Posts by Chris Waugh
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Very easy, and I completely agree with you.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Chances are you'll only need English. If you do stray off the beaten expat track, Cantonese will be way more useful than Mandarin - and their Mandarin is generally pretty poor, anyway. But if you get a phrasebook, do make sure the characters are traditional, not the simplified version we use on the Mainland - not that that should be a problem if you're looking for a Cantonese phrasebook.
wow, sorry for the threadjack
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Russell Brown,
I always thought it was Cantonese, which I gather is much better for swearing and cussing.
Cantonese can certainly sound very harsh, but I could learn you some fairly colourful Mandarin words if you wanted. Really don't know how you compare swearability of languages, though.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I've seen a couple of odd photos of "Chinese" signs from these shows on the internet, kind of a Chinglish or Engrish in reverse. I could easily get hold of pirated copies of the shows to find out what their attempts at spoken Chinese are like, after all, I've got so much far more important shit to get done, what with the semester about to start....
But y'know, Chinese TV and cinema features a wide, wide range of accents, from perfect standard Putonghua on CCTV 1's Network News to distinct Henan accents in Blind Shaft to - one I watched a few days ago - Nanjing dialect in Zhang Yimou's latest Flowers of War. And the Taiwan accent is so trendy thanks to the likes of Jay Chou. So I really do wonder how Hollywood is trying to sprinkle their shows with Chinese.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Chinese? Natural pronunciation?
Craig wrote
“Asians” are no more homogeneous and interchangeable than “Europeans”.
Indeed. Swap "Asians" for "Chinese" and that still holds true - linguistically as well as culturally.
I guess I should find some of these TV series and find out what this random sprinkling of Chinese words actually sounds like.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Russell Brown,
You reminded me of this article I read a while ago. I don't know anything about any of these TV shows mentioned, even less about the Autistic spectrum, but I found the article quite interesting in how it pulls apart TV protrayals of autism.
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Ah well, fair enough.
An awful lot of what is written there is directly relevant to my job, and almost every academic writing textbook I've come across has been full of prescriptivist poppycock - and almost all American for some reason. I suspect correlation rather than causation. So it's a good bit of letting off workplace steam for me, and perhaps a bit less destructive than some of the less than subtle corrections I've made to old books that colleagues have come across.
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Hard News: Media Mathematics, in reply to linger,
(as prescription so often is).
Indeed, and I recommend Language Log's prescriptivist poppycock tag for hours of fun reading descriptivists rip into prescriptivists and their non-existent rules that they themselves frequently break.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Islander,
Understand that I am blushing as I write this...
I'm just sharing a little bit of the world as I experience it, loving what everybody else shares, and enjoying the whole process. But thanks for the vote of confidence, it is truly appreciated, because for a long time I held off commenting much around these parts because I felt my experience was too far removed from everybody else's.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I was thinking along similar lines regarding hammers and knives, but one most draw the line somewhere. It is reasonable to expect any adult to be able to teach any child to use hammers, knives and cooking fires responsibly without endangering others (yes, I know, there's a lot of irresponsible adults out there, but... ) but everyday use of a motor vehicle involves a much higher level of risk. One can learn to hammer a nail or cook a basic meal fairly quickly and easily, but learning to drive requires much more practice over a much longer period of time.