With National Week (October 1-7) and the Mid-Autumn Festival coinciding at the same time this year, we here in China are gearing up for a big week of travel, family, and ruining our diets eating those delicious mooncakes. (For those of you who don’t know, during the Mid-Autumn Festival it is traditional to give friends, family, and business associates ‘mooncakes’ - small round, very dense cakes filled with anything from red bean or date paste, to salty preserved eggs. Yum.)
We are all prepared here at ChinesePod and so, during this holiday week, you can still expect daily lesson podcasts and review materials, and we will still be working hard to answer all your emails and academic inquiries.
On behalf of all the ChinesePod staff, have a great holiday and enjoy those moon cakes!
-Colleen Hamilton
Yeah, please don’t get upset if we’re not quite as fast about answering your questions!
Here’s some supplementary vocab for you:
中秋节 (Zhōngquījié) Mid-Autumn (Moon) Festival
国庆节 (Guóqìngjié) National Day (commemorating the founding of the PRC)
-John
The word ‘galore’ comes from Gaelic expression ‘go leór’, meaning ‘abundant’. It was retained by Irish speakers when they adopted English. Interestingly, it carries the same syntactic relation to the sentence as it did in Gaelic: it comes after the noun that it modifies. In English, most adjectives come before the noun, so this is what makes it interesting and different.
Actually, the story of how Galic influenced Irish-English is a fascinating one. The vocabulary items are interesting but these structures are even more so.
Ken - Just how many languages do you speak?! I’ve heard you speak four languages now (English, Mandarin, Belgian and German). Do you also speak Gaelic?
To the whole ChinesePod staff - Have yourself a great holiday week!
国庆节快乐!
Frank,
I’ve studied a number of languages and have in the past been reasonably fluent in Gaelic, French, Italian. I also took some Greek and Latin at college, but never learned to speak them. My second language is German and I still speak that, with some Bavarian dialect thown in. I’ve also had a hobby for many years - figuring Dutch, Spanish and other European languages on the basis that they are all realted. If you know one Germanic languaghe and one Latin language, you can figure out the rest quite easily.
My most recent acquisition is Chinese, though it never reached the same level of fluency as my German. I’ve also dabbled with Shangnaise.
I think our capacity to learn languages declines with age, so I’m not planning to do a lot more.
Ken Carroll
Hallo Ken!
Angenehme Feiertage in Shanghai! Interessanterweise ist der Deutsche Nationalfeiertag mittlerweile zur gleichen Zeit: 3. Oktober.
Allerdings gibt es hier keine Mondkekse dazu - nicht einmal Sauerkraut.
MOVING DASH - you might want to go to your browser settings and select ‘larger’ font.
The first time I saw ‘qing4′, to celebrate, on a sign I thought it looked like ‘yan4′ which means disgusting. But all around me were big red signs saying ‘disgusting’ ‘disgusting’…
庆
厌 ：讨厌
太太
If you look at the dash, it goes from the top, to the right, and then down below, in order, meaning celebrate (qing4), disgusting (dog, yan4), and wife (tai4 tai). There seems to be no character with the dash on the left.
The three characters are not really related to each other by this moving dash — except to my eye, but who knows, maybe it’ll help someone else out there ’see’ the difference too.
Happy wife-disgusting dog-congrats holiday.
Ken,
One word for you: WOW. I’m very impressed!
Do you think the same holds true for Asian languages as it does for Latin or Germanic tongues? Could you make a fairly easy transition into Thai or Japanese from Mandarin?
Hi Frank,
Language branches are very interesting. Although there is a little bit of controversy, and certainly knowing “Chinese characters” would be an influence, Japanese is not as closely related to Chinese as one might think.
Quoting from “The Language Instinct” by Steven Pinker, p260-261, “…grouping corresponds to the non-obvious linguistic grouping of Japanese, Korean, and Altaic with Indo-European in Nostratic, separate from the Sino-Tibetan family in which Chinese is found.”
Also very interesting, p 250-51, “The roots of English are in northern Germany near Denmark….from Proto-Germanic…that gave us…German and its offshoot Yiddish, and Dutch and its offshoot Afrikaans. The northern branch settled Scandinavia and came to speak Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The similarities in vocabulary among these languages are visible in an instant..”
MOST interesting is the discovery by Sir William Jones are the affinities between English and Sanskrit!
English…..brother
Greek…….phrater
Latin…….frater
Old Slavic..brathir
Old Irish…brathir
Sanskrit….bhrater
I bet Ken speaks “Old Irish” 开玩笑
Frank,
I beleive the same holds true. Mandarin is related to a number of other languages - Tibetan, Thai, for example,insofar as they probably originated from a common source. I’ve never studied either but I beleive they are also monosyllabic (controversial term, I realize) tonal, and most likely share recognizable cognates. I’m told that it is therefore helpful to know Mandarin when you study those.
Japanese and Korean oroginated from a different source,and are consequently classified differently. However, there has certainly been some crossover between these languages/cultures because of the geographic proximity. Most of the osmosis probably went from China outwards: both Japanes and Korean use scripts that are derived from Chinese script. There are also a nmumber of words that just sound similar in Mandarin and Japanese.
I’m quite sure that studying one Asian language helps with studying others.
Ken Carroll
Joachim,
Vielen dank. Oct 3 ist Deutsche Nationalfeirtag! Das habe ich voll vergessson! Have a great holiday anyway!
Ken Carroll
I studied a little Japanese, and though knowing the Chinese characters helped with reading, as far as spoken Japanese went, English was more helpful than Chinese, given all of the English words borrowed by the Japanese.
Lantian,
This is why I prefer Traditional
國慶節快樂!
Joe
Joeくん,
なんか、ひらがなは？メヌでカタガナも読みやすいだね。
ラメンを食べたい！
デビド aka 蓝天
Lantian,
That’s easy for you to say!
Ken
日本語を勉強した、でも忘れてしまいました。Hablo mucho mejor en español, pero también se me olvida poco a poco. 不过，因为用ChinesePod使我记住中文，我还会说点点中文。Je parle pas français…
Now I’m just showing off. But it’s fun. Good as a Chinese holiday. Actually it’s not. But we did have a holiday on Monday - Labour Day! I kind of wasted it. I’m sure it was better celebrated in China.
It’s like the UN in here.
Ken Carroll
Can I have a motion for world peace, and Chinesepod as the official podcaster of the UN.
And all nations that have not paid their dues, please expedite payment to my offshore accounts.
Lantian, the only way to have world peace is to remove the entire human race from the world.
Lantian,
When I said a little Japanese, I truly meant a little. Besides your calling me Joe-san, I have no idea what you’re saying.
Joe
My two native languages are English and Yiddish (Lithuanian Yiddish). At this point, I can speak only one of them, but can understand both.
I’ve studied German (for several years since it is so easy (maybe because of my Yiddish). From that came a stint of translating Dutch scientific articles into English. Then I took two years of Russian (my father was Russian). Then my brother almost married a chicana and my sister moved to Cuba, so Spanish just sort of got dumped on me. Then my younger daughter moved to Montreal, then Paris, and, finally married a Parisian. My husband also speaks fluent French. Thank heavens, I had needed to pass my French language qualifying exams for my doctorate. So now I sort of understand French.
I started studying Chinese in summer of 1973, when I took an intensive beginning Chinese class. (Learned a great deal about a grenade factory.) And my Chinese studies continue to this day.
Did anybody have ever hear of that long forgotten lanchinesepodgage call french?Or is it that no French have discover the tresory??(new word)
P.S merci ken and Jenny for the delicious moments I spend hearing you though just now I have problem entering my pass and can’t get lessons mat though have paid since 2 days