j a m e s f o r s y t h ✡ n e t

Asher enjoys having sushi train a lot. First, he likes trains. Second, he doesn’t mind eating plain rice.

This was in Singapore. My Mum and Ying were there as well. I’ll post more photos soon.

I’ve just posted my first youtube video. This is it. It doesn’t look anywhere near as good as on screen or on the camera itself.

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

Here we are at Singapore airport, about to depart and go/come back to Australia.

If you’ve emailed me lately, apologies, I might not have received it. A large file from a previous student friend of mine was blocking my emails. Please resend.

We’ve just returned from an overnight stay in Singapore’s holiday island Sentosa. None of us brought bathers/togs/swimmers/swimming-costumes so we didn’t get wet, except when Asher fell over when he was running around one of those special water installations in which the water spurts out of the ground.

We went to the Underwater World where I found that the Chinese words for “stingray” and “jellyfish” that I’d be using up to now might not be the standard ones - mind you, whether Singaporean Mandarin is an indicator of usage in China itself is another question…. so please, if there are any Chinese readers out there, please tell me the words for these two creatures of the sea. Unfortunately I can’t type in Chinese using this computer.

I’m still without an easy way to post photos on here until we return to Melbourne.

We’re enjoying our time in Singapore visiting my in-laws and showing Asher around. He’s enjoying the roti prata.

This photo is actually from last time we were here, because I forgot to bring the adapter from the digital camera to the computer.

Right now we’re in an internet cafe, here is the only place we can actually easily access the web, so it’s not easy to keep this updated. I’ll try. Anyhow, on our return I’ll put up a few new pictures, not only from Singapore, but from the time just before we left.

This is, from right to left, Willy, Asker, Else and Mum. I’m not in the photo, but I think I was in Denmark with them at the time, only about 3 years old.

The next generation (Ying and I) returned to Denmark in 2001. We watched the Islamic attacks on the World Trade Center (sic) live from Else’s loungeroom.

Hopefully we’ll return to Denmark again sometime soon. We really miss the family, food, and Denmark generally. Most importantly, we want to show Asher.

*** UPDATE My Mum says this photo is from a few more years ago than 33 because of various clues she has picked up from the photo itself (i.e. the Christmas tree etc). More like 35.

We bought these chopsticks at the National Gallery of Victoria shop. Asher got into them straight away. I’ve got other pictures of Asher using real chopsticks quite some time ago, and even a video. I’ll have to see what I can do about posting those too.

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Fry and Laurie on linguistics.