Vocabulary #10

Hello everyone! 大家好！

对不起, there was no blogging during the last time, 因为我昨天刚刚从瑞典 (Sweden) 回来了。我那边参加了一个学校安排的 exchange project, so there was no time to write new articles for my Chinese 博客. Sorry for that.

But now, I’m going to 继续 my blog:

(瑞典的早晨, by me.)

In 瑞典 we had very beautiful sunrises and sunsets every morning and every evening.

So I asked myself how to say sunrise and sunset in Chinese. I actually remembered that I learned those words when I was in China, but obviously I forgot them. Maybe its because I nearly never saw beautiful sunrises or sunsets in China. ;-)
(Do you remember the character 霾 from one of my previous articles? …)

However, here we go:

• 日出 (ri4chu1) – sunrise, sunup

• 日落 (ri4luo4) – sunset, sundown

So, if we translate it literally, 日出 means something like “the sun comes out”, 日落 would be “the sun falls down”. (落 means ‘to fall down’) …
I pretty much like those words, because they have this kind of ‘Chinese logic’ of combining characters.

啊，对了，昨天是中国的中秋节。还是祝你们中秋节快乐！;-)
(Yesterday was the Chinese Mid Autumn Festival. I hope all of you watched the moon …. ;-p)

Stay tuned, 拜拜 ..
Arne

Character of the day #16

你们好！

Yesterday we started with 怄, today we are going to continue this 忄-character topic: Actually I was kind of lucky today, because I did’t had to look for today’s character, I simplay kind of 碰到它了 while I was chatting with a Chinese freind on MSN. ;) However, here it is:
Today’s character is 懦, pronounced as nuo4. 懦 bascially means ‘cowardly’ or ‘weak’.

We can use 懦 as follows:

• 懦弱 (nuo4ruo4) – cowardly, weak

What’s more we can use 懦弱 in a construction of four characters:

• 懦弱无能 – be weak and useless

And here we have a sentence using this word:

她太懦弱，不敢为自己的权利挺身而出。- She was too weak to stand up for her own rights.

The construction 挺身而出 seems to be kinda interesting to me: 挺身 (ting3shen1) literally means ‘to straighten one’s back’/ ‘to stand up’. The actual meaning is ‘to have the courage to do sth.’/ ‘to have the courage to take responsibilities’. 挺身而出 means something like ‘to stand up bravely for sth.’

所以，如果你们有什么问题或者碰到什么困难，那就一定要挺身而出。听明白了吧？:p

Stay tuned (:
Arne

Character of the day #15

Hi everyone!

I’ve been quite busy yesterday, so there was no new character … Sorry for that.
But I’ve been thinking about how to continue this ‘character of the day’ series and decided to take the radical 心 (heart, feeling) for the next few days (or weeks). The radical I am talking about is 忄 …

Okay, here we go:

(“怄气”, by me)

哈哈，today I used my 创造力 to illustrate this article. Well, 说实话 it’s not that 漂亮 but I suppose it has lots of 艺术感 … (*^__^*) 嘻嘻……

开始吧: The first character to start our new series is 怄, pronounced as ou4:

• 怄 (ou4) – (1) be annoyed, irritaded; (2) annoy, irritate

So, for instance we could make a sentence like:

别怄我了！- Stop annoying me!

And there is an interesting word, that uses 怄:

• 怄气 (ou4qi4) – sulk; be in a sulk

And of course we have an example for the usage of this word, too:

他因为被她拒绝而怄气。 – He sulked after she refused him.

Or another one:

他怄了一肚子气。- He smoldered with anger.

I think this one is literally something like “He sulked with one stomach full of anger.” ;-) “One stomach” (一肚子) seems to express some kind of amount (“a lot of anger”) …

Okay, I hope you won’t have any problems with your 怄气. ;-) Take care, Arne.

雨-radical-characters: summary

Hello again! :)

With the last character (霫) we finished our first topic: 雨.

I made a list for you and me to remember those 8 characters that I learned during the last days:

• 霖 (lin2) – heavy rain, continuous rain

• 雰 (fen1) – mist, air; heavy (rain)

• 霄 (xiao1) – clouds; heaven, sky

• 霈 (pei4) – heavy rain, profuse rain; carefree, contented

• 霭 (ai3) – fog, haze, mist

• 霾 (mai2) – thick haze

• 霞 (xia2) – rosy clouds, morning or evening glow of the sun

• 霫 (xi2) – dripping (of rain)

I think, those eight characters and the words I described in the correspondending articles are a good start to describe (mostly rainy) weather situations.

I hope you like this way of learning Chinese characters. :-) If you’va any comments, questions, suggestions or whatever, please leave me a comment.

And the next radical I’ll cover is going to be ………..
(You’ll know soon^^)

Character of the day #14

(‘Cyclists in the rain’, Beijing, by Liam Spencer)

大家好

I guess, I’ll post the last 雨-character today, ’cause there are not so many of them and it’s getting harder and harder every day to find new characters using the 雨-character …

Okay, here we have number 8:

• 霫 (xi2) – dripping (of rain)

As we already did with 雰 and 霭, we can doible this character to make the word:

• 霫霫 (xi2xi2) – (rain) dripping, pattering

Actually I’m still not that sure how to use this character, but I’ll update the article or add a comment, when I find a sentence or something like this using 霫 … ;-)

Regards,
Arne