[Multilingual Monday] The Direction Chronicles, and More Idioms
Again, direction in written Chinese taunts me:
Do you realize how long it took me to realize that the characters going around the circle of the rooster on the front of the Sriracha bottle were going right to left? I'm very weak in written Chinese, as my focus has always been JAPANESE. There are tons of characters that are used in Chinese that aren't in Japanese (and vice-versa) that require me to look up character if I don't recognize it (or worse -- a Chinese character may be the same as a Japanese character but have completely different meaning), and indeed I didn't even realize the direction until I finally remembered how the "final three" (the first three characters) were pronounced in the tag, 是拉差香甜辣椒酱, shì lā chā xiāng tián là jiaō jiàng. Yes, for a change, characters being used phonetically regardless of their pronunciation AIDED me instead of confusing me because I take the characters for their SEMANTIC value. It just amazed me, as the next line of text that describes the company, 匯豐食品公司, is going LEFT TO RIGHT, so you have two lines going in completely opposing directions one on top of another. It's embarassing to admit that I didn't immediately pick up on this, but when you factor in this and the Chinese on side which is right to left but VERTICAL, you have Chinese characters going in pretty much every concievable direction they're allowed to go. Perhaps they just like to confused people like myself. :: laugh ::
Also, using Lang-8 as of late has taught me a number of idioms, but none of them have been through a direct conversation ("X means Y in your language"). Rather, over the weekend I was introduced to the phrase 看板にいつわりなし, kanban ni itsuwari nashi, "Without deceit on the sign," and the woman using it (a native Japanese speaker) said, "... I can't explain what this means," and we came to an agreement that a good English substitue would be, "to live up to the hype" (of something) in her particular instance (which was explaining the benefits one gets from playing a certain card game). However, this phrase seems to cover a lot of ground and obviously can't only be limited to the one English phrase we used in this given scenario. It, again embarassingly, took me a bit to "get" what she was getting at, but of course now that I step back a bit it makes perfect sense. And it was so simple, it was of course not in my idioms dictionary, as it's not all THAT abstract.
Do you realize how long it took me to realize that the characters going around the circle of the rooster on the front of the Sriracha bottle were going right to left? I'm very weak in written Chinese, as my focus has always been JAPANESE. There are tons of characters that are used in Chinese that aren't in Japanese (and vice-versa) that require me to look up character if I don't recognize it (or worse -- a Chinese character may be the same as a Japanese character but have completely different meaning), and indeed I didn't even realize the direction until I finally remembered how the "final three" (the first three characters) were pronounced in the tag, 是拉差香甜辣椒酱, shì lā chā xiāng tián là jiaō jiàng. Yes, for a change, characters being used phonetically regardless of their pronunciation AIDED me instead of confusing me because I take the characters for their SEMANTIC value. It just amazed me, as the next line of text that describes the company, 匯豐食品公司, is going LEFT TO RIGHT, so you have two lines going in completely opposing directions one on top of another. It's embarassing to admit that I didn't immediately pick up on this, but when you factor in this and the Chinese on side which is right to left but VERTICAL, you have Chinese characters going in pretty much every concievable direction they're allowed to go. Perhaps they just like to confused people like myself. :: laugh ::
Also, using Lang-8 as of late has taught me a number of idioms, but none of them have been through a direct conversation ("X means Y in your language"). Rather, over the weekend I was introduced to the phrase 看板にいつわりなし, kanban ni itsuwari nashi, "Without deceit on the sign," and the woman using it (a native Japanese speaker) said, "... I can't explain what this means," and we came to an agreement that a good English substitue would be, "to live up to the hype" (of something) in her particular instance (which was explaining the benefits one gets from playing a certain card game). However, this phrase seems to cover a lot of ground and obviously can't only be limited to the one English phrase we used in this given scenario. It, again embarassingly, took me a bit to "get" what she was getting at, but of course now that I step back a bit it makes perfect sense. And it was so simple, it was of course not in my idioms dictionary, as it's not all THAT abstract.