The folks over at Chinesepod have once again done an amazing job on a subject that, while probably not relevant to everyday life in China, is entirely practical to watching X-Files reruns dubbed in Mandarin.

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A common dog name, which is basically the equivalent of “whitey”. Like this dog:

If anyone knows of any other uses please leave them in the comments section.

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A sign on the campus of Nanjing Normal University

This sign caught my attention mostly because of the small cartoon that accompanies the message. I cropped the area in question below:

My first impression is that it the blue figure is a ninja fighting two bad guys, but this is obviously not the case on a government sponsored notice. The large characters at the top are an idiom, 见义勇为 （jian4yi4yong3wei2), meaning “To act bravely for a just cause” or “Never hesitate to do what is right”. My translation for the section to the right of the illustration:

Victims who come into contact with violent criminals such as murderers, robbers, rapist, kidnappers and other people who are harmful to public safety should practice self defense.

So the blue guy is really you, stabbing the criminal on the left and punching the other guy in the face after they tried to steal your sack of 100 Yuan notes. That is some good self-defense!

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Recently I have discovered that my Chinese grammar is awful. I still have problems making sentences that should be pretty basic, and still have problems placing phrases in the correct order. Other areas seem to be progressing nicely, such as my character recognition and my listening. My speech is still terrible, but I kind of expect that and assume that it will take years and years of work before it is anywhere near natural. With the grammar it seems like I missed something basic as I was starting to learn Chinese and that is why it is not “clicking” for me.

But has anyone else had this problem? Any advice as to how to remedy this situation? Easy ways to remember how to construct sentences? Any help would be appreciated.

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I had written before about IPR week, but April 26th is the official worldwide day of IPR protection. As China makes a show of cracking down on piracy, World Intellectual Property day is the perfect time to hold large public events. I bet most of them even had big red inflatable arches. From one of the Nanjing daily newspapers, Public Square Publicizes “Intellectual Property”. (translated by me, so if there are any translation problems let me know)

Yesterday, 4/26, was “World Intellectual Property Day”, and the Provincial Industry and Commerce Bureau, the Copyright Bureau and other departments in Nanjing held a publicity and advisory event on Shangxi Road, with the related departments accepting 152 complaint cases. As an authority from a Beijing software company at the event told this reporter, software is the the most pirated industry, although the loses are difficult to calculate.

Is it that surprising that an authority from a software company would say that software piracy is the most widespread problem? Although he is correct that piracy loses are difficult to calculate, this is true for any industry. And I have to wonder what exactly was given to the authorities as complaints. Other then suspicions that your neighbor is running a DVD factory, what are they telling them that isn’t already apparent just by walking down the street.

Of course these kind of events were held throughout China. In Xiangfan, Hubei province, the authorities staged a standard steamroller rolling over DVDs event. I will never understand why they use a machine that is designed to make things flat to run over flat objects. I think a wood chipper makes a better point. And in one of the more bizarre piracy crack down cases, from a humorously titled China Daily article, Police pluck bird flu research base to find DVD pirates

NANCHANG - Chinese police have nabbed a pirate DVD production and sales ring that had concealed their operation in a supposed bird flu research base in east China’s Jiangxi Province.

Zheng Deming, head of the provincial anti-pornography and anti-illegal publications office, said police in Jiangxi, Hubei and Guangzhou seized at least 16 alleged members of a fake DVD ring which has produced and sold about 26.4 million DVDs in two years.

It goes on that to say that the owners scared away local residents by telling them that it was a flu research facility, and locked the factory doors and would not let the workers out during the day. Why isn’t this case getting more attention in the United States? It has two things the media loves, bird flu and Chinese factories.

I hope everyone had a good IPR week and day, and will conclude with a statistic, once again from China Daily. It is hard to say what will happen with piracy in China in the coming years, but I think it will be interesting to watch.

Statistics from China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate show that in 2006, 1,224 people were arrested on intellectual property rights infringement charges, up 44.9 percent over 2005. In the first quarter this year, 578 more offenders were arrested on intellectual property rights charges, up 19.4 percent over the figure last year.

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Today I created my very own Chinese Myspace account. While browsing around the site I realized that I didn’t know a lot of the vocabulary for using these social networking sites, or frankly for websites in general. So I will pass what was learned onto you.

社交网络站点 (shèjiāo wǎngluò zhàndiǎn)
Social Networking Site

常见问题(chángjiànwèntí)
FAQ

垃圾邮件 (lājīyóujiàn)
Spam

首页(shǒuyè)
Home Page

不当内容 (bùdàng nèiróng)
Inappropriate Content

邀请好友 (yāoqǐng hǎoyǒu)
Invite Friends

发布公告 (fābù gōnggào)
Post Bulletin

博客 (bókè)
Blog

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I found this in the latest copy of Chinese Learning magazine, and I am totally stumped.

年纪不算大
胡子一大把
不管见了谁
都叫妈妈妈

Though not old in age,
He wears a bushy beard.
Whoever he meets,
He will call “mamama”.

The English translation is from the magazine. Leave your answers in the comment section.

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As I have mentioned in this blog before, I love looking at dictionaries. I can’t believe that anyone who works at a dictionary company would actually hate their job. Your meetings would revolve around if words like “overstand” should be in the dictionary. Or answering emails about the proper usage of phosphorescent. How can you miserable doing that? How?!?!?!? Well, maybe the guys lifting boxes of dictionaries. Those things can be heavy.

What is not heavy however is my Concise English-Chinese / Chinese-English Dictionary. And sometimes when looking through it I discover English words that I don’t know. Words such as pelmet.

–noun
a decorative cornice or valance at the head of a window or doorway, used to cover the fastenings from which curtains are hung

I didn’t even know there was a word for that. In Chinese it is 窗帘盒，chuang1lian2he2.

Also, 肛门, gang1men2, means anus. Bwahahahhaha.

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忍着 (ren3zhe3) - ninja
海盗 (hai3dao4) - pirate
外星人 (wai4xing1ren2) - alien
机器人 (ji1qi4ren2) - robot
飞碟 (fei1bie2) - UFO

And for more information, please visit:

UFOs in China
UFO in China video (Let me know how it looks, I can’t watch stuff on Google video here)
UFO Organizations Worldwide

And this video showing a UFO in Nanjing! OMG!

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This is one of those perfect examples of how important tones are in Chinese.

狗食 (gou3shi2) = Dog Food

狗屎 (gou3shi3) = Dog Shit

Obviously they are different characters, but the sounds are the same expect for the tones. As one of our friends said “One is the beginning and the other is the end”.

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