Thank you China Guy. But would it be customary to ask in the desired Chinese dialect or in the vernacular?
Also, is it true that Orientals can indeed tell by facial features what the nationality is of other Orientals? Can you, for example, tell a Japanese from a Korean from a Chinese person? Or is this a myth?
If untrue, then I have to chase down my old Japanese roommate and let him know he misled me. It’s bad enough I gotta find my high school history teacher and tell him that Chinese nationals were not used in Tora Tora Tora.
Your roommate was wrong. If a Japanese, a Korean, a Chinese, a Philippino, and an Indonesian are shown to you, there’s a better than random chance that you’ll be able to identify their nationalities, just as there’s a better than random chance that you’ll be able to identify the nationalities of a Norwegian, a Frenchman, a Spaniard, a Greek, and a Russian who are shown to you. In both cases though, it’s not nearly certain.
DanBlather writes:
> Holy crap, that’s the mother lode.
Ethnologue is the first thing to check for any language questions, just like the IMDb is the first thing to check for any movie or TV questions.
My wife and I have both lived in China for more than a year and we both got 7 on the test(we took it separately). I think those people in the pictures live in America. If you show me Koreans in Korea, Chinese in China, and Japanese in Japan, I might score higher.
Ok, so how do you say “Mandarin” in Mandarin? I’m a lowly student of the language, but I have yet to find a neutral way to say it. “Putonghua” strikes me as politically loaded, and I’ve never actually heard anyone say “guoyu” or “huayu” even though I’m aware they’re used. How do you refer to Mandarin, if you’re not certain whether you’re speaking to someone from mainland China, Taiwan, or elsewhere?
my handy dandy Concise dictionary doesn’t even have an entry for “Mandarin.” My wag for Mandarin Chinese means the Beijing dialect, which is what was spoken by the imperial court “Mandarins”, but it’s a European word
Hanyu is the most formal. Putonghua is what is used in Mainland China. Guoyu is the Taiwanese version. Zhongwen is pretty universal.
Minority groups in China use “hanwen” as in language of the Han Chinese as opposed to the minority group.
In SE Asia, many of the overseas chinese say “huayu”
As for that tell the race thing, it should be renamed guess the Asian American ancestral roots. Asians in America, especially say 3rd or 4th generation, can look quite different than the cousins back home. Add in dress, physical mannerisms, etc. To me, it’s pretty easy to spot the Asian American in Asia.
As for nationalities, I hate the guessing game, because people often get insulted if you guess the wrong nationality. That said, I can easily recognize those with a “stereotypical” face between Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Tibetan, Miao, Malay. Heck, I can pick out a stereotypical Shanghaiese person (actress Joan Chen would be an example). It isn’t foolproof but akin to being able to recognize a Scandanavian, Greek or Spaniard in a crowd.
So zhongwen is understood to be in reference to Mandarin, and not any of the other Chinese languages? ::sighs:: Why does it have to be so complicated? And what’s the difference between a wen, a yu, and a hua anyway? Most of the regional dialects are referred to as hua, correct? Shanghaihua, Yuehua, Minbeihua, etc. Is this accurate?
China Guy, while you’re here, could I ask you a quick question? My uncle has found a painting with two characters on them, and I believe they are “da” (big, old) and “ri” (day, sun). I am a little doubtful of the first one being da however… the line diverges into the two different pieces right where the horizontal line is, which is higher than the depiction of da that I am familiar with. I am still unfamiliar with how the Chinese phrase things, so I am unsure of what dari would mean. Any thoughts?
liirogue, most likely it’s Japanese. Dainichi (that’s how it would be read) is a somewhat poetic word for “Japan”. “Big” looks like what you describe:
大
Perhaps so. I’ve never been west of California and I live in the midwest. I rarely see an oriental person unless I go to a Chinese restaurant…and still I scored an 8.
It’s not totally a myth that Asians can tell which ethnicity another Asian person is. It’s not foolproof, but in general they’ll do better than average.
And, that “all look same” thing is kind of hard because, in addition to other reasons already cited, I’m pretty sure the makers of the test deliberately threw in a lot of faces that really look like a “typical” ethnicity X but are actually ethnicity Y.
Actually, I don’t think that’s why. IRL there are faces that are very typical but there are just as many that aren’t. What gets taken out of the equation is differences in fashion and body language. With the face alone, it’s very difficult to tell where someone is from, outside of certain very typical types.
The chinese call mandarin “putonghua”. Its true to a certain extent that the written language is common, however Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau use a different writing system. After the cultural revolution the communists didnt want the PRC people to read about pre-communist China…they wanted to control what the people could read so they developed “simplified” characters. Only text written in simplified characters was allowed in China, so the idea was that after a generation or 2 no one would be able to read traditional characters so if a history book or newspaper was smuggled in to China no one would be able to read it. As the political situation in HK, Taiwan and Macau was different to that of PRC they continued to use the “traditional” characters. My wife, for example, can speak cantonese and mandarin (putonghua). She can read traditional characters and can recognise some simplified characters but not enough to read a newspaper. She (and millions of others) can read out loud in putonghua a text written in traditional characters. Most people in PRC can’t read traditional characters
On the subject of recognising faces…generally its not very clear cut. Filipinos are easy to identify, as are Nepalese. Some Thai girls are easily recognisable, but there are no general-across-the-board way to identify Chinese/Japanese/Korean just from their faces. One way to tell them apart is to listen to them saying “thank you” in English. Japanese tend to say “Sank you”, Chinese tend to say “Fank you” and Filipinos tend to say “Dank you”. This is VERY general, of course there are exceptions.
Is that really true? It’s not that hard to learn the traditional characters if you’re literate in simplified - I’m studying simplified characters in class but it’s not that hard to learn traditional ones; they’re not all that different.
No, this is not true. As you point out, the characters aren’t all that different.
Simplification was done in an effort to promote literacy. In most cases, the simplifications were just formalizing the sorts of handwriting shortcuts that many people were doing anyway.
This makes them easier to write, though they lose a certain amount of “charm” (a fact that leads to a number of people in China still using the traditional forms in writing their names).
