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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4301 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 217 of 408 23 January 2014 at 10:39am | IP Logged |
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Tadoku challenge: 186 pages read (mostly 鬼吹灯) out of 200, which is my commitment for January.
I've watched and enjoyed several episodes of the cartoon 大耳朵图图. It's enjoyable, easy, subtitled with hanzi and available on Youtube. What else could you hope for? I've converted several episodes to mp3s to listen to whenever I have some time but cannot read. Usual daily vocab chore with Skritter (characters) and Pleco (words). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4301 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 218 of 408 27 January 2014 at 9:47am | IP Logged |
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I've spent an afternoon plugging a Raspberry Pi with a huge external hard drive to my TV and configuring it as a multimedia server. It was not that easy, because my TV set is old (no HDMI) and has several other devices attached to it already. What's the relationship with languages? Well, the official excuse for buying the gadget is that it will be easier to sit on the sofa, relax and watch the family's huge collection of pictures on the TV screen. The semi-unofficial reason is that I've never liked watching (Chinese) TV, series, cartoons and movies on a smallish computer screen. Now it will be much easier to sit on the sofa, relax and watch them on my TV.
In other news, I've officially reached my Tadoku objective of reading 200 pages in January. I like the fact that I will have some objective measurement to assess my progress as from now. My impression is that I didn't read much more than before, though I definitely pushed myself to squeeze in more reading into my busy days and to read one more page before sleeping. On the other hand, I've probably spent less time practicing focussed listening comprehension this month. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4301 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 219 of 408 30 January 2014 at 9:26am | IP Logged |
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I've translated yet another short extract of 鬼吹灯. Here's my translation, for what it's worth:
-- 大金牙说：“非也，在咱们眼里是那粽子操性 的干尸，可是到了国外，那就成宝贝了，在北 京成交价，明代之前的，一律两万，弄出国去 就值十万———美子。您想啊，老外不就是喜 欢看这些古灵精怪的东西吗？在洋人眼中，咱 们东方古国，充满了神秘色彩，比如在纽约自 然博物馆，打出个广告，今日展出神秘东方美 女木乃伊，这能不轰动？这股干尸热，都是由 去年楼兰小河墓葬群出土的楼兰女尸引起的。 就算在咱们国内，随便找地方展览展览，都得 排队参观，这就叫商机啊。” Definitely not, Da Jinya said. In our eyes, that dumpling (*) is just a f*** (*) dried corpse, but take it abroad and it becomes a treasure. In Beijing, the sale price of a pre-Ming one is 20,000, without exception. If you bring it out of the country, now it's worth 100,000 - in dollars. What do you think, don't foreigners love to look at such weird stuff? In their eyes, our ancient Eastern countries are full of mystery. So for instance, if New York's Museum of Natural History makes an ad saying "Today, we exhibit the mummy of a beautiful woman from the mysterious Orient", it will certainly be a big hit. That fashion of dried corpses all comes from the woman mummy that was excavated last year from a group of tombs in Loulan River. Even in our country, if you could just find a place for an exhibition, everybody would have to line up to visit it - now that's what I call a business opportunity". -- * In the Chinese tomb raider jargon 粽子, is not a sort of dumpling but this: 盗墓者中流传的暗语，就像山里的土匪之间谈 话也不能直接说自己杀人放火，都有一套黑话 切口，例如「粽子」指墓里的尸体保存的比较 完好，没有腐烂的古尸。 My attempt at a translation: The jargon that tomb raiders use to communicate is like that used between mountain bandits: they just can't tell plainly they will "murder" or "arson". They all have a series of slang or jargon words; for instance "dumpling" means a relatively well-preserved mummy in a tomb, a corpse that has not decayed. If found the meaning of 切口 here: http://cidian.911cha.com/MjRkOXc=.html 拼音 qiē kǒu 基本解释指旧时帮会组织或行业所使用的暗语 ：他说的满嘴是切口，我一点也听不懂。 * I'm not sure at all what 操性 means. But I see that another online version says "在咱们眼里是粽子的干尸", which is a bit easier. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| JayR9 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4727 days ago 155 posts - 162 votes Speaks: English* | Message 220 of 408 30 January 2014 at 11:54am | IP Logged |
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Sorry to go off subject but what do you have to do with your raspberry pi?
I have one for my movies and that but how do I get things in mandarin? Or do you just mean switch the subtitles on when you are watching a film in English? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4301 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 221 of 408 30 January 2014 at 12:17pm | IP Logged |
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JayR9, the cable TV in my country does not feature any Chinese TV or programme. However, there are plenty of movies, series, cartoons, etc. in Chinese available on Youtube, Youku, the CCTV site and elsewhere. As I'd rather watch them on my TV than on my computer or on my phone, I download them in an appropriate format (mp4, avi...), with a suitable Firefox extension, to a hard drive connected to the Raspberry (itself connected to my TV) so I can watch them on my TV. Yesterday, I discovered I could also stream the movies directly to the Raspberry Pi without copying them on the external harddrive.
I'm not an expert myself, and there may be more simple methods, but it sounds more complicated than it really is. As for the subtitles, I use either Chinese subtitles, or English subtitles or no subtitles at all, depending on my mood and the difficulty of what I'm watching. It's not always possible to turn them on and off at will, though. I hope this helps. Edited by lorinth on 30 January 2014 at 12:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| JayR9 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4727 days ago 155 posts - 162 votes Speaks: English* | Message 222 of 408 30 January 2014 at 12:49pm | IP Logged |
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Hello and thank you for the quick reply.
Once I get home I will have a look to see if I have YouTube on it but I really don't think I have the others you mentioned. I'm no expert with it either so don't know how to add other programs to it. It seems like a good piece of kit and I never actually thought about using it for watching things in mandarin. Like you said, it will be more comfortable watching it on the tele rather than a little screen. Thanks again for your reply. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4301 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 223 of 408 31 January 2014 at 10:50am | IP Logged |
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Thanks to Tadoku, I've been able to track how many pages of Chinese I read (yay! 243 pages up to now in January). However, apart from reading, I have another commitment for 2014: logging 10 hours of listening each week. Unfortunately, I haven't been tracking the time devoted to listening in January. I may have failed to reach that objective, who knows? So I've installed a time tracking app on my phone (Gleeo) so I can have some sort of objective measurement. NB: I would absolutely *hate* it if I had to do such stats for my job.
To get me started, I did some background listening (radio and TV), I began work on a Slow Chinese podcast about China's “第一夫人” and I watched an episode of 大耳朵图图. Apart from a few more pages of 鬼吹灯 I've read three press articles. First, on the Chinese-language channel of the United Nations media website, I've read the transcript of and listened to an article about the relationship between Japan and Asian countries, specifically China and Korea, in the light of prime minister's Abe visit to the 靖国神社 and the protests by former 慰安妇. Link Second, I also read a short article about 习近平主席 going to inner Mongolia to wish a happy (Chinese) new year to just about everybody under the sun, including 港澳台同胞 and 全球华人. I learnt the interesting expression "幸福美好" that usefully sums up just about everything you may want to wish on such occasions. And finally, on the Chinese Deutsche Welle site, I read a short article about the equally short EU-Russia summit, where everybody suspected everybody of 作出干涉行为 (meddling). Link Vocab (Pleco) and character (Skritter) drills as usual. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4301 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 224 of 408 03 February 2014 at 10:59am | IP Logged |
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The January 2014 session of the Tadoku challenge has come to an end. My total: 248 pages, which is significantly more than my objective of 200 (but less than the first objective I had set (300) before changing my mind). So, in a year or so, I should try 300 pages and see what happens.
That comes mostly from a single book (鬼吹灯). In a way, I've cheated, because I'm reading it as an e-book, so looking up unknown words is a non-issue (or almost so because the book contains quite a lot of slang and many many expressions that I could not find in any dictionary; and, Chinese being what it is, parsing characters into words is not always obvious). On the other hand, I've been very careful to count two e-pages as one page, because e-pages are shorter: on average, I've counted that one e-page, with the character size I use, contains about 250 characters; one paper page contains 400-500. Probably, without the pressure of the challenge, I'd have read less in January, so the challenge played its role perfectly. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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