Eye shit

The other day I was speaking with a Chinese friend, who thought she might be getting sick, because when she woke up her eyes had been filled with "eye shit". She said it so matter-of-factly, as if that was the official name for the gunk that collects in one's eyes while sleeping.

Well, it turns out that in Chinese, it is!

It is written 眼屎 and pronounced yǎnshǐ - the translation given by MDBG.net is "gum in the eyes".

The first character 眼 is 'eyes' - that's easy'. And according to the same online dictionary, the translation for 屎 is 'excrement, shit, dung'.  So yes, "excrement from the eyes" is a more palatable translation.

But I definitely think that "eye shit" is the winner here today, folks.



PS. In English I call it "sleep in my eyes" - what do you call it?

Saddle up … for the Year of the Horse

Horse calligraphy, by Jasmin

It's riding into town - The Year of the Horse - and it will arrive on 31 January 2014.

In the same way that the western Zodiac has different personality types for people born in different months, the Chinese Zodiac has something for people born in different lunar calendar years. For a bit of fun, if you'd like to understand better what personality you are, and what the Year of the Horse means for you, then take a look at this site which has some great summaries.

But this is a Mandarin-learning blog, so let's dig a little into 'horse' as a character, a word, and as part of larger phrases. This is all consistent with my WordPack philosophy - which helps make learning Chinese much more efficient.


The Character Itself
The Simplified Chinese character for 'horse' is 马, which is written as 馬 in the Traditional Chinese character system - this is pronounced mǎ.  Although it's hard to tell, the character actually evolved from something that used to look like a horse! Here's a diagram which I got from Taeglich Chinesisch (a German-language Chinese blog) to make that etymology more obvious:

Just part of a Character
Sometimes, though, the 马 character isn't used as a full character, but rather only as a part of the character. For example, the word for 'camel' is 骆驼 (luòtuo) - note how the horse radical appears in both of the hanzi. When you're learning to read & write Chinese, you need a system to help you memorise all of these variations - I recently wrote an article called Stoned Horses which covers exactly that topic.


Horse Words
There are many words which include the 马 character - some related to horses, and some where the connection is a little more obscure. For your convenience, I have include the full details of the words & phrases below, so that it's easy for you to copy into your flashcard pack. And seriously, if you want to massively increase your vocab, in my opinion you really should be using flashcards.

The format I will be using is:

• english (simplified / traditional) pinyin: comment

The Actual Horse

• horse (马 / 馬) mǎ
• measure word for horses: (匹) pǐ: for example, 'three horses' is 三匹马
• horse (马匹 / 馬匹 ) mǎpǐ: given the above two characters, this alternative word isn't really a surprise :)

Things Related to Horses

• saddle (马鞍 / 馬鞍) mǎ'ān: literally a 'horse saddle'
• horseshoe (马蹄铁 / 馬蹄鐵) mǎtítiě: literally 'horse hoof iron'
• to ride a horse (骑马 / 騎馬) qímǎ
• horse racing (赛马 / 賽馬) sàimǎ

Because English uses the Word 'horse'

• horsepower (马力 / 馬力) mǎlì: uhm, it's 'horse power'
• seahorse (海马 / 海馬) hǎimǎ: again, as simple as 'sea horse'
• ponytail - for hairstyles or similar (马尾 / 馬尾) mǎwěi: if you pretend a pony and a horse is the same thing
• wooden horse / rocking horse / gym vaulting horse / trojan horse in computing (木马 / 木馬) mùmǎ: literally it's a 'wooden horse'

Names & Places - because it makes the 'ma' sound

• Mark (马克 / 馬克) Mǎkè
• Marco Polo (马可波罗 / 馬可波羅) Mǎkě Bōluó
• Barack Obama (奥巴马 / 奧巴馬) Àobāmǎ
• Rome, capital of Italy (罗马 / 羅馬) Luómǎ
• Malaysia (马来西亚 / 馬來西亞) Mǎláixīyà
• Himalayas (喜马拉雅 / 喜馬拉雅) Xǐmǎlāyǎ
• Amazon (亚马逊 / 亞馬遜) Yàmǎxùn
• … and so many more example like this.

Figurative Horses - where the connection is slightly tenuous

• immediately (马上 / 馬上) mǎshàng: get on your horse right now!
• street or road (马路 / 馬路) mǎlù: I guess it's the place where horses used to ride
• BMW cars (宝马 / 寶馬) Bǎomǎ: quite a clever name, by sound & meaning
• zebra (斑马 / 斑馬) bānmǎ: I suppose 'striped horse' is about as accurate as you can get!
• hippopotamus (河马 / 河馬) hémǎ: it looks like a horse in the river (said no one, ever)
• fine steed (千里马 / 千里馬) qiānlǐmǎ: literally a thousand mile horse, which would be fine!
• unexpected winner (黑马 / 黑馬) hēimǎ: literally a black horse, similar to English usage
• knight in shining armour (白马王子 / 白馬王子) báimǎwángzǐ: a Prince on his White Horse
• so-so (马马虎虎 / 馬馬虎虎) mǎmahūhū: horse-horse-tiger-tiger, neither one nor the other
• suck up to / toady (拍马屁 / 拍馬屁) pāimǎpì: to pat the horse's buttocks, to encourage it forwards

Idioms

Chengyu is a massive body of Chinese idioms (usually four characters) which you can read about here. Below are some of the ones I have found which relate to horses. If you take a look at Chinese-Tools, you will find at least 50 chengyu that use the character 马 - so I will only include a few here, and leave you to trawl through the others if you're overcome with desire.

• 马马虎虎 (mǎ ma hū hū) so-so: I have already mentioned this one above, but it's one of the first chengyu/idioms that we learn when studying Chinese so it's worth a second mention
• 兵荒马乱 (bīng huāng mǎ luàn) the chaos of war: soldiers wasteland horses confusion
• 单枪匹马 (dān qiāng pí mǎ) single-handedly: single spear one horse
• 非驴非马 (fēi lǘ fēi mǎ) it resembles nothing: neither donkey nor horse
• 快马加鞭 (kuài mǎ jiā biān) as fast as possible: fast horse add whip
• 露出马脚 (lùchū mǎjiǎo) unmask the true nature: expose the cloven hoof (also: 露马脚)
• 马到成功 (mǎ dào chéng gōng) achieve instant success: succeed as soon as the horse arrives
• 盲人瞎马 (máng rén xiā mǎ) rush headlong into disaster: blind person kills the horse
• 秣马厉兵 (mò mǎ lì bīng) be combat ready: feed the horse, strict soldiers
• 一马当先 (yī mǎ dāng xiān) be the first to take the lead: one horse goes first
• 走马看花 (zǒu mǎ kàn huā) examine a thing hurriedly: ride the horse while looking at flowers
• 车水马龙 (chē shuǐ mǎ lóng) heavy traffic: car water horse dragon (sorry, what??)

Saddle Up

So now you know the character, the words, the implications. All that is left to do is to have a great Year of the Horse - bring on the dancing horses!!

   Happy New Year!  

   新年快乐!

   xīnniánkuàilè!

Don't read books, read sculptures

Firstly, happy new year - welcome to 2014!   Secondly, just a quick post about something I saw which I thought was totally amazing …



Zheng Lu is an artist who creates very impressive things - you can see his full collection here. But it was in particular a series of sculptures made up of thousands of Chinese characters that really caught my eye.

The article which talks about these can be found here, it's well worth a look. And to give you a sense of scale, take a look at the picture above, and you can see the most incredible detail Zheng Lu goes to in his work.

So if you're tired of practising reading Chinese books, and you'd like to read something a little different, then read that!

Stoned Horses

When students learn to read & write Chinese characters, there are broadly two ways of doing it. The first is 'brute force' where you practise the strokes over & over again until you have internalised them, and the second is to use some method of visualisation which allows you to decompose the characters into parts - and piece them together again using imagary (which is much easier to remember that just pure strokes).

Although I used the Heisig method to learn 3000 characters (and I've blogged extensively on this - you can find the full collection here), note that what I'm writing below is about visualisation in general, and is not specific to the Heisig approach.

Take for example the character for 'numeral' - which is 码 (mǎ, also written 嗎 in the traditional system). You can see it's made up of 石 (stone) and 马 (horse). When I learned this character, I naturally had to create an image of why stone+horse=numeral. In this case, a flood of images came to mind, and I realised there were so many options.

So many examples!

It got me thinking of times I've spoken to people about visualisation methods, and they say it's so hard to create images. So in addition to the very popular article Tips & Tricks for Heisig Visualisations, I decided to share here a range of images that I could use for this character.

• I picture the Terracotta Army, but instead of rows and rows of soldiers, I picture rows and rows of stone horses. And of course, since this is a very valuable collection, I imagine each horse is numbered - as you often see in museums. I suppose you can use this & this to help you create the image yourself. Ultimately this is my preferred image for remembering that stone+horse=numeral. Your preferred image may be different, and that's OK.
• Or I can see a horse doing maths. You know, with numerals. But horses can't write in books, so this horse has a few stones laid out on the ground before him, and he is moving them around, a little like someone might use an abacus, to do the calculations. 
• I can also visualise a ten-pin bowling alley, but you won't find pins at this place - instead you will find 10 stone horses at the bottom of the bowling lane. Can you see as your ball hits them, they break from the impact - and your score (such a high number!) appears on the board above you.
• Maybe there are horses running a race, but the track has lots of loose stones on the track, and each time a horse stumbles on the stone and falls, someone keeping score of 'lost' horses chalks up a higher numeral on the board.
• How about a large piece of cardboard which is part of a colour-by-numbers approach. But with this one you don't paint according to the number, you place a stone of different colour on that number. And when it's done and you step back, you can see it's a horse!
• Another possibility is to imagine cave paintings of horses scratched into the stone walls, but when you look more closely you notice that between the pictures of horses there are numbers - almost like the person was doing maths with horses as numerals. 
• Alternatively, I can see a gateway with a stone horse head mounted on top (it looks a little like this) - there is someone sitting astride that head, and as people pass through the gateway, she updates the numerals in her notepad, since she's counting people who use this entrance. 

Choosing the best one

Let's be clear, the one that is best for me may not be the best for you - so don't simply choose the one that I have chosen, but recognise which one best matches the way your own thinking works.

(It is possible to come up with really bad images, which I've written about here, but none of the above ones fails the tests in that article.)

After having done 3000 characters this way, I know instinctively how my brain works. And if you repeatedly hypnotised me to forget this character, and kept asking me to (re)create an image, it would probably be the first one, again & again. This is important, because in future when you're facing the character in The Real World © you will indeed need to see 码 then think stone+horse, and if your mind comes up with a different image, then you're never going to be able to work out what character you're looking at!)

So?

Did this help? Is it useful to be reminded that there really are so many (good) ways of creating images, that we shouldn't feel helpless, and we shouldn't forgive ourselves for feeling we can only come up with poor images?

So while you're in a visualisation mood, challenge yourself … Pick one or two of the characters below and create a few images that actually work. For fun.

• 敌: tongue+taskmaster = enemy
• 妄: perish+woman = absurd
• 坏: earth+NO = bad
• 如: woman+mouth = if

Leave a comment if you have any clever thoughts. Or if you have any dumb thoughts, that's OK too.

Heisig Book 2 - now finished! (this is how)

Today I completed the 1500 characters of Heisig & Richardson's Book 2. (Actually there are 1519 characters in this book, including the bonus ones.) This takes me to a total of 3019, which is about as far as I plan to go.

I finished Book 1 about four years ago, and was happy for quite some time not to bother with Book 2. Then about 1.5 years ago, I tried starting Book 2, but failed. By the start of 2013, I had decided I would begin again - but the difference that time was that although I managed Book 1 in just over 100 days, my decision in January was that I would take my time, and focus on finishing the book by the end of the year.

And that's what I did - I stuck with the slow-and-steady approach, and completed the book in 11.5 months. And it feels great! (you should try it one day)

Although there is something to be said for throwing yourself at it - like I did with Book 1 - it does take a bigger time commitment and certainly more focus. My first attempt to begin Book 2 was too intense, and that's why I failed. The second time I was ready to focus on just 5 new characters a day - and that succeeded perfectly.

There is no Book 3 - and to be fair, even if there were, I think I would be focusing on actually reading books now, rather than memorising new characters. So for 2014 my focus will be books and not textbooks.


It's not even noon here in HK right now, so perhaps a little early to go out and drink champagne. But I will do that this afternoon.

Ridiculously flexible words

When you start learning Chinese, you figure out relatively quickly how the language puts characters together to make words.

Since 好 (hǎo) means 'good', it makes sense that 好友 is a 'close friend', 好看 is 'good looking', 好处 is an 'advantage', 好心 is 'kind hearted', and so on.

Deep down, I want Chinese to be like this all the time: consistent, and easy to learn. Unfortunately, life isn't fair. And Chinese isn't like this.

The one character, more than any others I have found, that seems to represent so many different things, is the character 节 / 節 (usually pronounced jié). The MDBG dictionary provides this selection of possible meanings: "festival / holiday / node / joint / section / segment / part / to economize / to save / to abridge / moral integrity / classifier for segments, e.g. lessons, train wagons, biblical verses".

I was seeing this character appearing in so many (very different) words, which is what got me thinking,  including: 节目 (jié​mù) = program;  春节 (Chūn​jié) = Spring Festival (but it also applies to most festivals including Christmas & Valentines Day);  章节 (zhāng​jié) = chapter;  细节 (xì​jié) = details;  空气调节 (kōng​qì​tiáo​jié) = aircon;  etc.

Not sure about you, but I find this confusing!

In an attempt to gain control of this character, with Judy's help, I came up with the following sentence to put in my flashcard pack.

     On Thanksgiving, frugal people might buy energy-saving lightbulbs in order to save money
     在感恩节，节俭的人可能买节能的灯泡来节省金钱
     在感恩節，節儉的人可能買節能的燈泡來節省金錢
     zài Gǎn'ēnjié, jiéjiǎn de rén kěnéng mǎi jiénéng de dēngpào lái jiéshěng jīnqián

(And if you remember, it really does help to create 'special' sentences for you flashcard pack, as I've written about here: The clever butcher uses a cleaver)


What about you? Do you have a character in mind that has many meanings? If so, please leave a comment below (anonymous notes are welcome too!).

Don't kiss while learning Chinese!

I read an article in The Guardian yesterday, entitled 'Eating popcorn in the cinema makes people immune to advertising'.

Simply reading the heading, even before I reached the article, made me think that eating popcorn is probably just distracting for the viewer, and so the advertising would be less effective. But when I actually read the article, there was one paragraph that caught my eye ...

The reason why adverts manage to imprint brand names on our brains is that our lips and the tongue automatically simulate the pronunciation of a new name when we first hear it. Every time we re-encounter the name, our mouth subconsciously practices its pronunciation. However, according to the study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, this "inner speech" can be disturbed by chewing, rendering the repetition effect redundant.

That immediately got me thinking about how we learn Chinese, and how a fair amount of learning (vocab, tones, 'flow' ...) is tied into this subconscious pronunciation that takes place while we're learning. Of course this affects all languages, but I wonder if it's even more marked for Chinese, given the tones that have to be mentally practised while learning too.

So, to avoid interfering with your "inner speech", don't occupy your mouth while you're learning Chinese.

No popcorn. No chewing gum. And certainly no kissing.

That music smells good

I recently went on a business trip to Kuala Lumpur, and was eating lunch with a colleague. When our Jasmine tea arrived, we were each given two small cups, both were then filled with tea. I had never seen this before, and my colleague explained that one of them is called the 闻香杯 (wénxiāngbēi) - the smelling cup. The basic idea is that one cup is for smelling, and one is for drinking. Or something like that.

I was (linguistically) confused, however, since the Chinese characters she wrote for 'smelling' cup seemed to translate into "hearing-fragrance-cup"!  She then explained that 闻 could also mean 'to smell'.

What? I immediately launched Pleco Dictionary on my iPhone and ... she was right.

(Pleco gave me the best one yet: 闻见 ('hear' & 'see') can mean 'to smell'.  Good grief. If you refer back to my article about Chinese being a series of mathematical formulae, then this is a great example of 1+2=634.)


Mandarin continues to surprise me. But I'm past the point of these confusing incidents frustrating me, now it's just interesting. At least, it's interesting enough to write a blogpost about it.

And now I'm off to smell some music.
(Or perhaps just look at it. #thicke)

Mandarin does not use these Cantonese characters

In the previous article I wrote - about Chinese people confusing 'he' and 'she' when speaking English - we discussed a very common word that is used in Cantonese, but not in Mandarin. That got me thinking about other characters which similarly appear in Cantonese, but not in Mandarin.

Of course there are many expressions that are used in one and not the other (for example, while Mandarin says 不好看, Cantonese instead says 唔好睇) - after all, they are two different languages. But in this article I'm going to avoid expressions, and rather focus on individual characters that have this feature.

As a cheat - since I don't speak Cantonese :) - my starting point was to search in the MDBG online dictionary for the word 'Cantonese', which gave me 99 results, from which I started to whittle the list down to ones worthy of being included in this article ...

• 唔: This is the first obvious one which means 'no' or 'not'. In theory it's pronounced wú in Mandarin, but it's only* used in Cantonese where it's pronounced m4. This is extremely common in Cantonese, generally used where Mandarin would use 不 - so for example 'bad' in Mandarin is 不好 whereas in Cantonese it would be 唔好.
• 冇: In Mandarin it is pronounced mǎo, but in Cantonese it's mou5. The closest Mandarin word to this character might be 没有 (méi​yǒu - which even sounds very similar to mou5). This is another very common character in Cantonese. To be clear, I have never seen this used in Mandarin.
• 佢: This is he/she/it in Cantonese: keoi5. No need to discuss this one - since I wrote an entire article on it before :-)
• 嘅: This is the Cantonese equivalent of the Mandarin possessive article 的. In Cantonese 嘅 is pronounced ge3.
• 呢: This character as used mostly in 呢個 to mean 'this' - basically it's the same as 這個 in Mandarin (or 这个 in the simplified system)) and is pronounced ni1.
• 嗰: Similarly, this character is used for 'that' in Cantonese - usually in the word 嗰個, which is pronounced go2go3. Mandarin would use 那個 (Simplified: 那个) instead. 
• 喺: This is the Cantonese equivalent of 在 (to be at) - and it is pronounced hai2.
• 咩: This is pronounced me1, and it indicates surprise by turning the sentence into a question. For example, 係咩 (hai6me1) means "Really?"
• 佬: If you're a foreigner living in HK, you will hear this character every day - part of the word 'gweilo' - this character is actually pronounced lou2. Therefore 'gweilo' actually means 'male ghost' (and not 'old ghost' - which is a common mistake that confuses 佬 with 老).
• 乜嘢: This is pronounced mat1 je5 in Cantonese, meaning 'what' or 'why'. Since both characters are unique to Cantonese, and since they are commonly used together in this compound word, I just gave them a single entry. It has the same meaning as Mandarin's 什么 or perhaps 东西.
• 咗: This is pronounced zo2, and puts the sentence into past-tense, in the same way that Mandarin might use 了 or 过 (過).
• 咁: The character is pronounced gam3, and can mean 'so' (like Mandarin's 这样) or 'very' (like 很).
• 噉: This is the other 'gam' word of interest, although the tone here is different: gam2. It means 'in that case' or 'and then'. When I'm listening to my colleagues speaking on the phone, I hear this word a lot! (In written Cantonese, this is sometimes just written as 咁, apparently.)
• 啱: The character is the Cantonese equivalent of Mandarin's 对 (Traditional:對), meaning 'correct'. It is pronounced ngaam1.  (And because you, Dear Reader, are so clever - you probably already worked out by yourself that we can piece together two of these characters to get the Cantonese word for incorrect: 唔啱.)
• There are a few more that are worth listing here because they are quite common, but I will just group them together: They include 搵 (find, like 找), 瞓 (sleep, like 睡), 噏 (gossip), 攰 (tired, like 累), 嘥 (to waste), 屌 (to fuck), and finally 餸 (a side dish). 

In the past (before moving to HK), I had been reading Chinese comics which I picked up on my travels, wondering why I was struggling to understand the text so much - and I kept seeing strange characters (like 冇). That is how I originally realised that there are indeed characters which are used in Cantonese and not Mandarin, which explains why at the time I couldn't easily work out what the text was saying.

So now we all know. 冇問題.

A message to my little brother

Hey Bro*

I was sitting in a coffee shop this morning, and realised how often I think about you while I'm learning Chinese.  Here, let me show you …

Take a look at this (poorly-taken) image from the book** that I'm reading at the moment for learning to read ...

I won't bore you with the details, but the method I use basically breaks complex characters into components - then you create an image that uses all those components, which is easy to remember.

• So you can see that #2279 has two halves - the left half means little brother (uhm, that's YOU!) and the right half (those two lines) means sword/sabre/knife. And you can see on the very right of the page, that overall character means shave. So the methods requires me to create an image of those words … so obviously the image I have in my mind is of YOU shaving with a sword!  (Glad you got rid of that beard!)
• Similarly #2280 involves YOU and a road - I picture us standing outside [the home where we grew up], on opposite sides of the ROAD (辶 means, in general, 'road'), and you're HANDING OVER something to me. Doesn't matter what you're giving me - it's the process of handing something over. And that's the image.
• In #2281 I'm stuck in a TREE (that's the 木 character on the left), and YOU are climbing up a LADDER to help me down.

The 'little brother' component is quite common, and you can see it is connected with such different words - but ultimately all those images involve you. So thanks for 'joining me' while I study Chinese. I look forward to your next visit out to Hong Kong.

Greg


* Yes I sometimes call him 'Bro'. Don't judge me :-)
** This is from Heisig Book2. You can read my whole collection of Heisig articles here.