Today's World: I Ching or Economy?

#chinese #mandarin #hanzi #japanese #kanji .
[ See also Tomorrow's Chinese/Japanese Radical(s) ]

I am a man of honor keeping my promises, so here is something easy:


It is easy: change + scripture = Book of Change = "I Ching" or Yìjīng as preferred in China. The simplified character for "easy/change" is a sun. On top of .... rays? An animal? Since it's not so far removed from the character for pig - 豕 - it would be possible to assign the label piglet to it, but Heisig has gone one step further and views it as the curly tail of the pig/piglet. Suggested story: It's easy to change a huge pig to a small piglet - or even nothing but a tiny piggy tail - when you put it under the hot, shrinking sun. 'Nuff said.

Let's dig deeper into Chinese tradition:


The Yin/Yang ☯ duality is probably even more CHINA than I Ching, for many of us living in the west. The Female Principle vs. the Masculine Principle, some would say. Sun vs. Moon (as in the simplified characters above) , Day vs. Night, Light vs. Darkness ... Darkness? Yes, if we look at the traditional characters the YANG principle is dominated by the top Sun, but all those strokes to the right in YIN is actually telling us that it's in the SHADE, and what's more refreshing after too much sun than to get into the shade? (阝 = some sort of hill/pinnacle).

From the world of Chinese thought to the ups and downs of the Brave New World we're living in : economy:


It's just like it should be. In the combination of the characters easy/change and sutra/scripture we got The Book of Change. OK, the character to the right above has many more meanings apart from "cross (a river)", like aid, relieve, help, be of help, benefit but it is still a stretch to arrive at Economy. That' is, if the ancients were clever enough to predict that the economy in the future - our time - would be "a religion/philosophy in need of help"??

See: I am making this easy, not getting deep down into any character details. Until now. I can't help getting very fascinated by how these characters have traveled through the ages, from China to contries like Korea, Japan and Vietnam. When you think about it, it's really amazing that there hasn't been more "corruption" of the originals.

Here are three versions of sutra (WikiPedia):


The component for thread 糸 is the same in all three versions, apart from the three strokes at the bottom reduced to a single one in the simplified character, as usual. The old character/component 巠 presents some familiar items like 一 (one - yī) and 工 (work - gōng) with sandwiched <<< style="font-weight: bold;">

Update: This project follow the technique/method of James W Heisig ("Remembering the Kanji" and Remembering the Hanzi"). It's nothing more than doing exactly what's been done here: break down the characters to smaller "atoms" (radicals/primitives/components) and turn them into actors in a story to help you remember the character. In Heisig speak the two components ス + 工 in 经 are a spool. In my own mental image the entire character is a Tibetan Prayer Wheel (Wiki) where prayers - sutras! - are sent rotating on threads from the center spool. Click image from WikiPedia below to enlarge.

Today's Word: Electric Brain

#chinese #mandarin #hanzi #kanji .
Yes: computer. You guessed right.

I have not found any frequency list so I am not sure which of the two words for computer is the most common one, but I guess it is the second one below:

电脑 diànnǎo -- 计算机 jìsuànjī

Nevertheless, I think an Electric Brain 电脑 is more fun than a Calculation Machine 计算机.

电脑 diànnǎo -- 计算机 jìsuànjī

Nevertheless, I think an Electric Brain 电脑 is more fun than a Calculation Machine 计算机.

As mentioned earlier here, I was not very happy with Chinese Simplified Characters when I started to go from Japanese/Kanji to Mandarin. - Here you find the posts on Simplifications. - There still are some simplified characters that I would like to have reverted to their original, traditional version, if I could. Electricity is one of those hanzi:

Not all characters are immediately offering a view of the original idea/object, but here is an excellent time-machine. The top part of the traditional character - same as the Kanji - is the rain radical/primitive 雨, used in so many characters for weather etc.: 雲 cloud, 雪 snow, 露 dew, 雷 thunder and so on.

The bottom component is the most interesting, though: is it a turtle, tortoise or a dragon? The blue, middle characters are tortoise and a simplified version of dragon (Kanji, but also a less frequently used Hanzi). So the first 'vision' of electricity was some sort of dragon in the sky appearing when it's raining. Neat. What's left in the simplified form is thus only the dragon part.

Confession: I was too much in a hurry when I wrote Today's Hanzi: Very difficult?

As you might remember I confessed ignorance regarding the bottom components of the "mane" character below.
If I had given my memory a bit more time to work, it would possibly have arrived at "hmmm.. doesn't this remind me a bit of BRAIN??" Let's look at the simplified brain character again (to the right below).
First there is what we can call the moon-flesh component signaling a part of the body. Then we have a) a lid of some sort, b) X and c) a container shape. We can agree that the brain indeed is a huge X - seen a brain recently? - contained in our skulls. No argument there. But.... here we go rats again!

I know, I know.... You might go rats here in the beginning, but the whole idea with this project is to show show you that each and every Kanji/Hanzi - simple or complex - is painted from a very limited palette of components/radicals. There is no absolute consensus on exactly how many radicals we should use, but consider slightly over 200 as the maximum.

To make it more interesting the ancient scribes added their own twists and misreadings, and we will never know exactly what. The traditional brain has the "hair" trio <<< and [x] with a little dot or accent´. No doubt: a head. If we go further back in history you can see that head of the ancient mouse/rat had the same head, but without the extra dot.

Trust me: Your memory is vastly superior to any computer! There will be a slight memory overflow in the beginning as you dive into this, but the dust will soon settle. Electric Dragon (in the Sky) settles into the Body Part called Brain. Now quickly: put on the lid!

Today's Hanzi: Very difficult?

#hanzi #chinese #mandarin #kanji
Chinese Characters can be difficult to remember, not doubt about that. But there is probably a notion that "difficult" character - that is: complex character with many strokes - are more difficult to remember than more ordinary Hanzi/Kanji. What about these mainstream character:

They might be easier than the more complex and stroke-rich character we will look at soon. but remember that you can fill an entire page with these "medium" characters, and the individual characters will soon start to get fuzzy.

I continued exploring animal words/characters after posting Today's Word: Cat-Headed Bird-Bird. I think my experience from Japanese can be applied to Chinese as well: animal names can have pretty tough characters. Here is what caught my eye: Iguana - lièxī.

The right character is the generic one for lizard: insect (see below for another one) + "chop" (divide, separate = tree + axe), i.e. something that chops up insects. A lizard tongue? But it's the left one that is Today's character: mane. I didn't manage to download an image where it's very clear that iguanas have some sort of mane on their back, but this was pretty good:

And here is a close-up of only "mane" liè:
Hmmmm.. A lot of stuff, isn't it? But wait: the difficulty is to identify the components. Once you have done that, it's very unlikely you will forget the character. The left part is a component meaning ... hair. And the bottom part is also meaning .... hair, or to be more precise, a head with hair and beard. Once again the doubling-up we have seen before: hair + hair = mane.

If you look at the most common traditional character and Kanji for hair you find the first component again (on top of the component for "friend"):

髮

The bottom part is slightly more tricky, but if you ignore the fact that < < < style="font-weight: bold;">Taped/crossed over mouth is the symbol for the head here.

And then I have to declare defeat! I have not found any etymological suggestions regarding the lowest 7 strokes, looking like some sort of legs, really. We have already seen these "legs" in the character for mouse/rat. (Weiger suggest that these strokes are the whiskers of the mouse.) But here it is a beard! We have to draw them as graphical elements and memorize them as such.

It's interesting - and sort of a relief - to note that the lower component set in "mane" has been simplified in characters like wax/candle and hunt. Note "insect" again - from above - to the left in the first character and the "wild dog" component in the second one. See cat in Today's Word.

The final challenge is to draw this character so it gets fairly equal in size to other character, but it's perfectly OK to make it slightly higher when writing with a pen/pencil. But DO draw it several times. Promise? Then I will promise less complex characters the next several times here :-) Good luck!

Today's Word: Cat-Headed Bird-Bird

#Chinese #Mandarin #Birds
This not as immediately funny as yesterday's Bag Rat, but has some interesting twists and turns.

The character for cat will remain really funny for ever, considering the story provided by James W Heisig in "Remembering the Kanji". The left part is a generic animal component, but Heisig suggested wild dogs as the specific label. To the right we have seedlings, i.e. something growing on a rice field. So to remember this you have to see a pack of wild dogs watering the cat plants/seedling on a rice filed, waiting for the chase to start as soon as the cats have grown up. (Unfortunately, Hanzi students will have to wait for volume 2 of "Remembering the Hanzi" to get to this character.)

Head is one of those radical simplifications we find in Hanzi:

頭 > 头

Finally the Bird-Bird character.... Yet another feature of character creation: the same 'meaning' is doubling up. "old bird" + "standard bird"

鹰 = 隹 + 鸟/鳥

This "bird-bird" character is some sort of generic label for several birds of pray and found in words like hawk, falcon, eagle, owl etc. Alone, by itself, it means Eagle. More birds at nciku.com.

listen to māotóuyīng spoken (nciku.com)

Today's Mandarin Word: Ever met a BagRat?

#Chinese #Mandarin
Japanese has tons of cute and funny words. As hopefully will be demonstrated here, Chinese/Mandarin is not lacking either.


Pronunced dàishǔ this can be read as "Pocket Mouse", and even "Pouch Mouse". But what sort of thing is this?? A Kangaroo, of course!

shǔ 鼠 is actually one of the more difficult-to-write characters I've encountered. It took - and takes - a lot of practice to get the lower part OK for me. Stroke Order Animation here.

Today's Chinese Character: Simple Justice

Today's character/Hanzi/Kanji is a RADICAL simplification. But does it fit into the UGLY vs CUTE categories, previously defined here?

I don't think so. The original traditional Hanzi/Kanji is one of my favorite characters. The most common meanings are "justice; righteousness". But "meaning" is also there as in 意义.

A couple of Japanese vocabulary items: Islamic fundamentalism vs. Christian fundamentalism. These Kanji seems to be possible to bundle to form many words 原義 (gengi) means Original Meaning here, taking everything very literally. 主義 means doctrine etc. and 原理 means "doctrine, rule, principle". Whatever you think of Japanese, "inflexible" shouldn't be there.

As usual I have some nagging feeling that I've made some mistake in my Japanese: "should it really be クリスチャン (ku-ri-su-ta-n) or something else?"

イスラム原理主義
vs.
クリスチャン原理主義

So let's go back to Mandarin. I've found two, rather similar words for fundamentalism:

原教旨主义 yuánjiàozhǐzhǔyì

Where the 教 ought to emphasize the religious aspect ("teach, religion...."). The other word for fundamentalism, 基要主义, seems to be less used so I simply ignore it here. 主义 has the same meaning in Mandarin as in Japanese - doctrine; -ism - which is no wonder since the world probably was imported to Japan from China.

To round up this not so deep-digging post:

義 = 羊 + 我

羊 is easy enough to remember as SHEEP, but the very important and frequent character 我　will get a component destruction any day, week. You have to admit that it's a bit faster to write the simplified version, isn't it? These characters are pronounced as yì in Mandarin. The fourth tone here would be easy to remember if the animation really showed the strokes: dot - down - down. Get a better view at nciku.

nciku.com - Chinese Character Animations

#chinese #mandarin
It would be great to be able to add character animations here now and then, so I am now testing those available at nciku.com (the best Chinese/Mandarin dictionary).

Well... It didn't work. I am pretty sure these animations are not Made At nciku, so I will hopefully find an alternative source. ...

Update 09-02-02

I have still not managed to find those animations I think I've seen somewhere, but on the other hand I found a way to show the animations here, if the people at nciku.com think it is OK.

nciku.com: How to use 必

end of update

In the meantime a GIF animation from this page. Not a bad alternative, really.
Testing something more advanced from eStroke

Too "advanced", too big, too many Google ads....

The reason for picking this particular character is that I tend to forget the stroke order all the time. If you want to get 5 new characters to practice every day, follow the nciku blog. Here is a permanent link to the very first five characters.

Welcome to Virtual, China

In case you see "China" on some profile, somewhere: My exact location in China is a place called Virtual. Bring out your maps and see if you can find this extremely attractive "township". IN the meantime you can enjoy the video above. It's created by Zhang Yimou, the director of the utterly beautiful movie HERO:

张艺谋 張藝謀

It seems like it's very difficult to get decent looking Chinese to appear on web pages, so I will use images to make it possible for us analphabets to see what it actually says.

Julia Nunes to Japan and China! Soon :-)

.
UPDATE: You can follow blog posts containing "JULIA NUNES" here. Still a trickle, but trust me: soon it will be a flood!

Considering my recent experience with Really Silly US High School and College Boys, I will indulge in Julia Nunes, a Really Sweet American Young Lady as a pleasant change in mood (from pissed-off to happy!):


It's really funny how the net takes you to never thought of places:

1) I got a letter from Mr Nibs (HisNibs.com) a couple of days ago when he recommended the Uranus '2018' Multifunction pen

Did I want one ??? YES! But then it's sold out (as Norman wrote in his letter). Can I wait? NO!

2) So I searched for this pen on Google, but it's seems like there are no other dealers than Norman. Nevertheless I took a look at Ruminations, a blog publish in Western Australia writing about New Toys, including this pen. Nice, but not fair. Me too. Wouldn't have rejected the Speeno pen, either.

3) Took a look at the The Fountain Pen Network. Saw that one was for sale at http://www.sharpclaw.com/. Was seduced into looking at Sheryl's wish list and got stuck drooling over handmade Japanese paper at DanielSmith.com ('merely' $6.14/sheet).

4) Found another blog at The Fountain Pen Network, which I got interested in merely for "amish" in the name. Sort of not many Amish around in my neighborhood: Amish Guitar, right in the middle of A Mid Life Crisis :-)

5) And there I got interested in a girl called Julia Nunes, merely because of the nice things Mr. Amish. WOW! I spent an hour or so watching all the funny and cute videos she has produced for YouTube and got totally hooked! Not only is she cute, but what talent! There are really no similarities between what she does and what Eva Cassidy did, but it's the same straight channell from heart to singing/playing. Ukulele too! No walls whatsoever! Just look at the way she treats All My Loving, The Beatles, All Love, Little Respect and Pure Fun from eine WunderMädschen!

This gal can get as far as possible. I missed her T-shirt contest in April so here are my suggestions for the next one. Since Julia is going to play in Tokyo, July 2009, and Beijing January 2010 (other dates not possible since she has to Write Essays!) she really needs to print up T-shirts in advance. Japan and China are a little bit edgy towards each other so some sort of T-shirt diplomacy will do good to:


All those bored of Japanese and Chinese should note that Julia is playing in London/UK this week, in case you are close. Go there. I would do if I was just a tiny bit closer.

I admit that the colors above are perhaps too ... ahem ..."vulgar", but you have to admit that they Really Shine! The Message Is Seen. But I really prefer Chinese characters in red on a black background; that is the incarnation of Chinese signs etc. so I made another sample using different fonts:

The Chinese font in the middle can be slightly hard to read for the Western Eye, but admit that it really impressive with tons of weight! I actually have more fonts than I can handle and even remember. The white one above was totally new when I found it today. It's fittingly cute when you zoom in:
So what about Julia's name in Japanese and Chinese? The Japanese version - top - is very easy since they use a special script for foreign names: Katakana. it simply says ju-ri-a--nu-ne-su (since there is no plain s in Japanese). Easy as apple pie. The extra -- tells us that these syllables are longer juulia nuunes (and it wouldn't surpirse me if Nunes is pronounced in some silly way so I have to remake my design!)

Names in Chinese is an entirely different matter since the use only Hanzi - Chinese Characters to write all foreign names. Here is what New York City and London look like:

These characters are not usually choose because they mean so much in common with what they are said, i.s. they are merely sounds. The first character (niǔ) means button etc. The second one means something like appoinment (yuē), but the finale means CITY. So when the Chinese say New York City they will say niǔyuēshì and most of us will just not understand -hear - what they are talking about. ("Meet Mr Butt in the City"???) London is a much more straightforward lúndūn, something that most of us Westerns will recognize when said.

We are all rather sure that Julia isn't too willing to fall into the too common trap of using characters meaning weird and "wrong" things - think crazy tattoos!!! - so I'll add links to the nciku dictionary here:

举ju - means "raise" - compare weightlifting in 举重
黎 li - means multitude (not in nciku) on it's own, but is part of 黎明, dawn
啊 a - means exactly that "ah", "oh" "aaaahhhh"

努 nu - means "make an effort", but Julia doesn't have to :-)
呢 ne - isn't really much more than a sound and a particle used for stuff like questions etc.
素 su - can mean vegetable and is part of the word for vegetarian, something Julia ought to be, if she isn't yet (all of us should stop eating meat from cows and pigs polluting the air with their farts!)

That's it. Since I choose the character more from a looking nice point of view, I very much ignored the tones, so vital in spoken Chinese. Perhaps a Chinese reader will think the name sound a bit odd, but I don't think so. The sounds are absolutely OK per se.

So now it's time folks, to dig out your calender and make room for Julia in Tokyo and Beijing! And Julia, in case you read this: Don't feel any sort of PRESSURE! (And don't start to pack your bags. Yet.) This is merely some New Year's predictions from an old star gazer. Predictions DO fail, but sometimes they are right on the spot!

Good luck!

PS I forgot:

Julia's Brand New CD "I Wrote These"
and her debut CD "Left Right Wrong" are available here

or download at