the personals

if you happen to be sort of beginnerish at mandarin chinese but wanting to practice listening, you can't do much better than the movie the personals (征婚启事). in it, a young doctor places a personal ad looking for a husband, and the bulk of the movie consists of the meetings that result -- lots and lots of "getting to know you" speech, precisely the topics where i have some vocabulary.

the boyfriend is incommunicado for work from work from yesterday morning to tomorrow evening, so i've been spending more quality time than usual with my netflix queue. this one was actually up on their instant viewing list -- since i have no tv and watch everything on my laptop anyhow, that's a super-nice feature.

bearcats

i was reading this article about china's reaction to the movie kung fu panda. it mentions the movie's title in chinese, 功夫熊猫... i was curious how the word for panda was pronounced, so i ran it through adsotrans - xiongmao. "mao" as in cat? check. and it turns out the first character means "bear." so, literally, we have bearcat.

which, as it happens, connects pandas to the blues, for me anyhow. right after big mama thornton's song "hound dog" came out in 1953 (that's right, elvis's was a remake), rufus thomas came back with "bear cat" to approximately the same tune, complete with campy fun sound effects. it was sun records' first hit, and they later lost the lawsuit for plagiarizing. you can hear a sample here.

and so it goes, now you see why my mental pandas are no longer lounging about, munching on bamboo. nor are they waging gravity-defying battles against power hungry ex-con snow leopards. nope, they're scratchin' at the door, purring, and otherwise trying to win their way back in under false pretenses...

another panda-related tidbit i didn't know: firefox is another name for a red panda.

language-learning goodness

i think i've mentioned chinesepod on here before, yeah? the same folks recently launched frenchpod, and i'm using more of my time than i probably ought to be poking around there. but... if i can find a job where they like the fact that i speak french, it'd be better to have knocked some of the rust off my grammar and vocabulary before trying to interview. so yay for feeling a little productive while i'm having fun. they came out with their first upper intermediate lesson today, and i'm rather relieved to find that i can follow it, no problem.

also on language, chris p. (whose blog i think i wandered over to from chinesepod?) recently posted a video explaining his strategy for learning lots of vocabulary in a foreign language quickly. it's not too entirely different from what i do when i'm being serious about learning vocabulary anyhow, but it's more systematic and it's been a while since i've been serious about it. i'm giving his method a try with chinese, albeit using the pdf transcripts of my daily podcast dialogs instead of articles -- not up to article-reading level yet, but the pockets of "things i understand" are getting more frequent!

because i'm five

i was too busy packing to fully participate in the kung fu fest at tyler's last night, but i took a break to see forbidden kingdom with everyone.

on the way out, i noticed that i totally had the little-kid-on-too-much-power-rangers urge to go try out a roundhouse kick on anything in sight.

i resisted.

fun movie, if you like that sort of thing (i do!), but i wish they'd spoken more mandarin -- i can pick out just enough words here and there to really enjoy trying to match up subtitles to audio.

almost caffeine day!

well, really, my laptop says it's 6 minutes to midnight. my laptop doesn't realize we're in another timezone, though. and i doubt that it would be favorably looked upon here, chez les parents, to go wandering into the kitchen to brew a cup of coffee this time of night anyhow. anyhow, if you see me tomorrow and i'm a bit spastic, it's normal easter sunday procedure.

today was gorgeous, sunny and 60 degrees, which if you ask me is a bit too cool for ambient temperature but absolutely perfect for running. i'm sure mumbling to myself the entire time really helps with the keeping up appearances as a sane member of society, but studying chinese while running is my new favorite pacing mechanism -- being able to talk in one-sentence chunks means staying in an aerobic but not-very-arduous heart rate zone, and i don't get bored. (lately, runs have had the tendency to turn into sprints and walking... which is also good, and winds up with about the same average pace, but it feels very different.)

oh, and my friend judson sent a link -- someone's put up a statue of the flying spaghetti monster in front of the crossville courthouse. i may have to make a quick pilgrimage on the way back to knoxville tomorrow.

你好！

one of my favorite projects of the moment is teaching myself mandarin chinese (with occasional bouts of pronunciation help from the boyfriend, complete with laughter on both sides at what a mess i can make of it). it's very odd compared to my other foreign language experience -- since i currently have a lot more time in the car than i have free time elsewhere, i'm picking up the audio side of it more quickly than the written one. (many thanks to the pimsleur audiobooks downloaded from the library and fun podcasts like chinese learn online and chinesepod.)

today, i sat down and started trying to catch up, at least a little, on reading and writing. i got a little frustrated -- i had pdfs with lots of characters i wanted to learn, but i was depending on this site for animated gifs showing how to draw them with the right stroke order. however, to search for a particular character, you need to be able to paste it in from somewhere. this character dictionary is actually pretty amazing for going from pinyin* to characters, but going through multiple webpages was getting a little tiresome...

then... the benevelont electronic overlord** wins again! i got curious about how on earth a person types when a writing system has thousands of characters. there are other input methods, but one of the wikipedia articles mentioned that google pinyin is one of the implementations for translating pinyin to character. so now, i can change my input to chinese in the language bar, then type in pinyin without the accents and select the right characters as i go. i think if i keep typing, it'll use context to decide the right characters for me... but let's face it, there are few enough words that i can spell correctly in pinyin right now that it's a little hard to test.

再见！***

*=the standard system used to romanize chinese. it's phonetic, but i still have trouble with it... my brain won't admit yet that 'q' sounds like our english 'ch', for example.
** i think i owe that terminology to will... so appropriate, though.
*** should be pronounced with appropriate degree of language-learning lesson perkiness. when do i ever say goodbye to you on a normal post?