Member: mvrdrk

yo waht is up, what is your favorite book that was turned into a movie, mine was twilight

posted by windu at 10:50 am (EST) on May 12, 2009

It's really weird, but after wrapping my mind around Classical Chinese, bits of it sort of stuck. In some ways it's easier than modern Mandarin. Learning the vocabulary is easier because, quite clearly, there's less of it: a lot of words haven't been invented. On the other hand, when a single word can serve as noun, adjective, intransitive or transitive verb (and if possible, I'm sure it would do even more), figuring out the meaning of any given sentence is like a really fiendish game of sudoku with ever-changing rules. I used to compare it to doing proofs in geometry.

There was a theory at the time I studied wenyan that back in the day that they actually spoke it, they pronounced grammatical parts of speech (stuff that they didn't write down) to give some context to what they were saying, because really, the language doesn't have enough redundancy for comprehensibility.

Tang dynasty Chinese is a happy medium between the two languages. By the way have you ever heard how much better Tang poetry sounds in Cantonese than Mandarin? When I was studying Tang poetry I memorized quite a few, in Cantonese. Some I can still recite from memory. I guess there is a linguistic as well as a historical reason that Cantonese call themselves Tang people (not Han) and their language Tang language to this day. Wish I knew more about it.

This is far too random (I think I am coming down with a cold and it is affecting my brain) - if I get into knitting it will be even worse. O_o

posted by muumi at 9:41 pm (EST) on Apr 10, 2009

Okay, there can't be too many knitting and ancient Chinese geeks out there. So hello to another unique person.

After I graduated with a BA in Classical Chinese, I worked in refugee resettlement and used Chinese all day every day in my work (fortunately I had spent my summers going to *high school summer school* to get a reasonable grounding in Cantonese!! University of Toronto didn't offer it!) for a year, and then changed careers to be a stay-at-home mum.

After 30 years of *not* using classical Chinese every day, or Chinese at all most days, my Chinese skills are rudimentary. Can't say "unfortunately" because I've learnt so many other fascinating things while not maintaining my Chinese language skills.

posted by muumi at 11:51 pm (EST) on Apr 9, 2009

did you watch kung fu panda
i think its a disgrace to all the cute pandas

posted by fefelrefel at 12:25 pm (EST) on Jan 31, 2009

Hi - Thanks for adding my catalog to your interesting libraries. I am not sure what you found interesting, when we apparently share no books and I can't read Japanese, but have fun.

posted by oregonobsessionz at 2:36 pm (EST) on Jul 29, 2008

大學之教
時教必有正
退息必有居學
不學操縵
不能安弦
不學博依
不能安詩
不學雜服
不能安禮
不興其藝
不能樂學
故君子之於學也
藏焉修焉息焉遊焉
夫然故安其學而親其師
樂其友而信其道
是以雖離師輔而不反也
《兌命》曰
「敬孫務時敏
厥修乃來」
其此之謂乎

posted by mvrdrk at 11:50 am (EST) on Jun 23, 2008

I found a book I thought I had, but couldn't find. I have a small collection of handwriting books, because I want to someday learn to write properly, and this is one of them. It has 1000 characters in 4 different styles of writing, and no index (sigh). I've made some images of it into my user picture. From right to left, the styles are loosely upright, cursive, something, and seal (正草隸篆). I start to see where some of the simplified characters come from from the cursive.

I also think I spent way too much money in my youth on books I'll never use.

posted by mvrdrk at 4:12 am (EST) on Nov 12, 2007

To combine tags
http://www.librarything.com/combinetags_...

posted by mvrdrk at 6:22 pm (EST) on Nov 24, 2006

Tag order: author, title, meta type (manga/novel/dictionary), language, type-lang, market category (shoujo, bl, ppoi), location, other ...
dumped titles moved to user=mvrdrk2

posted by mvrdrk at 2:06 am (EST) on Nov 5, 2006