Is there a star-constellation called "rooster"?
If there is ,then I kind of understand why the character for
"(year of) rooster" and "west" looks so similar. :p

WELCOME to Kanji 101 with professor "lorcafed" :D

Thank you Sensei for a most interesting class! :thumbsup:

I had no idea that the years were written differently! However after you mentioned it I looked up 酉　(tori) in my Kanji dictionary and it said:

酉
COCK :eek:

酉年
The YEAR OF THE COCK :eyebrow:

I think I'm going to like this year! :lol:

I wonder why we don't use a lovely word like "cock" much anymore to mean rooster? ;)

Anyway thank you lorcafed for straightening me out!

Wow. I hope more and more western people learn Chinese as we learn English.

Which Chinese, Billy? There seems to be a bunch of different dialects. :eek:

Mandarin and Traditional Chinese is the way to go. :thumbsup:

As far as Chinese goes, there's only one way to write it but lots of different dialects.

Hmmmm...you mean lots of dialects as in different words and/or different meanings for the same words but only one alphabet to transcribe them all? :confused:

When I was a junior high aged lad, "cock" was freely used as slang, roughly equivalent to "neat" or "cool", only with an edge. One usage is immortalized in one of my yearbooks: "To a really cock kid...see you this summer."

It's like they all have the same language, but there are regions with different "accents" which pronounce certain letters differently, like a NY accent versus a southern accent would pronounce their vowels differently. But it's taken to an extreme, to the point where all the consonants are pronounced completely differently too--what is pronounced "Bo" to one group might be "Pe" to another group, just as a (completely fabricated) example.

The same word has different pronunciations in different China zones. The pronunciation problem is caused by the poor communication. Now more and more speak, use and understand the Mandarin. Japanese and Chinese have some same words, but Japanese use old tone. Somtimes we can guess the Japnese meaning, but we cant speak.

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce
Hmmmm...you mean lots of dialects as in different words and/or different meanings for the same words but only one alphabet to transcribe them all?

No, the written character is not phonetic, it is a pictograph. So you would have a picture of a table (somewhat abstracted) and totally different words for table in say Mandarin or Cantonese. There are hundreds of pictographs, and the radicals that make them up. The character for Chi is a picture of steam escaping from a bowl of rice on a fire, for instance with steam and rice pot radicals. To put together a keyboard with all the radicals would be way too complex, so if you go to your local Beijing internet cafe (and these places are hopping) they use Roman letters.

I'm guessing that they type in the pin yin (roman letters for Mandarin Chinese, which is phonetical) and the characters appear on the screen. Many Chinese feel that the complexity of the written language has held them back technologically. The Japanese created a phonetical alphabet (albeit in characters) many years ago and only use the classical characters, which are similar to Chinese, occasionally.

Actually most of the guys I met at the internet cafes in China played games rather than wrote. And the keyboards were worn down so you couldn't read the letters on the keys that move your game pieces.

And since Chinese was originally not widely written- just in the scholarly class, it developed without having to refer to the common languages of the different provinces. So it isn't just a matter of different pronunciation. My Dad worked with a Chinese woman who had to communicate with her Chinese husband from a different part of China in English. But today they all learn Mandarin in school and on TV.

There is also the case where the bopomofo is a key on the keyboard, and you have to spell it out that way. It's slow to use at first, and difficult to learn how to type in that fashion quickly... and I absolutely hate pinyin, so I'm kinda stuck at the moment. ^_^

And don't forget about dialects like Taiwanese, where there are some phoenetics which have no hanji equivalent, so it needs to be written out using bopomofo.

There sure are a lot of people that know a lot about chinese on this board. :eek: This is great.
The things you learn from a seal.

Many people don't use the bopomofo input, but character input. The character input is faster than the bopomofo input. It need to divide the word into characters and remember the character positions on keyboard. Or you are familiar with the position. I cannot remember the position, but I can easily use the bopomofo input.

You guy are very good on Chinese. The more computer develops, the more people can easily use the Chinese input. The Chinese companies develop the handwriting input like keyboard input. You don't need use the PinYin, just write down the words on the board. So the words automatically are input on screen. Hanwang Tech is the best company on this input. You can get more inforamtion on their website.
I agree you that many young people play games or chat by QQ (like ICQ.At first we think it is copy of ICQ) in Netcafes. Once in Beijing a child fired one netcafe and many young people were killed.