Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with chinese

Chinese and Western relationship norms?

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:37:50 -0800

What do you wish you knew about Mainland Chinese dating and relationships that would have made your relationship easier? What are some common sources of misunderstanding between Westerners and people from China? I've been seeing a conservative woman from Guangzhou for a couple of months, and we get along great. I'm Asian, too, but I moved here when I was young, my family aren't Chinese, and I could really do with some education regarding Chinese culture.

I've noticed that the unwritten rules of dating are quite different for us both; it's quite possible for both of us to accidentally do things that the other person could potentially misinterpret. Fortunately, there's a lot of goodwill between us.

The drama of the Ask Metafilter guy who was going to move out on his Chinese roommate illustrated how different cultural meanings of various things can be.

http://ask.metafilter.com/138804/Stuck-in-the-dreaded-friend-zone

I've asked a previous question about dating this woman:

http://ask.metafilter.com/134846/Dating-Across-a-Language-Barrier

We're both in our 20s.

Have you been in a relationship with someone from China? What do you wish you had known? What realisations for you or for your partner made things easier for you?

anon.learning.chinese@gmail.com

(Dim)something strange is going on.

emelenjr — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:13:27 -0800

This is a should I eat it?* question of sorts. Exactly how is my Chinese take-out place attempting to kill me? Every time I order dumplings from the Chinese place up the street, I like to warm up the little plastic cup of sauce that comes with the order. I take the lid off, and stick the cup in the microwave for about 20 seconds.

Invariably, about 10 seconds into it, there's a zzzzzzzzap noise and occasionally a flash. I usually (stupidly?) let the microwave keep cooking until I hear a second zap, and then I take out the warmed sauce.

I know there's nothing metallic in the cup—no metal rim, for example. So what's in the sauce that could be causing the arcing? No other food does this in my microwave.

*I'm eating it.

I want to make Asian noodles from scratch. Can you help me?

flibbertigibbet — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:07:49 -0800

I really really love all types of Asian cooking that involves noodles (banh pho, udon, ramen, whatever!). Problem: kosher asian noodles are crazy hard to find in my neck of the woods. Could you help me out by suggesting cookbooks or websites with great make-it-from-scratch noodle recipes? I found this, and there's a book on Amazon--somewhere!--that has a recipe for udon noodles. Other than that, I'm lost and alone.

Yes, I realize this will take me a long time to master in some cases.

chinese language educational software for native chinese speaking kids

alcahofa — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:48:34 -0800

my kids (ages 3 and 6) are beginning to learn chinese. i am looking for useful materials and strategies to get them fluent. i don't speak chinese. one thing that helped a lot in learning spanish (their second language) was spanish language education software that targets native spanish speakers ages 3 to 5. does anyone have any recommendations both for the chinese educational software of this type and how to buy it when you don't speak chinese. there is absolutely nothing more daunting than a chinese language web site.

A Chinese Jig about Santa Clause would be just dandy, thanks

Navelgazer — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:28:47 -0800

Looking for newer, poppier Christmas/seasonal songs from Ireland and China. So my girlfriend and I are going to be apart for Christmas with our respective families. Whenever we go on a trip together or she has to go on one alone, I make her a mix CD for the journey. Since she's going back to her Chinese family, and I'm going back to my - well, largely mutt by now, but we act out our Irish side more than anything else - family, I wanted to make her a mix of songs from both cultures representative of the season.

I know that I'm going to open it with The Pogues' Fairytale of New York, and end it with Chris Cornell's rendition of Schubert's Ave Maria (which doesn't actually fit the rules, but we both love it). I'm having trouble finding other good, modern Irish Christmas/wintry songs, and I don't even know where to begin looking for Chinese songs which fit the bill (obviously they won't be Christmas songs, but good winter songs will fit just as well - we're both pretty atheist anyway.)

Modern renditions of classic standards are fine, as long as, again, they are good. Please help me, I want this to be awesome.

Chinese food ingredients in DC?

inara — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:13:20 -0800

Does anyone know of anywhere in Bethesda or the DC Metro area in general where one could get Chinese food ingredients? I'm specifically looking for wonton wrappers. Also, preferably someplace Metro accessible. Thanks.

Questions about Hong Kong Chinese people renaming themselves with more "American" sounding first names

Jacqueline — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:01:52 -0800

Questions about Hong Kong Chinese people renaming themselves with more "American" sounding first names. One of my classes is doing this funky cross-cultural international virtual team project with a bunch of students at City University in Hong Kong.

My project mates are Mei Ling, Ka Yan, and Wai In, but they've introduced themselves as Amy, Amy, and Cherry, respectively.

I was wondering if y'all could help me with a little cultural insight:

1. Why do Hong Kong Chinese people rename themselves with more "American" first names? (Every person I've ever known from Hong Kong does this.)

2. I would like to mess with my project mates a little by giving myself a new Chinese name. Would that be considered offensive?

3. If it wouldn't be offensive, what's a popular Chinese first name for girls in Hong Kong?

Thanks!

One fell swoop (rather than lots of shallow ones)

saysthis — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:56:43 -0800

I'm dealing with English/Chinese bilingual documents in OpenOffice, 100+ page ones, and I need to get all the Chinese characters out and into another document. I'm either looking at 2-3 hours of deleting, cutting, and pasting, or maybe there's a shortcut? I've got one Writer, one Calc.

The Writer, I just need to gut it all out so I have a clean English document without goofy GBK mucking up the formatting.

The Calc, I need to move all the Chinese out to a Writer document, strip out the cells, and get a clean Chinese-only document for a word-count.

H4LP! I don't want to be doing this all night!

My OOo, as far as I know, is up to date.

How do I convert strings to characters?

RavinDave — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:49:31 -0800

How can I break down a long list of strings into individual characters on a Windows box? I need a strategy ...

What I have:
----Spreadsheet of several hundred Mandarin Sentences from my personal Pimsleur notes.
----Windows & common prog/tools/utilities.

What I need:
----Mandarin sentences broken down into individual Hanzi with no duplicates.

Although the base info is currently in Excel, I can (of course) move it over to Word (or whatever) if there is perhaps a macro that does this.

Chinese translation help

killdevil — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:08:18 -0800

硬背. Please translate this into English for me. According to Google's machine translation, 硬背 means "blindly memorizing." Is this correct? If not, is there a better way to express this precise idea in Mandarin?

Tips on doing a master's degree in a second language

so much modern time — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:10:35 -0800

Tell me about your own experiences and tips on surviving and working through a master's degree in a second language that you are NOT fluent in. I am currently a master's student in Beijing, studying a major that will train me to become a Chinese teacher. This major is specifically geared to foreign students who will teach Chinese outside of China, so it includes courses in Chinese history and linguistics theory, as well as advanced Chinese.

My class is composed of about 15 students, about half of which are Malaysian students who are native or near-native speakers. The other half is composed mostly of students who have gone through the university's Chinese language studies department at various levels. That half, which includes myself, is nowhere near the Malaysian students' level of Chinese. (FWIW, I have just concluded a year's study in Chinese at my school, ending at upper intermediate.)

In our first day of classes, I realized that I would have to do some serious self-study to keep up. In our lectures, which were on the centralization of government power from the Qin to Yuan dynasties and linguistics theory, other than the very broad outlines, I didn't understand a thing. It was certainly interesting, and if it was in English I would have been fascinated. I was trying to keep up with translating phrases in the Power Point presentations, but I was literally translating every single phrase in order to understand a single sentence. Heck, I nearly died when our professor started talking about Chomsky, whose theories are difficult enough in a language I do understand.

How on earth can I survive this? After one day I'm already thinking about quitting! It's clear that it'll be a long time before I can get to the level where I'll be able to ask critical questions, and then, actually be able to understand the answers. Luckily it's not just me who feels like this, the non-Malaysian half of the class felt quite overwhelmed as well.

Possibly related: To say that I have a lot of ambivalence about doing this degree is an understatement. Before I found out that I had received the scholarship, which, since it is China, was at the last possible moment, I had actually already made up my mind to go home and repatriate. After four years abroad, I feel that my time in China is finished. My gut feeling on this is making it very difficult for me to commit to doing the master's degree, especially I have little intention of actually becoming a Chinese teacher, and I can't even say why I am doing this degree except that it is free education and will allow me to put those letters "M.A." after my name. I just have to wonder if there are better ways to spend two years of my time than struggling to understand Chomsky in Chinese.

What is the best Chinese translation of "ahead of her time"?

hybridvigor — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 06:31:15 -0800

Chinese Translation Filter: What is the best translation of, "a woman ahead of her time." The dedication in my dissertation is to my Grandmother, and I want it to basically say, "To my wonderful Grandmother, (name), a woman who continues to be ahead of her time."

She only speaks Chinese, and I do not speak any. I got this translation from a Chinese professor friend of my parents', but I am afraid that it may miss important parts of the sentiment. Namely, the idea that she is a *woman* ahead of her time. Does this translation contain that exact sentiment? Do you have any better translations?

献給我非凡的祖母 , 余美芳 ,

一個永遠走在時代前面的人

In Chinese 4 is badluck, but P4 ok?

imaswinger — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:49:38 -0800

If my appartment building has gone through the trouble to leave out the number 4 from all numbered floors and numbered appartments, why did they leave in the parkade level 'P4'? OK, my building has no 4th, 14th, 24th, 34th floor, and neither does it have any appartment numbers ending in 4 (ie: there's 501, 502, 503, 505, 506). Now I understand this, because in chinese the number 4 is apparently pronounced the same as 'death' and is considered extremely unlucky. My question is, why is there a P4? why didn't they skip it and go right to P5? This has been driving me bonkers for ten years.
(I asked two people at work who grew up in China and they had no idea other than maybe it doesn't matter cause you don't live there your car does. I'm not buying it...)
Anyone?

Tea Translation

tdreyer — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:17:46 -0800

Translation filter: What does the text on this box of tea say?

I need a visa for China asap...am I screwed?

dawson — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:00:56 -0800

I messed up big time here...I have my passport and ticket ready to fly to China on September 15th. I do not have a visa. I am confounded by all the websites and busy lines and non-returned calls.
Apparently my reading comprehension is slipping because I can make no sense of the information I do find.
Making things even more pathetic, I have been to China many times before and handled it with relative ease.
So. I am now in Southern California. But my residency is, I suppose, in SC. Or Maryland. I get mail at three locations. My driver license is a CA one. I have lived in SoCal about 2 months. I do not consider myself a resident. How do I find out what embassy I am even supposed to go to? Is it remotely possible to get the visa in 3 weeks from tomorrow? Would you recommend I pay a third party to do this?
I'm a deer in the headlights here, frozen by my own ineptness. Can you help?
I will be going out shortly, but will return to answer any question that I may not have addressed.

Pictures of a politician.

ms.codex — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:40:12 -0800

What should I do with personal family photos of Notable Historical Personage, my Chinese great-grandfather? Before her death my Chinese grandmother compiled around 25 photo albums documenting her life (1926-2002). Among these are numerous photos of her father, a minor political figure of 20th-century Chinese history. He was a prominent journalist and one of the leaders of the Kuomingtang, personally and politically close to both Sun_Yat-Sen and Chiang_Kai-Shek. Just for anonymity's sake I'd prefer not to link to his Wikipedia article, but here's a measure of his general notability: there are several English-language dissertations and academic books that discuss political role, his writings, and his (fairly colorful) life history, and he tends to merit medium-length entries in encyclopedias of 20th-century China. He gets a lot more biographical attention in Taiwan but with my dismal Chinese I'm unable to read any of that stuff.

I've run into lots of photos of him in academic publications, mostly "official" portraits and pictures of groups of politicians. My grandmother's albums contain informal pictures of him lounging around at home with his wife and children (circa 1930s). Come to think of it, while I've seen informal and/or domestic photos of other Chinese politicians, I've never seen any of him. I assume that researchers get their informal photos from the families themselves, and they just never tracked down my grandmother, since she came over to the US in the 60s. So my question is: would historians have any interest in these pictures of Minor Personage of Nationalist China? Is there some academic journal I could submit these things to? Should I just set up a little website? I think the pictures are noteworthy and shouldn't just be shut up in my grandmother's albums. Advice from the hivemind, academic historians especially, welcomed.

Information on the Chinese nuclear power industry

tawny — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:44:36 -0800

I have to produce a report on the Chinese nuclear power industry. Are there any good resources online to get me started? The focus is mainly on links between the state and business, and risk assessment for interested parties. I can read Mandarin.

Flying witch heads!

One Second Before Awakening — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:56:21 -0800

Help me identify this weird asian movie featuring a swordsman fighting demon woman whose head flies off, and whose lover hallucinates men in communist uniforms! Today my girlfriend and I saw the band Infinite Groove Orchestra playing at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersberg, Florida. During their set, they projected various bizarre clips from random films. One clip seemed to be from an Asian kung fu movie of some sort. I think the language it used was a dialect of Chinese. There was a man peering into a room where two lovers were in bed. He saw that the woman had half of her face peeled off, and an eyeball drooping out. He powered up his sword so that it glowed yellow, and then charged into the room and attacked the woman. She turned out to be some sort of demon and they squared off.

At one point her head came off and flew at him. He threw his sword at the head and hit it and it exploded, but then came back together again. She then hypnotized her lover, some ordinary human, into thinking that the swordsman was some kind of military or government man in a tan uniform, waving money around instead of a sword. He then attacked the swordsman. I think after that the witch flew out of the window and then the whole place started exploding.

The clip was really fun to watch, and now I'm dying to know what film it was so we can watch the whole thing!

Help! I underthought a plate of noodles

any portmanteau in a storm — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:07:53 -0800

What is the name of this cold noodle dish? Most likely Korean or Chinese food. This one's been bugging me for a while. About 6 years ago there was this restaurant in Kyoto called "Kara Kuri" which pretty much served one dish which I will now describe:

Cold noodles, around spaghetti size

Topped with cool vegetables (I forget which ones now but along the lines of shredded cucumber, lettuce, bean sprouts, etc) and cold, unseasoned chicken or pork

A dipping sauce, probably made from some kind of spicy bean paste

Garnished with sesame seeds

You could specify how spicy you want the sauce to be and they would make your sauce with more or less of the spicy ingredient accordingly.

If you pour the dipping sauce onto your plate of noodles, it will be much, much spicier than if you dip the noodles into the sauce. So there is probably a layer of (sesame) oil on the top of the sauce.

I'm guessing it's based on something Korean or Chinese but I haven't had anything like it apart from when my wife tries to recreate it from memory (which tastes pretty good, but memory fades so we're never sure how close it is).

Online Chinese study groups?

null14 — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:45:11 -0800

Are there any good online Chinese study groups? I'm a beginner at Chinese looking for an online study group. I want two things out of it: first, a forum for asking and answering questions, comparing translations, etc., with people of my level; and second, a sort of support and encouragement system. (That is, I don't just want a board with a bunch of people on it who know Chinese and are willing to answer my questions, although such forums are undoubtedly extremely useful; with this, though, I want other people who are working on the same things themselves.) It would be optimal if the group used the same materials, did "assignments" at the same time, etc., but that might be too much to ask for. I've seen [this http://www.quasillum.com/study/latinstudy.php] one for Greek and Latin, and that seems like a pretty good model, but I don't have any particular vision of how the group should be organized. Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

(Posted for a friend.)

Generating small gifs from fonts.

RavinDave — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:01:49 -0800

Any tips for generating legible .gifs from Chinese fonts? This one is hard to explain.

I'm going to over-explain it. If you don't want the background, you can jump down to the last two paragraph and probably still understand the question.

I'm currently creating a kick-ass SRS database in ANKI to help me own the 1,500 (soon to be 3,000) Tradional-style Hanzi characters mapped out in the Heisig/Richardson book "Remembering Traditional Hanzi".

If you don't already know, Heisig's approach is to break down characters into pseudo-radical components he calls "primitives". The user then makes up stories incorporating these primitives and uses them as mnemonics to recall the base character. It's surprisingly effective and the Japanese version of this approach (to remember Kanji) is wildly popular, spawning dozens of databases and a a strong online community.

The Trad Chinese version provides endless headaches that the Japanese version doesn't suffer from, as there are significant variations between Trad fonts. Moreover, there is also significant difference between many "print" styles and their "handwritten" counterparts. Finding a single font to use in ANKI is simply impossible (and if the characters are not displayed to Heisig's preference, it sort of defeats the purpose of his methodic approach).

THUS ...

I've been reduced to generating .gifs of various characters.

This would have been necessary anyway, since many of the "primitives" do not exist as independent characters. So, I'd fire up PhotoShop, find a character that incorporates the primitive, and crop away everything else. I'm fine with that.

The PROBLEM is that I need to reduce these 100x100 pixel transparent .gifs of Chinese characters (and pseudo-characters) down to a size that will fit into a 12 or 14 point text sentence. I've had reasonable luck, but am loosing a bit too much detail, leaving be with somewhat fuzzy images.

Is there anyway (I'm using PhotoShop) that I can somehow compensate? Which format is best? Which mode? Resolution, etc?

Blank walls, empty frames

embrangled — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:31:25 -0800

Where, online, can I find photographs and scans of classical Asian and Middle Eastern art? Specifically, where can I find images that I could ethically and practically print and hang in small frames above my desk? I'm no expert and I realise this is a big field, but I really love Islamic and Asian art. Mughal miniatures, Chinese brush paintings, Japanese woodblock prints - they remind me of my globe-trotting grandmother's house.

There's no room in my budget for actually buying art right now, but I do have a printer and some good paper. Can you recommend a source for out-of-copyright art that I can print?

I really don't want to infringe copyright or commit glaring cultural gaffes, so please don't jump on me for wanting to do this. I'd prefer sources where the art is presented in context so I can learn about its history as I search.

Confucius say... what, exactly?

sambosambo — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:32:48 -0800

Suggested reading about the life and teachings of Confucius? I've read the article at Wikipedia and seen the reading list there, but would love some personal recommendations. I don't read or speak chinese, so keep that in mind. :)

Finding Duplicates in Excel

RavinDave — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:44:31 -0800

I need an Excel conditional formatting formula for locating dups within a two-column row. Okay, I have a spreadsheet with two columns (A & B)

A = 1,500 Traditional hanzi
B = 1,500 Simplified hanzi

eg:

返返
支支
括括
憂忧
志志

About 80% of the time, A = B. Sometimes, the Simplified is different than the Traditional. Sometimes, it's wildly different. I'm not worried about those -- I can spot them easily enough. But sometimes, the difference is VERY subtle.

Thus, I need an Excel formula that will compare the two and (maybe) change the background color of Column 2 if it is different than Column 1.

Creative vegetarian recipes using won ton wrappers?

pleasantries — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:05:24 -0800

Creative vegetarian recipes using won ton wrappers?