chinese tongue twister

chang cheng chang, cheng chiang chang, chang chang chang cheng chang cheng chiang, cheng chiang chang chang cheng chang chang


I HAD TO RECORD THIS ABSURDITY.

Did you use Google Translate?

 Directions for a practice activity in my Chinese course:

"Watches each kind of clothes. The description of the clothes writes after listening to the recording."


Yes. I can do that. 

Typical Conversation #8

ME: Mr. Sommar was talking about majors in college, and he said something like, "Say I went to college and decided to major in twelfth-century Chinese women's studies--"
MOM: That's what, the 1100's? Twelfth-century Chinese women?
NATHAN: Oh, that's you, Mom!

How My Day Went

(In non-chronological bullet points, as I am too lazy for actual narration.)

• I have this. I wore it to school today. This miraculously saved me from getting scolded when I was a little late to math class, because Mr. Sommar likes his daughter and that was her Halloween costume. Apparently she called herself "Hamster Boy."
• There was a lockdown drill today during AP Bio. It was sort of cool, although the prolonged silence as we sat there did amplify the sounds of stomachs growling or saliva gurgling in throats as people swallowed. I was also still in my hamster thing. The tail makes it uncomfortable to sit on the floor.
• I forgot to print out an assignment for AP Language and didn't have it on my flash drive, so I heroically re-did the whole thing during second period, and then at the end of the period something went wrong with the saving of the file...and it got deleted. I was devastated. (Good thing Mrs. Z is a wonderfully reasonable teacher who said I could send it to her when I got home for credit.)
• Emmie made an amazing birthday gift for me. Much thanks to her and to everyone else who contributed to the video! I love you all ^^
• I am going to miss Mrs. Farr so much, I just... 

 

• Drama club Act III memorization deadline was today. It went quite swimmingly. I do enjoy the way my character behaves herself in this act. She rambles about the pooka, whines about her lack of social life, gets annoyed at the cab driver, then goes hysterical (again)--during which I get to yell at Alix to shut up :D That being said, though, I started laughing really hard about three-quarters of the way through the rehearsal and couldn't restrain myself for anything funny after that.
• I still have a bunch of Chinese work to do. Urk.

Self-Advertising

From my Chinese course, as we learn how to compare three or more objects:

Later, in a quiz:

"Which is a superlative sentence?"
- 中文很有趣。(Chinese is interesting.)
- 中文比英文更有趣。(Chinese is more interesting than English.)
- 中文是所有语言中最有趣。(Chinese is the most interesting out of all the languages.)

Davina Is A Geek

There is a picture at the bottom. If you don't feel like reading all this, you can just skip to the picture.

By geek, I mean language geek, to be more precise. Though I will admit that I have a distinct bias towards East Asian languages, since I'm most familiar with them after English.
I got so excited the other day when I was reading my Korean language book that I received for Christmas (see? I asked for that for Christmas = I am a language geek), and I could understand an entire written conversation without the use of translators. I suppose that would be rewarding for any student of any language, but this accomplishment was the product of countless hours poring over dubious sources on the internet, pasting words into multiple translators to see what they might really mean, attempting to translate song lyrics, documenting the uses of every single particle I discovered, and writing random Korean words over and over whenever I had pencil and paper to familiarize myself with the writing system.
So reading that conversation felt good. Really good.

One of the most discouraging things in the world is when you paste "dama" into Google Translate, and it comes out "dama."
I think I love and hate Google Translate at the same time. On one hand, the dictionary-ish thing that pops up for single words can be extremely helpful in figuring out various uses for them, and it's great for translating simple vocabulary terms that I just don't know--and for Chinese, the "read phonetically" function aids me tremendously, because it gives me the pinyin needed to type the characters. On the other hand, I will be frank: it's well known that the grammar is atrocious.  
"I like that cat better because it's prettier than other cats" in Chinese becomes "I prefer the cat, the cat because it is beautiful than the other."
Also, I don't know how much to trust the thing, period. I put "한치 (hanchi)" in once, trying to find out what it means after hearing it in a song, and I got "FLAMMABLE LIMIT". I don't think that was quite right.

I also have a love-hate relationship with my Mandarin Chinese course. Firstly, I love it simply because it's teaching me Chinese, and that is a language that I am totally ashamed to not already know. My parents are both fluent in Mandarin as well as a few other dialects. I feel like I should be, too. Most of my relatives speak Chinese. Some of them don't speak good English. I want to be able to talk to them.
One of the good things about the course is that it makes me write and read a lot, which is absolutely essential for any foreign language, but especially so for learning Chinese characters. Another good thing is that when we are given passages to read, my teacher never provides the pinyin (phonetic spelling of the characters, in case you didn't know) along with it. I know that other Chinese students can have problems with learning the actual characters when the pinyin is always included, because they end up just reading the alphabet they're familiar with in order to recognize words. I'm forced to memorize the characters themselves. No alphabet. Just words. MEMORIZE.
But then, my teacher also forgets to include pinyin when she's first teaching us new vocabulary. It took me a while to figure out that I had to just go to the course dictionary to find how to spell something. Before that, I just stared at the complicated characters, baffled as to how she expected us to just understand her sentences, grammar, sounds, new vocabulary, and all. Oh yeah, that's another thing. A lot of times she gives us long PowerPoint presentations to teach us new stuff, and there will be absolutely no translations inside. You have to figure everything out from prior knowledge and the pictures. Perhaps it's an attempt to simulate the way you'd learn through immersion. Just figure it out yourself.
I think that's a little similar to Rosetta Stone. Supposedly, you're going to "learn like a child." I wonder if that really works without actual immersion in a separate culture, where you'd be forced to use the new language all the time. Can you learn like a child while sitting at your computer and listening to one person's voice speak?
Maybe. I've survived through my course so far. All the same, I'd really like it if my teacher gave us translations.

If anyone asked me whether Korean or Chinese was harder--a question I think I've received at least once--I don't have a definitive answer. Both are really quite difficult for the native English speaker, but definitely not impossible for the dedicated student. Korean's writing system and phonetics are simple, a whole ton easier than the Chinese characters and tonal phonetics...but its complicated grammar structure and nearly inseparable connection to hierarchial Korean culture balance out any difficulty advantage that the alphabet provides. (Seriously, you use a different set of vocabulary and conjugate all your verbs differently depending on the societal status of the person you're speaking to.) Chinese grammar is a little more similar to English. IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING PICKING ONE OF THESE LANGUAGES TO LEARN, I RECOMMEND CHINESE, NOT BECAUSE IT IS MY HERITAGE AND I AM BIASED, BUT BECAUSE IT WILL PROBABLY SERVE MORE USEFUL IN YOUR FUTURE, AS CHINA IS A RISING WORLD POWER RIGHT NOW.  AND IF YOU WANT AN EASY LANGUAGE, JUST GO FOR A EUROPEAN ONE THAT IS RELATED TO ENGLISH. 

I haven't dabbled much in other languages. I took a little bit of Spanish when I was maybe ten, so I forget virtually all of that. I took an eight-week course in German once, but I forget most of that too. I tried learning Irish once. It's not as bad as Welsh, but the phonetics and spelling hardly made any sense to me, so I never really got past that. Japanese is one of those languages that I think I'll get to studying sometime in my future, but I'm not too interested at the moment. And Latin...eh. I learned that for a little while too. I will probably find my old books and go through them at some point soon, since I'm aiming to study biomedical stuffs, and it'll help.
Then, I'll learn Icelandic and Nahuatl and Aboriginal Australian. 'Cause I totally have the time. Pfft.

Oh wow. This is a pretty long post. I guess that suits the title.

 To make it even longer, here's a cool infographic I found:

Typical Conversations #3 and #4

ME: Looking at writing examples in my Chinese course. Why would you ever say, "I prefer these elephants because they are prettier than other elephants"?
MOM: Elephants are so ugly.
NATHAN: Well, maybe if you were a princess, and your father took you to see some elephants, and he said, "O princess, which elephants would you like for your birthday?" And then you would say, "I want these ones because they are prettier."

 ~•~

JEREMY: Coming into the room suddenly. You know...sometimes all you need...is a potato.
MOM: For what? To throw at people?