Laowai Chinese 老外中文

Sorry for the White out

2008 July 18 – 7:30 am

Categories: Blog Updates | 1 Comment »

If you tried to visit in the last 48 hours or so, you would have seen nothing on this site but the White Screen of Death.  I just got it sorted out by upgrading to WordPress 2.6, but I have a feeling the addition of the “secret key” (which I added a few days ago) and that final carriage return that Colin talks about was the problem.  Regardless, the upgrade fixed everything.

Sorry to bore everyone with blog updates like this, but I have a feeling some of my readers also use WordPress and this info might be important for them.

For you email subscribers: this post SHOULD come in an email with the previous post about finding out the geneder of a Chinese person from ta’s name.  If the emails don’t go out today, something else is broken (thanks for your nàixīn 耐心)

Wanted: Chinese Name Gender Reference

2008 July 16 – 3:04 pm

Categories: Computer, Resources | 7 Comments »

I sometimes get emails from Chinese people that are friends of friends, or someone I’ve never actually met, and I’m not really sure if it’s a boy or girl.  There was no way to know ahead of time because it was always “tā” when my friend mentioned “tā,” and I never thought to ask.  So then I get an email from someone like, 张安平 or 李娟 and I don’t the gender of the sender (it’s a mind-bender!).  I don’t want to be an offender, so this is something I’d like a computer to render (ok, I’ll stop).

I know it’s not the MOST important tool in the world, but still, here’s what I want: I enter a Chinese given name (míngzi 名字) and it tells me whether it’s most likely a boy’s name or a girl’s name.

I know there are some that are ambiguous, but I get the feeling that Chinese people can tell from reading someone’s hanzi name if that person is most likely a boy or a girl.  For example the inclusion of “flower” (huā 花) is a dead giveaway that it’s a girl, and “dragon” (lóng 龙) is reserved only for boys, right?  Well where’s the resources that lists all those sorts of rules of thumb?

Questions for you all (if anyone’s still reading):

1. Does something like this exist?  If so, where?  If not, don’t you think that’s unfair since English learners can easily find out the gender of most English names?

2. If this doesn’t exist, would it be possible to create (given the technical savvy)?  What would the problems be?

Fairy Tale (an easy song to learn)

2008 July 11 – 9:47 am

Categories: Songs | 3 Comments »

I know my little translations of pop songs are some of the least popular content on this blog, but I just can’t help it, sorry.

“Fairy Tale” (tónghuà 童话) by Guāng Liáng (光良) is very popular right now (in this part of the country at least).  It also has the added benefit of being one of the simplest (linguistically and musically) Chinese pop songs I’ve heard.

I’m trying a new format for posting the lyrics.  In addition to the “printer friendly” PDF format, I’ve got a plain text file as well.  I tried just slapping the plain text lyrics in this post, but it got kind of long.  If either of you two readers who actually look at my pop song translations have an opinion about the lyrics format, please let me know.

Lyrics (English, pinyin, 汉字)

Fairytale (printer friendly)
(requires Adobe Reader, which is available here).

Fairytale (plain text)

NOTE: To download the document directly to your computer without viewing it in your internet browser, right-click on the link and select “Save link/target as…”