Peking / Beijing

When I was young, I saw a TV news item that told me that Peking was now no longer called Peking, it was called Beijing.  (Perhaps the news item was in fact a bit more accurate than that and went into the gory details of Wade-Giles and pinyin, but if it was, it all went over my head).  It struck me as a puzzling thing to happen to a city, being renamed like that.  This must have been at the time of the 1979 pinyinization.  Peking still persists in the names of institutions that want to boast about their age, such as Peking University (and I think that on the Chinese version of the site, the last character in 'university' on the logo is the unsimplified version  學 as opposed to 学, for added old-fashionedness).

I keep wanting to train my ear to hear the sounds of Chinese properly: never mind the tones, many of the initials are very hard to distinguish.  Perhaps something to do next year.

Pictures from China, and Russian books

Listening to this programme featuring Robert Bickers whose Empire Made Me is a fascinating look at Shanghai in the 20s and 30s.  It's a very BBC thing to do, to make a radio programme about old photographs, but it works very well.  I'll have to have another proper crack at Chinese some time, but at the moment I've got distracted with reading Russian again.  Having returned to it after a long break I find that I'm much more confident at ploughing through texts and trying to guess meanings from context.  I've been looking at this archive of inter-war emigré magazines and journals, some of which is in the pre-1918 spelling (not at all difficult once you get used to it).  On the Russian Wikisource site there's this nice old encyclopaedia (transliterated into the new spelling, but there are links to page images in the old spelling on the Russian State Library website).  I'm not short of stuff to read.  Plan for the near future: keep reading, keep flicking through lists of vocabulary too (particularly verbs, which have always been my weak point: I'll remember one aspect and not the other), and try to get fluent.  I'll still listen to Russian radio occasionally but it's good reading comprehension that I most want.

Lists of kanji, and draw-and-recognise sites

Soon after posting yesterday I wondered why on earth I'd forgotten that there's a precomposed a-with-tilde at U+00E3, which reminded me to mention:

• Shapecatcher which lets you draw a Unicode character (not a Chinese/Japanese/Korean glyph, unfortunately), and it will try to match it to the right code point;
• Mouse Chinese Input Method - draw a Chinese character and it will try to recognize it and give translation/pronunciation;
• List of Jooyoo Kanji on Wikipedia: very useful if you remember characters by their Heisig names; you can click on a table heading to alter display order to by-number-of-strokes, which is useful for looking up unfamiliar kanji;
• Kanji Information on Jim Breen's site: lists of Heisig keywords, all 3007 Heisig kanji, old and new kanji shapes;
• Detexify, which allows you to draw anything and it will try to match it to a LaTeX symbol.

 

A Chinese Typewriter in Silicon Valley (Google Tech Talk)

An interesting talk by Thomas S. Mullaney.  If you've ever wondered how characters were arranged in the traybed of a Chinese typewriter, here's the answer.  There's more to it than you might think.

Stuff

Have had just no time for Chinese recently, and little inclination to try to squeeze language study into the odd spare moments that I do have...

 Watched this film last night and was rather cheered by how much of the dialogue I could match up with the subtitles.  Even though I haven't done any Japanese in the last several weeks, the knowledge is still rattling around in my brain somewhere.

Teach Yourself Chinese by HR Williamson (EUP, 1947)

I've been glancing through this book; it uses unsimplified characters with Wade-Giles romanization, so it's hardly going to be anyone's first choice as a textbook these days, but like the other Teach Yourself books of its era it's a lovely little hardback ("Produced in Great Britain in complete conformity with the Authorised Economy Standards"—paper was still in short supply).  At 530pp I think it's the fattest EUP Teach Yourself book I've ever seen.

The author seems to have been this chap, who must have been very disappointed by the turn that China took towards the end of his life, but who would have been cheered and astonished to see the number of mainstream Protestant churches in England now with well-attended Chinese-language services.  The book consists of 40 dialogues: text in Wade-Giles and side-by-side translation verso, vocabulary and corresponding hanzi recto.  At the back are vertical Chinese-character texts of all the dialogues, grammar notes, a very large and clear list of characters with romanizations and translations, a list of radicals, and a list of the characters arranged by Wade-Giles.  It's a comprehensive book clearly aimed mainly at missionaries who are going to go Out East and live in a Chinese environment heavily mediated by lots of servants.  Sample dialogue: Master: "You did not make the bed properly yesterday.  I did not sleep very well."  Servant: "I am sorry sir.  There was too much to do yesterday, and I couldn't overtake the work."  Mao hadn't quite won by 1947, but even then it should have been clear that that old style of expat life in China was on its way out.  You can trace the shrinking of the British Empire by the last publication dates of language primers for colonial officials and their families (I've seen several books on Malay from the 50s whose purpose is to enable exaperated wives to yell instructions and rebukes at 'native' cooks and houseboys).

Listening to syllables

Am repeatedly listening to the first few lessons of Colloquial Chinese just to get used to the rhythm of the language and the sounds of the initials, finals and tones.  Interesting that I can sort-of get the tones (which I expected to be the hardest part) with fair accuracy, but am having problems distinguishing several of the initials from one another.  But it's early days, and I hope I'll improve.  Or maybe it's just that the audio is sounding very muddy and I need to get my tape heads cleaned!

Sino-Platonic Papers

(available here) describes itself in this way:

Sino-Platonic Papers is an occasional series edited by Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. The purpose of the series is to make available to specialists and the interested public the results of research that, because of its unconventional or controversial nature, might otherwise go unpublished.

It's full of interesting stuff about East Asian languages.  In particular there seems to be rather a lot of skepticism about the benefits of hanzi and kanji; one might innocently expect Western experts in these languages to be enthusiastic fanboys/girls for the characters, either because it was the characters that they first found interesting about the languages or because they're proud of the memorization-mountain that they have climbed.  But readers of  Language Log will know that Victor Mair is not a starry-eyed fan of characters!

Anyway: interesting stuff (mostly in PDF form, though some HTML), and well worth a read.

Sound and vision

First thing to say about starting to read the textbook is that I've just discovered that I've been pronouncing Pinyin wrong for years. It might take a little while for the correct pronunciation of the unguessably awkward initials like q and x to 'stick'. The audio for this course is on cassettes, which I am handling with nostalgic awe. I remember the days when I used to buy albums on cassette...

Chinese project

Have slacked off on the Japanese and fancy trying something different.  Everyone else seems to be writing a novel this month, something that I have neither the talent nor the inclination for.  But I like the idea of a time-limited project, so I've decided to have a crack at Chinese, just for this month.  Textbook is the original 1995 edition of Colloquial Chinese by Kan Qian.  And away we go.