Happy Year of the Tiger!
I don’t know if I explained this before, but every (solar) new year I send nengajō (new years’ cards) to my past Japanese teachers. It’s fun! Anyway, here’s mine from this year. It has a tiger and says “kinga shinnen”, which is a more formal “Happy New Year”.
Tomorrow I will ask my Vietnamese-speaking friends how to pronounce chúc mừng năm mới, since I can already do 新年快乐.
Kanji / Hànzì (漢字 / 汉字) are one of the harder parts about learning Japanese or Chinese. But there are two pairs of characters that are, simply put, awesome.
凸凹 (deko-boko) — first seen in Japanese, means “ridged” or “rugged”. (I call them “Tetris pieces”, even though the latter isn’t a valid Tetris piece.)
乒乓 (pīng-pāng) — seen and used in Chinese 1B, means “ping-pong” or “table tennis” (if it had/has another meaning, I’d be interested to know).
So, our Chinese course has some pretty random stuff in it. Last year we had a translation problem along the lines of “Little Bai has no friends. So, he wished himself a happy new year.” During one of our recent listening exercises about renting a video, the customer asks the cashier out for coffee at the end.
This week’s chapter is actually called “Dating” and the second dialogue is about an unfortunate Bái Jiànmíng, who tries to ask the textbook’s heroine, Lǐ Yǒu, out on a date three times (to watch an opera, of all things, although “gējù” could also…
