UniLang

My understanding of what a morpheme is is that it is what you get when you break a word down till you can't break it down to any smaller pieces and still have meaning. So for example the word "irrevocably" can be broken down into "ir"' "re"voc"and"ably" and these are the morphemes of the word "irrevocably". Does Chinese have any morphemes?

Of course. I think probably most Chinese characters are morphemes.

I'm curious does Taiwan use the same character list as mainland China?
I've tried doing a bit of research on it, but I have yet to find a definitive answer.

I would suspect that even if they use a "different" list, it's largely the same. I just want to know if there are any differences.

And no, I'm not talking about the simplified vs. traditional thing here.

vijayjohn wrote:Of course. I think probably most Chinese characters are morphemes.

There are a few exceptions, e.g. 葡萄, 蝴蝶. Despite being two-character compounds, these are monomorphemic.

I'm not sure if the argument works the other way, e.g. is 甭 (from a contraction of 不用) analysed as a single morpheme or two?

księżycowy wrote:I'm curious does Taiwan use the same character list as mainland China?
I've tried doing a bit of research on it, but I have yet to find a definitive answer.

I would suspect that even if they use a "different" list, it's largely the same. I just want to know if there are any differences.

And no, I'm not talking about the simplified vs. traditional thing here.

I think the answer is likely to be "yes, they use the same 'list'", but what do you have in mind, theoretically speaking, if there were any differences?

It's still worth pointing out that as far as the printed standards go, some simplified characters correspond to two different traditional ones. Reality on the ground is a little messy though.

I'm not sure if I had anything in particular in mind, as I am just beginning to dive into these waters in general.

I think I just wanted to be sure, because I know that there are pronunciation differences, some words have been borrowed into Taiwanese Mandarin from Taiwanese Hokkien, etc. So I was ready to hear anything.

Though I suspected that they would, by and large, use the same "list" of characters for most types of written materials.

It's still worth pointing out that as far as the printed standards go, some simplified characters correspond to two different traditional ones. Reality on the ground is a little messy though.

That's interesting, thanks.

Any recommendations on resources for learning traditional characters? (reference materials, character dictionaries, etc) I expect my course to do a good portion of the work here, but some additional materials never hurt.

księżycowy wrote:I think I just wanted to be sure, because I know that there are pronunciation differences, some words have been borrowed into Taiwanese Mandarin from Taiwanese Hokkien, etc.

Those are very colloquial. I learned to speak Chinese using Taiwanese materials and they didn't include any Hokkien borrowings. I don't recall any English borrowings either, even though those are becoming common in the PRC as well.

linguoboy wrote:Those are very colloquial. I learned to speak Chinese using Taiwanese materials and they didn't include any Hokkien borrowings. I don't recall any English borrowings either, even though those are becoming common in the PRC as well.

I get that. But sometimes those colloquial terms have a way of weaseling their way into the standard.

linguoboy wrote:

vijayjohn wrote:Of course. I think probably most Chinese characters are morphemes.

There are a few exceptions, e.g. 葡萄, 蝴蝶. Despite being two-character compounds, these are monomorphemic.

I'm not sure if the argument works the other way, e.g. is 甭 (from a contraction of 不用) analysed as a single morpheme or two?

Very good point!

I guess many "load words" like the 葡萄 and 蝴蝶 are monomorphemic, and I can easily think out a few more like the 咖啡(coffee)、巧克力（chocolate）、沙发（sofa）、扑克 （poker）、爵士（jazz）...

Ow! All these examples hurt my brain. I need an 阿司匹林.

I've started trying to watch a Taiwanese (Mandarin) movie from 1991 called 五个女子和一根绳子 (translated into English as "Five Girls and a Rope"), apparently about sexism in rural (feudal?) China. I was trying to learn some new phrases, but I'm confused by some of them.

One term they use is 沤臭. The English subtitles seem to suggest that means 'to decay'. Does that sound about right? Is it pronounced ōuchòu or òuchòu?

Does 吃一口井长大 mean 'to grow up together (in the same hometown)'?

The most confusing part for me is the introduction to the main characters, particularly when they're talking about how old they are. The first one is twenty years old, and they describe her as "二十齐头." What does 齐头 mean? Something like 'altogether'?

The third one apparently just turned nineteen when the story started, so they describe her as 刚满十九. Does 刚满 mean something like 'just turned'? Does 齐头 have a similar meaning?

The second one is sixteen, and to describe her age, they use the phrase 吃十六的饭. What does that mean?

没人回答你的问题！

vijayjohn wrote:The most confusing part for me is the introduction to the main characters, particularly when they're talking about how old they are. The first one is twenty years old, and they describe her as "二十齐头." What does 齐头 mean? Something like 'altogether'?

齐头 means "exactly", so “exactly 20" in this case.

The third one apparently just turned nineteen when the story started, so they describe her as 刚满十九. Does 刚满 mean something like 'just turned'?

Yup.

Newb question: why are Google Translate and Assimil giving me different tone markers for some syllables? Is this the famous tone sandhi? Which tone mark would make more sense to put in my flashcards (keep in mind all my cards have audio as well)?

No, tone sandhi in Mandarin Chinese is actually pretty simple. The reason why this thing is happening is because Chinese characters often have more than one pronunciation. Usually, 要 has 4^th tone and is pronounced yào, but in some contexts, especially certain compound verbs, it's pronounced yāo with 1^st tone. (The only example I know off the top of my head is 要求 yāoqiú 'to request'). I recommend ignoring the 1^st tone pronunciation for now and just recording the 4^th tone one. In this context, yāo doesn't make any sense, but Google Translate isn't a human and so is bad at identifying context.

In Mandarin, these are called 多音字 duōyīnzì ('many' + 'sound' + 'character'), and OldBoring has complained before that they're what makes Chinese characters so hard. This is also why, on my personal thread, I sometimes include multiple pronunciations for the same word (for example, in my last post, I noted that 坟场 'graveyard' can be pronounced either fénchǎng or féncháng).

Also: thanks, Yasna!

vijayjohn wrote:I've started trying to watch a Taiwanese (Mandarin) movie from 1991 called 五个女子和一根绳子 (translated into English as "Five Girls and a Rope"), apparently about sexism in rural (feudal?) China. I was trying to learn some new phrases, but I'm confused by some of them.

One term they use is 沤臭. The English subtitles seem to suggest that means 'to decay'. Does that sound about right? Is it pronounced ōuchòu or òuchòu?

Does 吃一口井长大 mean 'to grow up together (in the same hometown)'?

The second one is sixteen, and to describe her age, they use the phrase 吃十六的饭. What does that mean?

I asked these questions to a woman who very recently immigrated from Taiwan two years ago (from Taipei, and if it matters she also speaks Mandarin better than Taiwanese Min Nan), and she couldn't answer these questions. She said 沤臭 is a very, very rarely used term, and as she's never heard it she didn't know whether it *should* be ou1 or ou4. She thinks she has heard 吃一口井长大 meaning "to grow up in the same way/manner", but she wasn't sure. She's never heard anything like 吃十六的饭.

Ser wrote:

vijayjohn wrote:I've started trying to watch a Taiwanese (Mandarin) movie from 1991 called 五个女子和一根绳子 (translated into English as "Five Girls and a Rope"), apparently about sexism in rural (feudal?) China. I was trying to learn some new phrases, but I'm confused by some of them.

One term they use is 沤臭. The English subtitles seem to suggest that means 'to decay'. Does that sound about right? Is it pronounced ōuchòu or òuchòu?

Does 吃一口井长大 mean 'to grow up together (in the same hometown)'?

The second one is sixteen, and to describe her age, they use the phrase 吃十六的饭. What does that mean?

I asked these questions to a woman who very recently immigrated from Taiwan two years ago (from Taipei, and if it matters she also speaks Mandarin better than Taiwanese Min Nan), and she couldn't answer these questions. She said 沤臭 is a very, very rarely used term, and as she's never heard it she didn't know whether it *should* be ou1 or ou4. She thinks she has heard 吃一口井长大 meaning "to grow up in the same way/manner", but she wasn't sure. She's never heard anything like 吃十六的饭.

1 吃一口井長大，i guess Vijayjohn is correct; it mean "我和你共吃同一口井的井水長大＂

2 漚，這裡讀四聲 òu,`意思是 「久漬」，浸泡很久的意思。於是發出了臭味，所以叫「漚臭」。
老舍寫的小說 《駱駝祥子》：＂除了一件灰色單軍服上身，和一條藍布軍褲，都被汗漚得奇臭＂。

BTW, all these terms are very dialectal and thus literary.

I baidued this text and it seems it's in 弗兰话 湖南话.

Saim wrote:Newb question: why are Google Translate and Assimil giving me different tone markers for some syllables? Is this the famous tone sandhi? Which tone mark would make more sense to put in my flashcards (keep in mind all my cards have audio as well)?

In this context, 4th tone it is! Quite sure about that.

By micro-learning (in this context), I mean to merely familiarize oneself with a certain language without actively even trying to remember anything.

This is what I already have been doing it with Finnish, for example. Some words simply stick , like ruokakauppa (food store).

Trying to do the same one with Chinese, i.e. exposing myself to a few words or even phrases hoping that at least some of them stick without doing any rote memorization.

Any ideas on how exactly to do it, keeping in mind that Chinese is a tonal language so words can be more difficult to remember if someone comes from a non-tonal language background?