This is one of those poems that Chinese kids learn on their own (kinda like swear words), no one admits to teaching this poem and no kid admits to learning it from anyone. =)
| chun1 春 | tian1 天 | bu2 不 | shi4 是 | du2 讀 | shu1 書 | tian1 天 | ||
| Spring is not a studying season | ||||||||
| xia4 夏 | ri4 日 | yian2 炎 | yian2 炎 | zheng4 正 | hao3 好 | mian2 眠 | ||
| Summer is so hot, I could nap all day | ||||||||
| deng3 等 | de2 得 | qiu1 秋 | lai2 來 | dong1 冬 | ye3 也 | dao4 到 | ||
| By the time Autumn rolls around, Winter will be here soon too | ||||||||
| bu1 不 | ru2 如 | bei4 背 | qi3 起 | shu1 書 | bao1 包 | deng3 等 | ming2 明 | nian2 年 |
| I'll just pack up my schoolbag and wait for next year | ||||||||
Page Summary
badkarma_05 : (no subject) [+5] - nicosian : cute poem [+2]
- mayna : (no subject) [+2]
- (Anonymous) : the Mandarin version [+1]
Comments
The character set is basically the same, but kanji is the Japanese term. She's not Japanese, she's Chinese. It's han zi (with some variations on the spelling). I know you didn't mean it that way, but as someone who's Chinese it feels disrespectful to me to refer to it with a Japanese word.
Anyways, I'm not posting this to give you a hard time, just to point it out for future reference. Maybe I'm the only person bothered by that, but I bet I'm not.
I used to get annoyed at Canadians using American spellings; I chewed someone out for saying "zee". I'd get annoyed at people who ask me for the nth time if a book is written in Mandarin or Cantonese. I'd get annoyed at people who won't use tone markers to denote the tones in Chinese (Chinese is a TONAL LANGUAGE, there's no representing it without tone markers!!! That's like never using consonants in English *seethe*). I'd get annoyed at people who mispronounce someone's name (not necessarily mine) and then go, "oh, yeah, whatever" when corrected. I'd get annoyed when people wouldn't even try to pronounce sounds outside the phonetic inventory of their native language, expecially if the sound was contained in a name. I'd get annoyed at English spelling and grammar errors. I'd get annoyed at...
And then I'm like, man, I'm picky...
I know I can be too picky too, sometimes, which is why I tried not to overreact in my response to him... :)
But I still like the han zi characters, and I’m sorry for jumping around and twirling in your journal…
< head for nearest horizon > Yipe, yipe, yipe… < /head for nearest horizon>
At the airport, my supervisor routinely mangled english names.
Hannibal Lector became Hannibal Hector.
Dynamex became Diamonex.
I ripped her a new one when she sent me a memo telling me forms must be filled out ileligibly.
Uhh. legibly. Right o.
The written language is the same. The pronunciation is different. Which is why they're called "dialects" and not different languages =) There are slight differences in the definitions of words and slight differences in grammar. Mandarin can be written exactly as it's spoken (like English), but you cannot technically write prose the way you speak in Cantonese.
You could quote someone and the colloquialisms have an approximate sounding harmonic paired with the radical for "mouth" to denote that it's slang or indigenously Cantonese term. But those words are not accepted as a part of the language (no matter how much the people from Hong Kong tell you they are).
At the airport, my supervisor routinely mangled english names.
That would drive me bananas too. And then, there are people who keep mangling _information_. >={
my theory. I'm sticking with it.
Reminds me of the booger song I learned in Argentina
Yo tengo un moco, yo saco poco a poco
(I have a booger, I pull it out little by little)
Yo redondeo, yo miro con deseo
(I roll it in a ball, and I look at it with desire)
Yo me lo como, y como sabe un moco
(I eat it and since it tastes like a booger)
Yo me lo saco, y vuelvo a comencar
(I spit it out and I begin again)
It's complete with hand motions and everything.
Writing Spanish without accents is like writing Chinese without the little numbers at the end. heheh :-)
Actually Americans that spell things the Canadian/Australian/British way annoy me. Because they do it because they think they're cooler than everybody else and have to be different.
People, who, when online, converse with acronyms. Such as "r u m or f?" "how r u?" "me 2" "nm" etc. My sister turns from intelligent being to blabbering idiot the moment she hits online. She no longer can converse with whole words. She must use every single acronym known to high school kids AND any words she does spell out, she spells wrong. "wuz up?" "nm" "im bored" "me 2"
Eeeew... =S
夏日炎炎正好眠
秋有蚊子冬有雪
放下书包好过年
This is the version we quote all the time in college, when nobody wanted to study. :) we call this type of poem "打油诗". I like this version better as it describes fall and winter in a more specific way. :)