Mnemosyne

When adding Chinese vocabulary to my Mnemosyne cards, I use definitions from an online dictionary. Many Chinese characters have multiple meanings and so, while I often learn only one particular meaning from my book, I find other meanings in the dictionary. An interesting one I recently ran across is 疼, which is pronounced téng. We learned it, in the chapter of our book on going to the doctor, as "hurt" or "pain". For example, 头疼, pronounced tóu téng, means "headache" (头 means "head"). My dictionary listed some other synonyms (ache, sore) but also gave the meaning "love fondly".

Another interesting feature of Chinese words is the tendency to double up characters that have the same or similar meanings. I imagine this happened partially for emphasis or expressiveness, but also to distinguish a particular meaning of a character (recall that an individual character can often have more than one meaning). For example, take the word 休息, pronounced xiū xi and meaning "to rest". The first character, 休, also means "to rest", but the second character, 息, has several different interpretations: "news; interest; breath; rest".

The character 休 is also cool because it's one of the pictograph characters. The left side is the radical for man, while the right side is the character 木 (pronounced mù) which means "tree". So the character 休, meaning "to rest", is a person leaning against a tree.

I recently joined the Charing Cross library, which is the one closest to Chinatown and which has a large supply of Chinese books. I take out kids' books and try to read what I can. I ran into an interesting character in one of them, which is 佛, pronounced fó and meaning Buddha or Buddhism. I found this character interesting because it's the first sound I've run across that doesn't have any other characters associated to it, not even with other tones. Now, that might be due to limitations in my dictionaries, which are probably not the most extensive Chinese dictionaries in existence, but every other sound I've looked up has had some other characters, and some sounds have tons of characters. For example, look up "yan" with the "Pinyin" option in the online dictionary. Not all sounds have that many entries (try "xiong"). But then try "fo".

Basic Corner Shapes

I really like this one too.

Fest!

Marty and I are on the same Heathrow -> JFK flight!

Ooooh... pretty....