Yangs (扬) vs Changs (场) vs Tangs (汤)

These can get confusing, so here are some of the most common words that use this radical 昜 explained.

场 (chǎng)

A measure word for sports or leisure activities e.g. 一场足球比赛

A large place such as an open space, a field or a venue e.g. 会场 (a conference hall)

畅 (chàng)

An adjective meaning smooth or at ease or free from worry

A surname

玚 (cháng)

An old word (rarely used nowadays) meaning jade used in sacrificial ceremonies.

肠 (cháng)

Intestines or sausages

汤 (tāng)

Soup

Hot or boiling water

A surname

杨 (yáng)

A willow but it's more close to it's scientific name poplar in meaning

A surname

扬 (yáng)

To raise something e.g. 扬手

To toss or throw something up

A surname

炀 (yáng)

A literary term for smelting or melting something

旸 (yáng)

Sunshine or a rising sun

飏 (yáng)

To soar, fly or float

疡 (yáng)

A medical term for sores or an ulcer

钖 (yáng)

An ornament on a horse's head stall (oddly specific)

20 HSK 3 Rearrange the words activities

20 ACTIVIDADES HSK 3 DE REORGANIZAR PALABRAS

#hsk3 #chinese #mandarin

I've been shown this tweet three times today.

Therapist: Linear Mandarin is not real, it cannot hurt you.

Linear Mandarin:

So I guess I'll do a deep dive on this.

All 15 of these characters exist, although most of them are pretty obscure. The mix of Traditional and Simplified versions of the metal radical is because some of these are so obscure not to have a Simplified version.

Cross-referencing several dictionaries to find information on these characters:

鍂 (metal/metal) piān – an incredibly obscure word for an ancient musical instrument no one knows anything about because it existed too long ago

鈢 (metal/wood) niē – as far as I can tell an archaic form of 璽 xǐ, an archaic type of royal seal

淦 (water/metal) gàn – a word used only for names (most famously a river in Jiangxi), and an archiac word for water leaking into a boat

鈥 (metal/fire) huǒ – the somewhat common word for the element holmium

釷 (metal/earth) tǔ – the somewhat common word for the element thorium

林 (wood/wood) lín – a very common word meaning "forest" or "grove"

沐 (water/wood) mù – a somewhat common word for "bath"

炑 (fire/wood) mù – an incredibly obscure word meaning "fire"

杜 (wood/earth) dù – a somewhat common word for "restrict" as well as "birchleaf pear tree"

沝 (water/water) zhuǐ – an incredibly obscure archaic character meaning "two rivers" or "river intersection"

淡 (water/fire) dàn – a common word meaning "bland" or "watery"

汢 (water/earth) – no pronunciation because it was invented by Japan (kokugo) and never imported into China; an extremely obscure abbreviation of 浄土 jōdo, the "Pure Land" in Buddhism; also used in place names in Japan (pronounced nuta)

炎 (fire/fire) yán – a somewhat common word meaning "flame"

灶 (fire/earth) zào – a common word meaning "stove"

圭 (earth/earth) guī – an archaic word for a a ceremonial jade badge

All the shishi words I know

Last year I learned the word 时事, and it struck me how many shishi words there are. For fun, I listed out all the ones I'm familiar with. You can see more at MDBG (but a Chinese-Chinese dictionary would probably have many more).

世世 shìshì - from age to age

世事 shìshì - affairs of life / things of the world

事事 shìshì - everything

事实 | 事實 shìshí - fact

失事 shīshì - (of a plane, ship etc) to have an accident (plane crash, shipwreck, vehicle collision etc) / to mess things up

实事 | 實事 shíshì - fact / actual thing / practical matter

实施 | 實施 shíshī - to implement / to carry out

实时 | 實時 shíshí - (in) real time / instantaneous

时事 | 時事 shíshì - current trends / the present situation / how things are going

时时 | 時時 shíshí - often / constantly

试试 | 試試 shìshi - to have a try

逝世 shìshì - to pass away / to die

I ran some stats based on my Anki deck, and there also a lot of qishi words: 其实、气势、骑士、启示、歧视、启事. But not as many as shishi. Maybe we need a poem of shishis to go alongside the 施氏食狮史 poem?

Tired of language learning apps constantly downgrading for profit? Introducing Lingonaut Project

We've all seen previously great language learning apps such as Duolingo or Busuu gradually losing quality, because of the owners always looking for more ways to make money. That is why a programmer and language fan by the name of Dr.Greenboys on Discord decided to do something about it, and start his own project, with a strict non-profit policy, never to be sold to the stock market, and premium tiers only giving aesthetic benefits, instead of not being able to pay money damaging the service's ability to teach you a language. It is still in development, but I am really happy to have found this project, and wanted to share it with the world.

Did I mention that, unlike Duolingo, we'll take volunteers for pretty much any language as long as the volunteers are fluent in it?

Anyways, you can find the project's page at https://lingonaut.app/

Creepy Koi

This Koi found in a Chinese lake has some unique markings.

Jet-black Polyhedral Seal of The Western Wei General

This multi-faceted jet seal of the Western Wei dynasty, belonged to the famous General Dugu Xin (獨孤信). It has 8 edges and 26 sides: 18 square and 8 triangular ones. It is the ancient polyhedral seal with the largest number of facets.

Among them, 14 sides are engraved with inscriptions. The inscriptions range from one-character to five-character. The functionality is differentiated, including the use in official letters, orders, document labeling, etc.

The jet, a composite organic gem, from which the seal is carved, is known in China as “coal jade” (煤玉).

The total height of the object is 4.5 cm, the width is 4.35 cm, and the weight is 75.7 g.

The seal was accidentally discovered in 1981 by Song Qing, a student from Xunyang county (旬陽縣), Ankang, Shaanxi. While returning home from school, he picked up a weird object in the gravel on the roadside, which aroused his curiosity with its bizarre shape. Song Qing had no idea what it was. Having examined the inscriptions at home, he gave the find for examination to the local archaeological museum, where the artifact was considered not of particular cultural value.

The seal vegetated on the outskirts of the local exposition for another decade, until it was revealed and recognized by a prominent researcher Wang Hanzhang (王翰章) from the Xi'an Institute of Literature and History. On display in Shaanxi History Museum (陝西曆史博物館).

Ha I wonder how many strokes the most complex Chinese character has like maybe eightee-

Look at this, no wonder I was confused about dong and yue/le on my recent exam:

乐 yue/le (as in yinyue = music or kuaile = happy) 东 dong (as in dongxi or east)

I knew 乐 had two pronunciations, and felt that the dong character was similar, but I knew it couldn't have a third pronunciation. And I couldn't for my mind figure out what to change with 乐 to make it into the dong character without it becoming 车.

My new favourite idiom is 画蛇添足 basically meaning to ruin something by overdoing it

Quite literally ‘draw snake add feet’

Pinyin: Huàshé tiānzú

Traditional: 畫蛇添足

75 essential single-character verbs (单字动词)

When I started consuming more native Chinese content, I quickly discovered an area in which my knowledge was lacking: single-character verbs. In my experience, it’s very easy to focus on learning words consisting of two or more characters and overlook single-character words.

Driven by curiosity, I went through my Anki deck (and also wracked my brain) to generate a list of characters/words that I have learned over the past couple years (roughly). Then I selected 75 verbs that are fairly common and important to know. They skew towards intermediate and advanced vocabulary.

Definitions are from MDBG. For characters with additional meanings that I am not yet familiar with, I have bolded the meanings I want to share.

(1) 抢 qiǎng - to fight over / to rush / to scramble / to grab / to rob / to snatch

(2) 救 jiù - to save / to assist / to rescue

(3) 扶 fú - to support with the hand / to help sb up / to support oneself by holding onto something / to help

(4) 催 cuī - to urge / to press / to prompt / to rush sb / to hasten sth / to expedite

(5) 夹 jiā - to press from either side / to place in between / to sandwich / to carry sth under armpit / wedged between / between / to intersperse / to mix / to mingle / clip / folder / Taiwan pr. [jia2]

(6) 咬 yǎo - to bite / to nip

(7) 砸 zá - to smash / to pound / to fail / to muck up / to bungle

(8) 毁 huǐ - to destroy / to ruin / to defame / to slander

(9) 嚷 rǎng - to shout / to bellow / to make a big deal of sth / to make a fuss about sth

(10) 塞 sāi - to stop up / to squeeze in / to stuff / cork / stopper

(11) 贪 tān - to have a voracious desire for / to covet / greedy / corrupt

(12) 拆 chāi - to tear open / to tear down / to tear apart / to open

(13) 掏 tāo - to fish out (from pocket) / to scoop

(14) 跪 guì - to kneel

(15) 摘 zhāi - to take / to borrow / to pick (flowers, fruit etc) / to pluck / to select / to remove / to take off (glasses, hat etc)

(16) 拎 līn - to lift up / to carry in one’s hand / Taiwan pr. [ling1]

(17) 扛 káng - to carry on one’s shoulder / (fig.) to take on (a burden, duty etc)

(18) 拽 zhuài - to pull / to tug at (sth)

(19) 愣 lèng - to look distracted / to stare blankly / distracted / blank / (coll.) unexpectedly / rash / rashly

(20) 搂 lǒu - to hug / to embrace / to hold in one’s arms

(21) 垮 kuǎ - to collapse (lit. or fig.)

(22) 撑 chēng - to support / to prop up / to push or move with a pole / to maintain / to open or unfurl / to fill to bursting point / brace / stay / support

(23) 甩 shuǎi - to throw / to fling / to swing / to leave behind / to throw off / to dump (sb)

(24) 围 wéi - to encircle / to surround / all around / to wear by wrapping around (scarf, shawl)

(25) 愁 chóu - to worry about

Keep reading

你酒国女英雄

Just sharing this except from the Taiwanese series “Wave makers” (人選之人—造浪者)

I laughed so much when I saw the translation haha, will definitely be using this in the future.

English added by me :)

My biggest tips if you're learning Chinese and starting to read Chinese webnovels (this list is not all inclusive, I'm sure there's things I forgot to mention):

Download Pleco app and use the free Clipboard Reader to copy/paste in text to read (or purchase the Pleco Reader tool which is what I did). Pleco has click translations (and great dictionaries), a Dictate Text text to speech button (good for listening to pronunciation while reading), a Google translate whole-section button (good for if you understand individual words but not the overall sentences/paragraphs), and it's just very Reader friendly. Pleco also has many graded readers to purchase if you'd like to first read 100, 300, 500, 1000, 1500, 2000 unique character graded readers Before trying webnovels. Alternatively: download the app Readibu. You can open webnovel url links in Readibu, and the app has click translations and can give you pronunciation of individual words. The app also has a Statistics button that tells you what percentage of words in a given chapter is in what HSK level. This can help you determine if a novel is your reading level. For example if you are reading level HSK 4, and open a novel with 90% words in HSK 4 or below? Good choice to read. If you open a novel and rhe app says it's 80% words HSK 4, 15% HSK 5, 3% HSK 6 and the rest above HSK? Then that novel may be a more difficult reading choice. Readibu lets you explore their app to find some webnovels, but you can also simply paste in a url of any novels you've found online. The paid version of readibu has additional tools like full-sentence machine translation.

Google/search the following terms when looking for novels: the Chinese version of the novel name, and xiaoshuozaixian 小说在线. So for example to find Guardian by priest, I might go to novelupdates.com Guardian page and find the Chinese name listed there for it Zhen hun 镇魂. Then I would go to google/duckduckgo/searx.space and search "镇魂小说在线" I may also include the author name "priest" if needed. One of the first results is likely to be jjwxc site where priest published it. There should also be additional results, if you're looking for say a chapter that got locked on its original publishing site etc or need a site that is more compatible with whatever Reader app you're using (Pleco, Readibu, other). Qidian and Jjwxc are major webnovel sites.

For that matter, do you want to listen to the audiobook as you read? Go to a search site again like Google, and type the book name in chinese along with 有声读物 youshengduwu or 有声在线 yousheng zaixian or 有声书 youshengshu. You could also search using those terms in youtube or bilibili. Ximalaya and Himalaya apps also have a lot of audiobooks, but I've noticed this year a lot of region blocks on stuff in ximalaya. So I usually listen to audiobooks on bilibili.com now.

If you are reasonably comfortable in your Chinese reading skills and are able to understand what you read even if word-translations are only right 80% of the time? Then you can expand what applications you read in. ANY ebook Reader app is likely to have click-translate features, you may need to download additional language dictionaries (Kindle app requires this) or you may just need Google Translate/DeepL/some translation app installed on your phone. Then you can open up any Reader app of your choice (I like Moon+ Reader personally) and you'll have click translate, sentence machine translate (using the translation app installed), and Text To Speech for the passages. The translation quality is likely to be worse than Pleco and Readibu, and will probably be roughly as good as Google Translate quality. But it is usable if you are upper beginner or above and know enough to recognize when a translation looks suspiciously wrong. Idiom app also has this level of translation quality (free), and Lingq has this translation quality for chinese (I don't use lingq because it's a paid subscription but the Chinese word translation quality is as poor as Google translate so I'd just rather use free tools that use Google translate at that point). You can also simply read IN your web browser in Chrome, Firefox, or Edge. In all of those, if you have Google Translate/DeepL/any translation app installed, then you can hold down and click words for the option to click translate. You can also highlight whole sections of text to machine translate the sections. Microsoft Edge actually has one positive in this regard: Edge has the feature Read Aloud that uses text to speech to read a web page. And Edge's text to speech sounds WAY better than any other tts service I've used. In addition, if you read using Edge on the computer, their Read Aloud TTS has multiple voice options on computer version of Microsoft Edge and in Microsoft Word. If you plan to heavily utilize TTS tools, I think Edge's tts sounds the best by far.

If you would really like to study with a parallel text translation? I recommend the app I'm currently using daily: Parallel translations of books by Kursx. It is free. It has click translation, TTS for individual words and per sentence, it has parallel translation per sentence (resulting in some of the most easy to read machine translations I've seen, and it helps if you know individual words but can't parse the grammar). It has a unique word count statistics for the book, as well as total word count, list of words by frequency (if you want to pre study vocabulary), percentage of book read, estimate of time remaining to read (I love seeing this number go down), how often you're looking up words (useful to notice if a book is more or less difficult for you). You can import txt or epub files to read. I personally suggest looking up novel names in chinese plus 小说 xiaoshuo (novel) plus "txt" to find text downloads, or copy pasting text from a website into a txt file to then read in this app. Or go to a site with epub downloads and search for the book you wish to read. The parallel text translation and Dictate Text tts functions are my favorite parts about this app. But the statistics page for the books I also find highly motivating.

A tip about reading: when reading any machine translations to help you, be aware of the following common mtl mistakes. First, mtl may struggle to notice if a Chinese name/place is a name or an item. Examples would be Li Lianhua potentially being translated by a mtl as Li Lotus, instead of the mtl recognizing it as a name and leaving it as Li Lianhua. Mtl are likely to struggle a lot with names and sometimes switching them to object/verb word translations so it may be a good idea to read after checking the names of people in the novel, or if you see a word translated weird then be mindful it might actually be someone's name. (Guo Changcheng's name often gets translated to Guo Great Wall by mtl). Second, mtl often mixes up gender of pronouns 他她它. Please go into Chinese reading already aware of which ta is he, she, or it. So that when you run into this mtl error, you can check for yourself which pronoun the ta was meant to be. Third is also pronoun related: English sometimes needs a pronoun in a sentence when Chinese does not. In those cases, mtl will often just make up one and use he/she/it/you/me/they when no word is present in the Chinese. In some cases this is fine and the meaning is the same. In other cases it wildly changes the meaning of the sentence. In these cases, look to the previous Chinese sentence to determine what noun the following sentence is about. Then you can determine which noun would have Actually been used in a correct English translation. Then you will know if the mtl translation is right or wrong. Fourth, like the last issue mentioned, mtl will struggle with sentences in chinese that require less words than the English equivalent. In any cases like this, be aware the mtl will add English words without those necessarily have anything to do with the actual meaning of the sentence. It may change the sentence meaning significantly. In these cases also, it's good to look at the last few sentences and then determine the most likely meaning of the current sentence, to judge if the mtl is roughly correct or Very Wrong. Fifth thing to be aware of: some machine translation tools will simplify translations. By this I mean they will turn long imagery lines or idioms into shorter single words sometimes. It greatly depends on which mtl you use, and if the mtl is trying to preserve detail (which would mean preserving the long line of imagery) or sacrificing detail for a more roughly correct translation. By this I mean that it's easy for an mtl to mess up a line as complicated as "He was stiff as a coffin" with so many words to incorrectly translate and implications, so some mtl will change to "He was stiff" and leave out some words. When I used to use Baidu translate it had a habit of doing this a LOT. Where if I looked up each word/phrase individually I would get a lot of detail, but if I put in a whole paragraph then many lines like chengyu and imagery of "hairs standing up from head to tail" would translate to MUCH shorter one word or short phrases like "scared" and so much detail was lost. Google translate and DeepL ALSO seem to do some deletion of details with longer passages. I have been using the KursX app for machine translation lately because since it translates each sentence individually, it tends to preserve most details. Whereas I've seen many mtl tools start deleting or summarizing details if you put a longer passage into them. So if you use any machine translation for phrases, sentences, or paragraphs, and you notice words you individually translated are NO longer in the machine translated output? It's possible the mtl is deleting details or summarizing details. If this is the case, a way to find the original details again is to either shorten the input into the mtl (to very short phrases bit by bit in the sentence), or by looking up each individual word in a sentence.

Bilibili Comics app is great if you like reading manhua. You can read comics in Chinese (just click the Chinese language option), and then go read the English translations if you need clarification of something. The app gives you icon dress up rewards for reading, which kind of let's you gamify your studying into fun little decorative rewards if you push yourself to keep reading.

My personal translation of ~the~ most lesbian poem by Qing dynasty lesbian poet Wu Tsao/Zao (1799-1863). This has been done before (i've tried some of her lesser or never-translated work too) but a) there's something very magical about interacting with a poem like this, b) i read some translation theory once where it was argued that when many different people translate a poem, the monolingual reader gets the most complete view of it...so if any other lesbian or bi women know Literary Chinese here's the original text, maybe we could make a compendium lol

“As I savored the warm porridge with a couple of pickled lemons and cucumbers, I gazed at the crawling red ant that was frantically finding its way out of from the starchy rice circle that I had drawn on the granite counter. Surrounded by the glutinous fluid the ant was searching for a way out to live. A stream of memories of Fugui flooded my mind and I wondered how humans find the gist of survival through their darkest despair and how my belly did became alive again through the fragrance of a simple fare. What is it that makes a person jammed in a hell hole redefine the laws of death? “When the chicken grew up it turned into a goose, the goose in turn grew into a lamb and the lamb became an ox…””

—

To Live (活着) by Yu Hua (余华). 1993. Republished by Anchor Books in 2003.

Initially banned in China but later named one of the nation’s most influential books, Yu Hua’s To Live is considered a classic staple of post-Cultural Revolution scar literature. It was adapted by Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou into a film of the same name which received the Grand Prix at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. Spanning decades, To Live follows the Xu family through cycles of reform and nation-wide struggle during one of China’s most fraught periods of history.

After squandering his family’s estate in brothels and gambling dens, Xu Fugui is forced to turn towards farming. He is conscripted into the Nationalist army, where he witnesses the human privations of the Chinese Civil War. Years later, he and his family are thrown into turmoil again by series of Communist reforms, portrayed in stark succession as the country turns towards, against, and towards tradition in unpredictable sociopolitical shifts. As his entire family succumbs to illness and accident, Fugui is left with an ox as his only companion at the novel’s close, but he is filled with hope for a new generation and stands as a symbol of the people’s tenacity during times of tragedy and doubt.

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The film adaptation has a much more positive and hopeful ending.

(via inkjadestudio)

That film, while being an absolute masterpiece, completely broke my heart. I didn’t know the story in the book could be even more tragic.