Thorn Tree travel forum

How to write Chinese Character?

I want to make the new season of Bruce Shaw's Chinese, I have made some vides on Chinese Character

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnZE0pZiXmk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiwKXX6HlHw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rw8S9ahey8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rw8S9ahey8

I am not sure if they are useful for guys who want to learn Chinese. Or do you have any ideas to promote my videos? Thanks.

Bruce Shaw

Translating place names

French compound place names are always written with a hyphen. For example, Trifoullis-les-Oies. This is not the case in English, as far as I know.

I just did a translation from French to English that contained names of churches and places. The museum curator whose text it is is complaining that I left out the hyphens, even though I kept the French name. For example, I said Saint Etienne Cathedral, instead of St Stephen's Cathedral, since I feel that whoever buys this book might look on a map to go to the cathedral and will find it written as Saint-Etienne and not Saint Stephen's. However, I did not include the hyphen of Saint-Etienne Cathedral.

Any opinions? She just called me and I said I was trying to get some expert opinion.

Polish word 'tuszka' for some kind of fish

Any Poles out there please. In the market today I saw herring, salmon, trout etc and something called 'tuszka' which looks like sardine or herring. I bought some and about to grill it but cannot find its equivalent in a Polish English dictionary, though one entry did offer 'carcass'... which I assumed meant the bones once the flesh/ meat had been removed, and that certainly isn't what these 'tuszka' look like!

"Duh" around the world

I've always been fond of the word "duh", and I find myself using it rather too frequently (although never seriously, I hope). Its cousins "dur" and "doy" and the related phrase "no duh" are also acceptable, especially if you're 8 years old.

Do other languages have synonyms for "duh", or, as American Heritage defines it, and interjection "used to express disdain for something deemed stupid or obvious, especially a self-evident remark"? And has "duh" spread throughout the English-speaking world?

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

finches and rotkehlchen

Are robin redbreasts a type of finch?
i wonder because the french for finch is supposed to be "pinson" and when i google that i get the same pictures as for the german "rotkehlchen".
the english language robin redbreasts and finches however look different, not only from each other ( that may be because they are american species?)

Russia translation help for train travel

Dear russian speakers,
in one month I'll be traveling in to Baikal lake by train, that's why I'm working on my russian
to deal with the ticket counters at the stations :-), which the most correct why to say in russian:

• upper berth (couchette)
• middle berth (couchette)
• lower berth (couchette)

• the bed sheets for the berth on the train

please don't hesitate to write in cyrillic
spaciba
alby

Aramaic

Hi,

I have a friend who's looking for a translation of two words into Aramaic. Can anyone help???

The two words are:

Perfect Imperfection.

Thanks A LOT in advance if anyone can help.

Pieter

Help with Chinese Characters

Evening. I'm having some difficulty with learning Chinese characters (who doesn't, right?) and I was wondering if someone could recommend a learning style or method that has worked for them.

Here's some background. I'm an American living in Korea. I started taking a Mandarin Chinese course about a month ago. Prior to this, I had done some self-study of characters, but it was mostly limited to 2-7 stroke characters. Anyhow, now I'm in this class with a bunch of Koreans (its also taught in Korean, surprise surprise).

I'm hardly new to learning languages- I'm a language teacher and I am literate in several languages with non-Roman script (Korean, Hebrew, etc.). But I have to admit that I'm really struggling with Chinese. The first problem is that the other students in my class learned several hundred Chinese characters at part of their schooling. I, of course, did not . . . I am pi... more »