j a m e s f o r s y t h ✡ n e t

If you don’t know what I’m talking about below, please overlook. It’s just a response I’ve posted on the Supermemo yahoogroup, and was afraid that the Chinese characters wouldn’t display properly.

Hi David,

I haven’t spoken to you since Message #7221! 好久不见！

This isn’t really on-topic for Supermemo, so non-Chinese learners please ignore, but regarding showing stroke-order in diagrams, I’m NOT in favour of a demonstration of the stroke order of each character by having it drawn over and over again with progressively more strokes to show which follows which. Where do the strokes begin and end? This method also takes up too much space. A far preferred way is used in Kanji & Kana: A Handbook of the Japanese Writing System by Wolfgang Hadamitzky and Mark Spahn (ISBN: 0804820775). They simply show the character in a nice, neat, large size. At the BEGINNING of the first stroke, for example, there’s a small 1 followed by a small 2 at the BEGINNING of the second stroke and so on. This is dignified and visually appealing.

Regarding the characters you have asked about:

七 horizontal (横) first, from left to right, then vertical with hook(竖弯钩).
九 slanting vertical (撇) first, slanting leftwards on the way down then horizontal with hook (横折弯钩).
水 vertical first, then left (横撇), then right (撇,捺).

Regards,

James
http://www.jamesforsyth.net

mmmm!! yummy!

But so many of these Taiwanese actors look and sound the same as each other. Compare this with some of the guys on 天才冲冲冲 (天才衝衝衝) and you’ll see what I mean.

The dictionary I’m carrying is the ABC Chinese - English Dictionary 汉英词典 - 按罗马字母顺序排列。

***I’m reposting this at the top of the blog, because I accidentally deleted it last night. Having been unable to access Google’s cache here in China I owe big thanks to Terri for retrieving it for me and emailing it***

Literally “big bright lake”, I took David for a look at this major attraction. Well worth a second look.

It’s strange, the second character down (if you’ll compare it with the heading of this post) should have an 日 on the left, rather than a 目. I asked some kind bystanders what the reason for the difference was, and they said it was because of 特殊含义. I need to do a bit of investigating as to why this is. If you can give me any advice on this subject, please click on “4 Comments” below and add a comment to let me know about this strange occurrence. Thanks in advance.

Above is a picture of Asher doing his daily study. I’m so proud of him. I look forward to going home so that I can be with him again.

Although he speaks and understands the Mandarin language, culturally he is being brought up as a combination of Australian and Singaporean.

If only I could read this well to Asher!

火影忍者 - Naruto
变形金刚 - Transformers
忍者神龟 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
舒克和贝塔 - Shuke & Beita
天线宝宝 - Teletubbies
海绵宝宝 - Spongebob Squarepants

Hopefully this list will keep growing.

Check out this animation (seems to work better in IE than Firefox):

building blocks

If anyone can advise me of other versions of the below (or advice as to which version is the most useful) please let me know:

Oral:
善有善报，恶有恶报，不是不报，时候未到

or

Written:
善有善报, 恶有恶报，不是不报，时辰未到

I also don’t really understand the 未到 at the end.

关于“阝”，如果在左边是阜，在右边是邑。