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This is fun at Chez Chenu:
Upon leaving work, I picked up a copy of a free Chinese weekly called 大紀元時報 ("The Great Era Times", known in English as The Epoch Times), curious to see whether my renewed study has paid any dividends when it comes to understanding newspaper Chinese. I gleefully translated an ad on the back for an "Asian Farmers Market" in my hometown which included the useful phrase 應有盡有 "Everything that should be there is there" (i.e. "Everything you want and more!").
When I got to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu's place, I laid out the paper, grabbed my dictionary, and walked him through my fragmentary understanding of the articles. Here's one on the Taiwanese elections, this is about the Olympics (including the first, blurry photo I've seen of Calatrava's half-completed roof for the Olympic stadium), I think this has something to do with the Three Gorges project.
The most fun was to be found in what Germans would call das Feuilleton. Selections from the Three Character Classic for young learners of Chinese (a thousand year tradition!), articles on obesity and high blood pressure, a guide to the characters and locales of Lord of the Kings, etc.monshu's attention was seized by some photos of artifacts in the margins of an article claiming to find traces of the legend of Yi the Archer in prehistorical remains.
So I hunkered down and went through it line by line. We found that it referred to someone's theory of a bird cult in the ancient pre-Shu culture exmplified by the site of Sanxingdui (or "Three Star Mound") in Sichuan. Never heard of it? Neither had we, and we try to keep reasonably current on such things. In the absence of writing, archaeologists still only have tentative ideas about the position of the culture that built the walled city here. As I explained tomonshu, it's only relatively recently that people have started to take seriously theories that a sophisticated civilisation in the Yangzi Basin preceded that along the Yellow River. Still, I never expected such a important find that I'd never heard of. (Turns out it was a little to recent to make it into the history books I read as an undergraduate.)
We ended with a speculative discussion of a trip to China, which could include a side trip to Chengdu in order to visit the nearby Sanxingdui Museum. Some day!
Upon leaving work, I picked up a copy of a free Chinese weekly called 大紀元時報 ("The Great Era Times", known in English as The Epoch Times), curious to see whether my renewed study has paid any dividends when it comes to understanding newspaper Chinese. I gleefully translated an ad on the back for an "Asian Farmers Market" in my hometown which included the useful phrase 應有盡有 "Everything that should be there is there" (i.e. "Everything you want and more!").
When I got to
monshu's place, I laid out the paper, grabbed my dictionary, and walked him through my fragmentary understanding of the articles. Here's one on the Taiwanese elections, this is about the Olympics (including the first, blurry photo I've seen of Calatrava's half-completed roof for the Olympic stadium), I think this has something to do with the Three Gorges project.The most fun was to be found in what Germans would call das Feuilleton. Selections from the Three Character Classic for young learners of Chinese (a thousand year tradition!), articles on obesity and high blood pressure, a guide to the characters and locales of Lord of the Kings, etc.
monshu's attention was seized by some photos of artifacts in the margins of an article claiming to find traces of the legend of Yi the Archer in prehistorical remains.So I hunkered down and went through it line by line. We found that it referred to someone's theory of a bird cult in the ancient pre-Shu culture exmplified by the site of Sanxingdui (or "Three Star Mound") in Sichuan. Never heard of it? Neither had we, and we try to keep reasonably current on such things. In the absence of writing, archaeologists still only have tentative ideas about the position of the culture that built the walled city here. As I explained to
monshu, it's only relatively recently that people have started to take seriously theories that a sophisticated civilisation in the Yangzi Basin preceded that along the Yellow River. Still, I never expected such a important find that I'd never heard of. (Turns out it was a little to recent to make it into the history books I read as an undergraduate.)We ended with a speculative discussion of a trip to China, which could include a side trip to Chengdu in order to visit the nearby Sanxingdui Museum. Some day!