You should maybe consider avoiding sugar before going on the ride to avoid a heart attack and/or aneurysm.
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Asian-GAF: We're all the same, like Stormtroopers |OT| |AT|
- Thread starter Cybit
- Start date
You should maybe consider avoiding sugar before going on the ride to avoid a heart attack and/or aneurysm.
Why are you trying to be evil!
InsaneZero
Member
IAmtheFMan
Member
I didn't add mine. Check your PMs.
Zaraki_Kenpachi
Member
Not sure if anyone here would know but why are most names pronounced the same but use different characters? Is it from the days of clans? I tried googling but couldn't find an explanation.
Took this a while back and I was sorted into the Slytherin house.3 R, 1 H, 0 S (StMeph you should be S), and 0 G.
Pick more water choices.
Septimus Prime
Member
Like what?
A general explanation is that Asian and Western languages often don't use the same phonemes (units of sound), so there is no direct way to translate the sound. For example, as we probably all know, Japanese makes no distinction between l and r.
Troubled Bat
Member
I find it funny how a "If Mortal Kombat characters were sorted into Hogwarts houses" thread popped up. It's just one of those days.
Lmao, I forgot all about that completely. Good times.
Impossible, I didn't make it to 30
Lmao, I forgot all about that completely. Good times.
Zaraki_Kenpachi
Member
Maybe it's to western languages? Like one person's Xiaohan for example I've seen written a lot but when I've asked a coworker she said they were all spelled differently. I've seen things with Japanese also where they'll say their last name but then specify what characters are used. A couple places online said that you usually can't spell a person's name correctly without them identifying what characters they use to make it.
Septimus Prime
Member
There are a lot of words--like in English--that are homonyms, so you'll need context to know which ones they are. For example, in Chinese, you have:
Down - 下
Summer - 夏
Scare - 嚇
These are all pronounced Xià, and you would need context to figure out which one someone is saying. Put them in a name, though, and there's nothing you can do but ask which one is in there.
Septimus Prime
Member
Oh, also, I got Splatoon.
To see if it was legit or not.
The heads or tails part was funny though.
I'm pretty sure I'd be Gryffindor if I got to choose. And choosing plays some part if not the greatest.
Zaraki_Kenpachi
Member
Hmm, I guess that's true and it's more muddied since I see names in english since I don't understand chinese. So Xiaohan always looks the same to me but I guess it would be the same when trying to translate an english name to chinese or japanese where you're mostly trying to match up the sounds. So to someone in Chinese it could seem the same but it could be Catelyn, Katelyn Caitlin, Kaitlin, etc.
I'm guessing it probably still initially came from the different dialects from clans or regionally or whatever since english is only so broken with that because it pretty much stole from everyone so it was probably the same of the areas making up Mandarin. I'm assuming names vary by region a lot?
Are they homonyms or tonal variants of the same phoneme?
In the example given, they all use the same tone; different tones would be noted through different diacritics. So, in this case, they would only be homophones in Chinese, but would be homonyms in pinyin.
Not generally a Slate fan; but saw this article
http://www.slate.com/articles/techn...te_why_he_wants_it_and_could_just_get_it.html
Thoughts?
http://www.slate.com/articles/techn...te_why_he_wants_it_and_could_just_get_it.html
Thoughts?
CapNBritain
Member
This also describes me pretty well.
And I've actually been thinking a lot about how integrated I am into the American social fabric, although I don't see my separation as one of race. In college, it was easy to find people that shared my interests and beliefs, which are more on the liberal side. But once I was forced to make friends in the real world it was evident that many people don't think the same way.
Although I guess it depends on what the American social fabric is defined as. Is Grindr and Tindr now part of it? Or is it just the attitudes leftover from the 50s where women should be housewives? Is about how I view the world or how the world views me?
Gully State
Member
One more for Ravenclaw...
Troubled Bat
Member
(Also, I put up the Harry Potter spreadsheet for us
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1agx1cxPeA6zqCTSfuzO2cXcjdFDV80hTSywaBPTv32c/edit#gid=0
Even more reason to feel alone. ;______;
Definitely true for me; I find most of the discourse people generally trying to gain a superior position under the guise of "morality"; or cover their own sexism or racism under the guise of "morality". I think more people argue about this (online) for their own self-righteousness or for clicks/money rather than actual belief or genuine effort to change (or even understand) things.
I think we are relatively speaking; I have friends out here who grew up in a Chinatown / Little India / etc type of situation where they basically never ventured outside their own culture until after college. Growing up in the middle of nowhere midwest - we were forced to integrate a lot more from birth (plus my parents are very big believers in integration).
See what I said above; I think we live in a much more self-selectable world that can skew our perspective unless we expend energy and effort to search out different perspectives. Growing up in a conservative area (and being super liberal for the area) and then moving to Seattle (and being conservative for the area definitely gave me a different view on things.
As to your questions below, Yes, Yes, and Yes. American social fabric is unique in that it is very heterogeneous compared to a lot of other countries, IMO. Makes sense with the nature of the creation of the country and all.
Septimus Prime
Member
Well, one of the things that makes things more complicated is that Chinese is a tonal language, so tonal enunciation is paramount. English, on the other hand, is phonetic and doesn't really use the tonal diacritics, since intonation matters less (it still matters in the sense that you can use tonal shifts to make a statement interrogative and turn it into a question by lifting the last syllable--"Go there," and "Go there?" are different tonally when spoken). Because of this, it's extra hard to romanize different words, where tones change their meeting.
In my previous example, I listed a few different meanings for Xià, which has a specific tone. If we remove the diacritic, we have Xia, which opens up even more words for the same set of Western letters.
Xiā - 蝦 - Shrimp
Xiá - 峽 - Gorge
Xiǎ - (I can't think of any word that sounds like this, but this is the third tone)
Xià - 下 - Down
With four tones, you can have a lot of different words for the same few letters, and then when you add in homophones, homonyms, and that there is no way consistent way to romanize some phonemes, and you end up with a lot of different spellings.
EDIT:
Can't really say I disagree with any of it, although I work at a small-to-medium video game (as opposed to tech) company in a non-engineering position. I think I'm also more integrated into the American social fabric than Annie and Male Annie, though, but that might be because I was born here and consider myself an American who just happens to be ethnically Chinese.
I do find myself leaning further and further left as I get older and advance in my career, though, which I think is unusual, since most people seem to lean further right. As for the stuff I don't care to discuss much on GAF or elsewhere, it also has less to do with apathy and more to do with me actually caring a lot about these things. I just don't want to discuss them and get all riled up, knowing that I'm not going to be able to change anyone else's opinions anyway.
Zoe
Member
I don't think that's what he's asking.
I can't speak for Chinese, but in Japanese an example would be 麻衣 and 舞 both sound the exact same: Mai.
ActStriker
Member
I went to go look up the different tones in Cantonese and then how to say certain things and I ended up stumbling across this.
https://www.youtube.com/user/PFMproductionz/videos
Dude's pronunciations are better than mine.
https://www.youtube.com/user/PFMproductionz/videos
Dude's pronunciations are better than mine.
CapNBritain
Member
My mom is so fascinated when she hears non-Chinese people speak Chinese.
And then she kinda rubs it in my face because I can barely speak or understand our language. ¯\_(ツ
The go to joke in my family is how terrible my Chinese is. So what if I refused to eat Taro for years because I thought it was made from fish heads?
Ha! This made me laugh. Those tricky homonyms
Nowadays, you can say Zhou as in Jay Chow. That was my experience in Taiwan.
CapNBritain
Member
I still can't eat it to this day. Homonyms ruined my life.
Gully State
Member
They're called radicals or roots. You can use them to guess what a word might be pronounced as.
For example.
虫- insect- if you see this radical, then chances are the word in question is an insect.
蝴蝶- butterfly- you can see the radical there on the left for each character. If you change up the radical, you get an entirely different word but the pronunciation might be similar..
蝴->湖 - both are pronounced the same (hu2) but the latter means lake because the radical has changed.
Little things like that work great for traditional Chinese....I'm not sure how well this works for simplified though.
CapNBritain
Member
In Chinese school we had this thick, red dictionary that we would use to look up words by their roots. I remember the inside covers having this crazy huge table with all the roots. I believe that if we wanted to look up a word we were expected to look it up by its root(s). I'm still not sure how I did it.
I remember this, I think like most other things Asian kids had to do, you just got better at it through sheer repetition.
Some roots for certain characters were absolute bullshit though.
Gully State
Member
Go to the corresponding root section of the table, then count how many strokes it takes to complete the rest of the character. Go to that corresponding section and find your word (whatever page that is).
Oh god. You had to look up the root, then count how many strokes it took to write the character on another table, then find your word with its corresponding page number.
I swear, if I had google translate back then, with its auto-convert writing to text, my Chinese reading level would be 50x better.
Of course there were always those tryhard kids back in the day with their fancy electronic dictionaries.
Gully State
Member
I got one as a gift. Great for playing Tetris/Hangman during Chinese school. I probably should've paid a bit more attention.
Speaking of writing, I wish I could do calligraphy but talk about discriminating against us southpaws...I don't think I've ever been belittled that much in a formal class ever for being left handed.
Calligraphy teacher(s)- "You'll always be terrible at this since you're a lefty. " x100000
CapNBritain
Member
Holy shit that's right! Jesus man you just caused a load of memories to come flooding back. I think I hate you.
Also, you guys/gals learned the same way I did right? A chapter with like 8-12 new words that you were forced to write hundreds of times on lined paper, right?
I wrote every character taught to me (over a thousand) hundreds of times each and can now only remember how to write like 10 of them.
yep sounds like saturday morning chinese school ptsd
Yes. haha
Gully State
Member
I took a Chinese minor so I did a bit more also developed a bit of disdain for kids that grew up in China, Taiwan, HK etc because they were doing it for an easy A while my illiterate ass was looking up every other word.
You guys remember 王大中 and his no good trouble making friend 李小明?
Oh and missing out on Saturday morning cartoons...
I would befriend kids like you to borrow your dictionary, but then we'd just both end up playing hangman. Or paper football. Good times.
That, plus drawing crazy mustaches on all the crude people pictures from each chapter.
I cheated by just reading straight off the bopomofo and ignoring the actual characters. On the day they switched to the books with only Han characters, I realized my word recognition was crap.
CapNBritain
Member
Someone say PTSD?
[Totally kidding about the last one,]
Wow you had special books for chinese characters? I used old school dot matrix paper with the alternating white/green lines before graduating to "normal" lined paper.
Also didn't ever get a backscratcher, just chopsticks and the handles of flyswatters.
王大中 was a true bro.
I'm pretty sure I've forgotten bopomofo, but I think they stopped teaching it.
Gully State
Member
Someone say PTSD?
[Totally kidding about the last one,]
I got the backscratcher. Friday nights suuuuuccked..
Gully State
Member
It's redundant...I mean pinyin is just bopomofo but with roman letters.
Onto other torturous Asian childhood things. How many of you guys did this?
Zaraki_Kenpachi
Member
Holy shit that sounds miserable. I mean it makes sense but still sounds miserable.
Not a tech career dude or American but at times it's a little disconcerting but also mostly in line with most other Asians I know. I feel like a lot of that most of the time too, I just don't really say anything about being somewhat apathetic about certain social/political issues, or at least not always "on" about it. If I'm not being forced to dig in my heels or someone is purposely being ignorant I usually just don't care about these things as much. Sometimes I feel ashamed that I feel that way, that it doesn't affect me but what exactly should I do.
Sometimes I feel like even just having those particular threads on GAF is a bit tiring though, cause they pretty much follow the same arc everytime a thread pops up. But I don't really participate because that's just asking to be banned for merely trying to go off the beaten path a bit, or making a genuine mistake, much less going full idiot.
It was grade school/high school for me, but there were 'native' and 'non-native' tracks and yep, despite technically being a FOB, I was raised here since less than 3 months old, English schools still made me do ESL and I basically was surrounded by actual FOBs coming in for that easy A and no one ever really did anything about it anyway.
It's redundant...I mean pinyin is just bopomofo but with roman letters.
Onto other torturous Asian childhood things. How many of you guys did this?
I did that for a few months in elementary school. Felt like I was turning into a robot.
Have you seen their new logo?
Hilariously accurate representation of my face during Kumon. Really nails that exact note of misery.
CapNBritain
Member
Pinyin made everything easier and was introduced right after I quit.
Gully State
Member
I did that for a few months in elementary school. Felt like I was turning into a robot.
Have you seen their new logo?
Hilariously accurate representation of my face during Kumon. Really nails that exact note of misery.
Yup that's the Kumon face all right. So I used to hide parts of my Kumon worksheet packets around the house as a kid so I wouldn't have to do as much (smarter and more devious friends were able to steal answer books). My parents to this day find Kumon sheets stashed around their house in odd nooks and crannies.
I learned both...How is it easier? Just that you don't have to learn more characters? The rules are exactly the same.