chinese learning tool that I think is useful, fun, exciting, welldone, etc.

Check out Skritter.com.  The tools is aimed to help you more quickly learn new characters and words.  According to their website “Skritter is free for now, during our beta test stage. After release, there will be affordable monthly subscription fees, with a free trial period.”

I’ve played with it for about 25 minutes and found it to be pretty good.   They’re in beta now, so maybe if you give them a hand with testing, feedback, they might be nice enough to give you a free account once they go into “subscription mode.”

Finally going back to China for a month in October. It’s been a year of living in the States without a proper environment. 借口, jiè kǒu， an excuse for not advancing in my 中文? Perhaps. But going back will be a great test to see if what I’ve learned thus far will stick. If it does, then I’ll know that learning the right way will take you a lot further than learning the “traditional way.” I certainly don’t remember much Spanish, and I took that for 5 years.

I often read through Chinese-Forums to see what Chinese learners are talking about. I think too much time and energy (and sometimes money, too) is spent on figuring out the 最好的/zuì hǎo de/”best” system, when in reality, all systems work if you stick to them long enough. The problem is that most people don’t have the discipline to stick to anything, save for bad habits. It’s not about which book you use, how many vocabulary words you learn in a day, or the 15 stroke characters that you can write. It’s about taking responsibility for your own learning and creating the opportunities for yourself. Use the tools that are out there and design the perfect environment for you.

Keep going, don’t quit, 加油！

My theory was right.  Taking Chinese class at the local community college would keep my mind on Chinese.  Now that summer’s practically here and I’m “on break,” I’ve slacked quite a bit on my studying.  I still talk to friends regularly in Chinese, but I find myself struggling more to put things together.  So the moral of the story is, keep in in you mind and on your heart (kinda like what you learn in Sunday school!).

On another note, I’m a member of the “Chinese-Dictionaries” Google group where there’s lots of techie discussion on XML, API, databases, dictionaries, etc.  A current topic string is on integrating handwriting recognition into different programs.  Through this, I discovered a new (to me) site: NCIKU (which is apparently looking to change it’s name.   The site is “more than a dictionary.”  There is a neat little java applet that lets you use your cursor to write characters and then get feedback.  Also, apparently you can post your own vocab lists and let the world know your progress on how much you’ve memorized.

If you know of other resources that have helped you, drop a comment.  Thanks!

再见！

Keeping in line with my belief in linguistic diversification, I’m entering a Mandarin Speech contest, which will be held at the end of April.  I have some idea as to what I’ll speak about, but I’m looking forward to challenging myself in this fashion.

This week I haven’t had a chance to give my 10 minutes chinese lesson of the day, but last week, we introduced the favorite:  你好， 你好吗， 我很好， 你呢

No  characters, just pinyin, as characters aren’t a goal in this case.

In my Chinese class, we’re also diversifying.  I’d like to think I had a hand in suggesting practicing calligraphy 书法 and using 毛笔 （writing brush) while we listened to KTV (karaoke TV videos) DVDs.  It was very fun.   That’s important.  Remember to have fun!!!

好久不见！Long time no see!

I’ve been busy starting up my wealth management practice and haven’t had time to devote to this blog, but I’m still as into my Chinese studies as ever.

The managing principal at my firm is interested in learning Chinese and I’ve promised him that I can get him up and going in just 10 minutes a day for the next year. No problem!

So I’ll track our progress and what I go over with him. I’ll be writing stream of conscience style, so pardon the lack of detail, grammer mistakes and poor organization!

Day 1. Today I covered just 2 things.

1. Chinese is tonal. 4 tones. mā má mǎ mà with a neutral tone (ma) that is basically unstressed. If you can sing, you’re good because you’ll have an easier time recognizing the differences in the tones.

• mā is the first tone. Like a robotic voice.
• má is the rising tone, like when you say “what?” It’s called the second tone.
• mǎ is falling and rising, like when you sarcastically ask “AND???”
• mà is the 4th tone and is falling. My Chinese teacher used to say “it’s like when you’re swearing and yell “Dame!” I didn’t know that “dame” is a bad word, but I got the idea.

2. Chinese is a big bucket of languages. There are something like 5 main “dialects” which are all considered Chinese, Cantonese being the largest minority dialect. Mandarin is the most widely used dialect

So that’s day 1. 10 minutes. Tomorrow I’ll tell him about regional dialects, Putonghua and Beijinghua and some other interesting info.

再见！

I’ve been watching Flying Foxy of Snow Mountain/雪山飞狐 on TV and like it very much. The hero, 胡飞, doesn’t understand women very much and mutters this line to himself: 这女孩子怎么一个比一个麻烦呀, which essentially is a declarative statement to the effect of “why are girls so bothersome” or “why are girls so much trouble?” or “girls are so much trouble.”

Let’s break it down to understand how this pattern works.

1. Context. The hero is a real man. He knows how to fight, but he doesn’t understand women. So they always give him a big burden. So, he speaks this line. The main elements of the sentence are 女孩子 (girl/girls) 一个比一个 (roughly “one vs. another”) and 麻烦 (troublesome).

这女孩子: If you’ve studied Chinese for a while, you might wonder why this isn’t 这个女孩子, or even just 女孩子. Well, 这女孩子usually refers to all girls, where as 这个女孩子 refers to just one girl. Let’s look at another example:

这杂志(Magazine) 很好. (Time) Magazine is a good magazine. Every issue is pretty good. This entire publication is good.

But if we say 这本杂志很好 We could either be talking about this magazine (this issue) or Time magazine in general.

Why use 这 at all? Why not just say 杂志很好? Well, remember that this statement is a interjection. The 这 here is used to express worry, disgust, unhappiness.  Functions like a (hey, well, man!, gee, etc)

So 这女孩子 is leaning towards “girls” in general (the 一个比一个 part makes this 100% clear).

怎么: why, but in a rhetorical way.
一个比一个: one compared to one, one compared to another

麻烦: trouble/troublesome

呀: adds strength to what’s just been said.

And here are some short dialogs to look at how this is used (谢谢在广东的Chris!):

Dialog 1
A:你的女朋友没和你一起吃饭吗？
B：我和她吵架了。
A：别担心，很快就好了。
B；她很小气的，唉，这女孩子怎么一个比一个麻烦啊

Dialog 2
A：Lili 准备好了吗？我们要走了。
B：还没呢，她还在化妆啊。
A：天啊，她化妆可是要两个小时啊。那LUCY好了吗？
B：她也没好呢，她在洗头发啊。
A：我的天啊！！！！！这女孩子怎么一个比一个麻烦啊！！！

I’m back/我回来了/Wǒ huí lai le！

I guess things got a little busy for me around the turn of the new year. In spite of some good ideas/好主意/hǎo zhǔ yi/ I got off track with my studies. I’m still “busy” these days and I don’t have the energy to pay attention to being diligent, so I decided to take a class.

The class

Well, it was Day 1 of Chinese 220. In some ways 220 will be easy, but in a lot of ways it will be hard. Why?

1. Traditional characters. The 老师 said that we can write in 简体字 but the book is 繁体字.
2. I haven’t studied characters in a long time. I can recognize some (500?) but can’t write that many.
3. Lots of 人 from different places (well, mostly 香港).

So why is #3 on my list? Well, I lived in China for a while and had a wonderful environment. But in class there will be a lot of different accents. Get this, the class demographic breaks down something like this: 85% from Hong Kong, 5% from Taiwan, 2% from mainland China, 2% from Korea, 2% from the US, 4% other. So when others speak, I won’t have the pleasure of hearing “correct/native” accents. In other ways, though I think my listening will improve more because I’ll be more focused on the context of what’s being said. I’ve talked about context before.

Anyway back to the point of this post. I’m taking this class for 2 reasons. One is to give me a schedule to follow, and 2 to approach this class form a language acquisition point of view. I want to comment throughout the semester on what works, what doesn’t and what to do when something’s not working the way you think it should be working. Remember this, though:

When you are your own teacher, the world is your classroom.

Did you miss wishing your friends in China a Happy New Year? Want to wish them a happy belated new year in Chinese? Well, first a little background.

China is 16 hours ahead of California time. Yes, all of China. There aren’t different time zones like here in the US. To do quick math, take the local time, add 4 hours and then add another 12 hours.

Example: It’s 6:08pm now. So adding 4 hours gets us to 10:08pm. Now add 12 and you get 10:08am the next day.

So it’s already 2008年/nián in China now, but it’s still 2007年 here (read each digit of the years separately, “this year is 二零零七年”). So how can you wish someone a happy belated new year? Well, first, you have to remember that Mandarin Chinese is not English. For a lot of the language, you can do a word for word translation and the listener has the task of trying to guess what you’re trying to say. I told my friend 我晚点祝你”新年快乐/Wǒ wǎndiǎnr zhù nǐ “Xīn nián kuài lè.” He said “do you mean ‘I’ll wish you a happy new year a little later on,’ or ‘I’m late in wishing you a happy new year?’” So in the context of wishing someone a happy belated New Year (to differentiate this from wishing someone a belated birthday wish) you can use 给你拜个晚年/Gěi nǐ bài ge wǎn nián. Another, more formal way is to say 对你说声迟来的新年快乐/duì nǐ shuō shēng chí lái de xīn nián kuài lè. Broken down, this means “to you say a late ‘happy new year.’” 给你拜个晚年 is more “natural” though.

As a side note, I like World Time Server’s website for checking the time around the world.

So on which ever side of the International Date Line you are on, 新年快乐! or 给你拜个晚年!