Re: Please learn English better

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Article #3272

#3272

From: Mike Wright
Date: Wed, 08 Jan 1997 00:00

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71064.332@compuserve.com (George Partlow) wrote:
> [...]The one thing I _like_ to do but haven't yet, is
> to learn a basic set of Chinese written characters, as James Fallows
> of the Atlantic magazine once suggested.  This would be quite useful
> in Korea, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia[...].

Perhaps not as useful as you might hope, unless you learn some basics of
each of the languages. Even then, the most common characters are not the
same from language to language.

There are also some interesting pitfalls, as illustrated by the story of
the Chinese man who went to Japan on vacation. Though he did not speak
Japanese, his friends told him that he should be able to get along fine
by writing Chinese. On his return, his friends asked how his trip had
gone. He said, 
"The Japanese are nice enough, but their soup is awfully thin."

The joke is that the Chinese character for "soup" is used by the
Japanese to mean "hot water".

By the way, Koreans of my daughter-in-law's generation never studied
Chinese characters at all in school, though some older and younger
people did.

-- 
Mike Wright
____________________________________
email: darwin@scruznet.com
WWW:   http://www.scruz.net/~darwin/language.html

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From: Mike Wright <darwin@scruznet.com>
Subject: Re: Please learn English better
Date: 1997/01/08
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