Celebrating labour by goofing off

[muckefuck]

It's been a low-key weekend so far, just a few people over for grilling last night. The Chinese calligrapher & co. are due this afternoon for Kaffee und Kuchen which will give monshu a chance to show off some seals (and, one hopes, get a few stubborn ones translated) and me another chance to embarrass myself in Mandarin. I never wrote about my experiences last time since they were, if anything, more humiliating than my attempts to speak Dutch a few weeks earlier. Sitting next to the calligrapher's wife, I turned to her and asked "Ni3 yao4buyao4 ka1fei1?" so I could instruct the waiter to pour and she answered "Yao4!" It was my only fully-successful foreign-language communication of the day.

At the time, I could blame my comprehension problems on a noisy restaurant and sinus congestion. No such excuses this time, so I tried to prep by listening to Chinese Internet radio. Even with news stories I know ("Ka3te4li3na3" was, as you might expect, the top story--even beating out news of the one typhoon currently laying waste to Anhui and the other heading for Kyushu), I could only nab a few comprehensible phrases out of the incessant flow of syllables. I don't favour my chances.

Comments

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

I think you need to be a bit fairer to yourself, nena. Seriously, you've been studying Chinese for HOW long now? I know people who've intensely studied the language full-time for six years who still have end up experiencing communication breakdown. You can't just magically have full comprehension skills with as (relatively) little time as you've had to use those skills.

Get seals translated??? O_o

[teapot-farm.livejournal.com]

Is it *very* sad that I'm all proud of understanding your exchange with the calligrapher's wife?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

No, it's cool! I still feel like every bit of Chinese conversation I manage to pick up is a tiny victory.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Chops, hon, not sea mammals. We had one in the nine-fold script that we hadn't been able to decipher, plus others that have been eluding my meagre capabilities for months.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Awww, we NEVER get to read sea mammals ;_;

Is there any way for you to somehow "scan" said chop? I'm just curious to see -- I doubt I'll be able to decipher it, either. ^o^

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

There are already scans up on monshu's website. The official seal in nine-fold script is on the far right of this page.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Well thanks! I don't know if you posted a link to this in regards to the seal scans before, but if you did, I apologize; I must have missed it somehow.

... and yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, I can't even BEGIN to decipher that ... o_O I'd especially love to know what in God's name the second character's supposed to be.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Second starting from where? This one is read top-to-bottom, right-to-left and the second character is 山 "mountain". Second from the end is 戶 "household", IIRC.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Top-to-bottom, right-to-left is exactly what direction I was going for (and really, the only direction I've ever really seen seals get written -- do you have examples of it ever being left-to-right?). I'm familiar with other seal styles and styles similar to this, but this one ... yeah, I'm not used to "vacant" space being so uniquely filled (the "steps" surrounding mountain threw me, thus explaining why I didn't recognize the character).

So just so we're clear : you DO mean this one, ne?



So, do you know what the character is to the left of it? I'd be curious to see what you HAVE deciphered...

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the highlighted character is 山. There are actually two characters directly to the left of it, since the middle column has four characters to it rather than three like the outer columns. I can't read the fourth, but the first three are 中千戶, i.e. "middle thousand households". 山 adjoins both the lower half of 千 and most of 戶.

Thanks to Huang xiansheng, we know have a full transcription of the seal. Maybe next weekend we'll have time to mount it on the website.