AR&IO Chinese Course Episode 3: 抗議還是騷亂？

this is episode three of the AR ni Oh
Chinese language course way back in episode two I insinuated I hinted at a distinction between Connie and other less flattering words for political protests let me tell you something in this life one man's protest is another man's riot when you when you look at this photograph do you do you see a protest or do you see a riot when I first saw this headline gee a tie so this is not a quotation from the article this is just the headline of the article I assumed this was going to be about Thailand because Thai Ghul is the way we say Thailand in modern Standard Mandarin Chinese but no tiata is actually Catalonia this is the short form of the name of the country Catalonia in Chinese right so yet I saw LuAnn GC hey so many she the next part of the headline is somewhat bizarre if you recognize the word hoodia you can guess the meaning this is suggesting to you that there are continuing riots in Catalonia as part of a butterfly effect somehow indirectly linked to the protests or the riots in Hong Kong you can probably read about the same events for example recent protests in Hong Kong and one newspaper might describe it as a protest and another may describe it as a riot I'll have my lovely assistant read the show to you in perfect Chinese in just a moment but the sentence begins Shen Gong Wu ji teach young padawan I think you might just want to skip the word tan Wan we're gonna cover a lot of vocabulary in this lesson here the meaning is economic paralysis in other context it would mean paralysis in the sense of a physical disease but now let's hear the sentence as a whole given that Hong Kong Airport has been paralyzed would we really call these protests or would we call this a riot sound Conchords it's you trying time quiet kind you hi she's so long my lovely assistant is reading you a real world example of a headline on a news item tangy hi Solan is this a protest or is this a riot puggy hi she's so bad you may have noticed that there are some words I dwell on for quite a long time and there are some I skip over quickly because some of these words they're not merely more interesting but there are words or characters you will use intensively starting from level one in Chinese so I did not spend any time at all discussing the word for paralysis whereas LUN Cong and E three of these four characters we started this episode with those are characters you really need to know those are characters you are going to be using intensively already at level one in speaking reading and writing Chinese if English is your second language you need to memorize the word riot just for that one context just for that one meaning and then the word riot will only come up in rare and extraordinary circumstances when you're talking about politics and history and so on but then one half of the word for riot in Chinese actually is a character that you're going to see and use day after day already at level one in Chinese that's because Chinese unlike English will take this one character and use it in different combinations with a range of remarkable meanings so studying Chinese is in this way quite intellectually stimulating here we see LUN hand written on a sign here in the mountains of central Taiwan so I took this photograph myself I was walking down the street and I noticed this sign someone had put up and this also draws our attention to the tremendous challenge ordinary people have in coping with the complexity of the Chinese language this is not calligraphy but the person who wrote this using a felt-tip marker you can imagine they really took some time to write this correctly and you can see none is correctly assembled from each of its constituent parts even though it doesn't quite have the verb of outright calligraphic Chinese and you can imagine this person was really quite angry and frustrated with people leaving litter leaving garbage on their tiny garden in the front of their house and I I would assume it took them at least 30 minutes to write out this this sign once you get into writing short essays you also will realize how tremendously time-consuming it is to write something out by hand in the Chinese language as opposed to typing it on a computer and typing it on your phone many many Chinese people I would say today the majority of Chinese people can type done but would not be capable of writing it correctly and accurately even though as I've been emphasizing LUN is not just a character you're gonna see associated with riots it's not just gonna come up in the discussion of politics and history this is in fact a symbol that comes up every day in your life living in China or speaking Chinese precisely because it has these other uses like Lando so how are you possibly going to remember and practice writing this character LUN accurately this is where the study of Chinese etymology is not merely of historical interest but is a very real practical value in our lives here and now look at the top left corner of the screen you'll see that I'm drawing your attention to the resemblance between done and very common level one vocabulary like it's high you're looking there at the symbol or the radical of a hand reaching downward at the bottom of the left hand side of lon you then have a hand reaching upward and that particular symbol for hand in the bottom left corner the character could be familiar to you from common characters like the yo in Ponyo Ponyo meaning friend again level 1 vocabulary in between the two hands you have a confusing mess of brushstrokes what this is very imperfectly rendering in 21st century Chinese silk on a loom being worked by two hands coming together there is a very close resemblance between this LUN and the common character rule rule is a word that vegans need to get familiar with immediately it's used more like our word dari in English rather than the word milk itself so dairy products if you're reading the ingredients on the side of packaged processed food you really need to learn to watch out for a rule it also does mean breast and breast milk and so on so sometimes it does mean breast in reference to human anatomy and sometimes the meaning is dairy as in dairy products like yogurt and so on um top left corner of rule again you can see this radical of a hand reaching downward the bottom left corner is the child I guess you say the child's growing upward in the center of the screen you see a really ancient attempt to draw this character where it is a true pictograph you can see the mother embracing the child but on the right hand side of the screen you see the way in which this was stylized or systematized into three separate radicals the hand reaching down the child reaching upward and then the single line on the right hand side of the character is here supposed to symbolize the human breast in this case we really do know the whole history of this written character we know the symbolic meaning of each of its parts and how they're assembled to have a new symbolic meaning as a whole this is rare this is extraordinary and this also were of the limitations of Chinese etymology the limitations of breaking characters down into their pieces and offering an analysis component by component because the truth is the single hooked brushstroke on the right hand side of rule does not have the same symbolic meaning or value when we see it on the right hand side of blood we are encouraged to imagine that on the right hand side of one this is a stray strand of thread whereas the character as a whole is depicting two hands coming together and working with a bundle of silk thread and then this one line is a strand of thread that got away that sounds to me like a story that schoolteachers made up rather than a real etymology of the character but in any case these are the limitations of learning the characters component by component but if you don't learn the etymology in history of the characters you are just left with having to memorize a mess of meaningless lines but there's good news the good news is once you put in the effort to learn these incredibly difficult characters they come up again and again even within level one vocabulary back in Episode two this word come where this character Cong came up in two very different contexts we talked about kanji meaning to protest a political protest a protest march but it also came up in the history of China's war against Japan and this same character Kong I even see it every day Here I am holding up proudly a household cleaning product known you're gonna see it on store shelves you're gonna see it every time you go to the pharmacy or the grocery store Kang Jun antibacterial in some contexts we would say antibiotic the word for antibiotic or antibacterial is a struggle against bacteria in the same way that in a political and historical context we talk about the war being a struggle against the Japanese in situation for the you Buddha health commissioner you Norman Bethune of the canadian-american medical unit reporting for duty Tommy you don't do 8/3 John Norman Bates you in 70 bother well you know who are you me I faked my death [Music] well a bunch of junk war become you changing ezel Fantini la tho junk war there are many many ways to express the purpose of an action in Chinese there are many ways to say that you are doing one thing in order to accomplish another but the teacher I worked with in Kunming China for many months she always insisted to me that I should avoid using whele altogether I think this is partly because of the gap between written Chinese and spoken Chinese sometimes they seem like two separate languages I would guess it's also because of the gap between textbook Chinese the somewhat simplified way the chinese has taught to foreigners and the reality of how native Chinese speakers actually communicate whether in writing or in speech but I was told again and again and again no don't use whele and what you see here on screen this sentence fragment it's not really even a complete sentence does indeed be kid with whele so in order to help China in its struggle against Japan remember we learned kung earlier in this episode so this is normally translated as the anti-japanese war congra john-john well a bunch of junk war become you changing and then we have the date when he arrived in China he's old Fantine you lie though junk wall as I've no shared with you my teachers warning that whele should be avoided perhaps in our own written compositions and when speaking Chinese as foreigners how about I give you an alternative here is the sentence pattern wait this show this is a slightly hilarious example from my favorite textbook see if you can guess what happens next I've highlighted the word pay just in case you don't know it or maybe you don't know any of the vocabulary in this sentence pay is the main verb when I was first learning Chinese it always helped me immensely if I could figure out which words were the verbs in the sentence and then sort of see the rest of the sentence structure organized around that had some Alipay poverty cheating some fall even if you're starting at level one or level zero in Chinese you should get the general drift that this is a question with Zimmy and then we have a reply that's going to begin with we do show we this is gonna tell us in order to do something it's going to tell us the purpose of an action so the question is had someone low pay you've already been warned that pay is the main verb in the sentence but pay is one of those words that your teachers and textbooks will conspire to avoid teaching you and no not for any kind of political reason but just because it's unbelievably confusing and not too terribly useful look I know that pay and Boo are two completely different words but you have to admit if you were confronted with these two symbols on the final exam on a multiple-choice test you you might get them mixed up it's essay composition or whatever I think the teachers and textbooks have just decided that the world would be a better place if foreigners could get through their first few years of studying Chinese without having to learn and practice the difference between pay and Boo because they are too painfully similar looking Chinese characters so our first sentence is asking why does she always accompany her son to the gym gentian fan gym and then our answer comes with way to show and look guys I got to admit to you some of these things in language they come down to a matter of opinion my teacher was of the opinion that we should have wanted using whele and I'm of the opinion that way tisha sounds more conversational sounds more like real-world 21st century Chinese and this is a very conversational colloquial real-world 21st century Chinese answer wait is she young Potter Pollard's is if a so why does she always go with her son to the gym you could translate this as in order to help her son lose weight you could translate it as that she's allowing her son to lose weight in some context the verb rung really is more like allow but probably here in plain English to make her son lose weight and the function of weight issue beginning the sentence lets you know that the answer is going to tell you the purpose or the objective that the question was asking about abdominal bullet means we must work fast football total death that's he's lost too much blood we must give him a transfusion immediately to Chicago tomorrow sushi you see a jump on you want Li Ling quite sure what a shred tortilla so what is dr. with Yoon doing in this dramatic scene yo ETN EAGA Xiang Yun Jie Auto Show shoe sho shoe is operation show sure young un champion note that we've had this word Yin before we talked about it at some length in earlier episode here it gives us the sense of a wounded person more often we know it from words that mean a staff member an employee or communist party member right you need the shunran's realtor show show show you a Leo said hey door eating Camilla handle Jew don't sink wha bout will and I for sure young chui's year Louie teon eager Chang Hyun soo Yeon soo show shoe shagging do sheer tidal shall do it hey dual he's lost too much but Chang yen yoshii atado shall do it hey dual he's lost too much blood Chang Yin do see a typo we must give him a transfusion immediately eg in Kumi de condado de jong shin Kwong hai chew and daifuku yahoo xie na koto de marzo sushi yahooza tissue massage sushi so what is read towards you mayor should any instrument wash your ocean link highlight Josh awho by Joe and I foo generate the schwöre Shoalwater you should remember the verb Joe remember Joe remember from an earlier lesson see it's all coming back all the stuff we did in the earlier lessons comes up later on if you remember the meaning of Cho you have half a chance at guessing the meaning of the sentence [Music]