I’ve been working on getting a scholarship to study in Taiwan for Fall 2008. Of course, I’ll definitely need to brush up on my Chinese before I go.
Back in the States, I’ve already taken two quarters of Mandarin. The coursework was primarily in Pinyin, which means I didn’t really learn many characters. My pronunciation was decent, though, as I was fortunate enough to have a professor from Taiwan and one from Beijing. I got the best of both worlds, so to speak.
Here in Germany, I took an additional course in Mandarin, which assumed knowledge of characters. Pinyin was used exceedingly sparingly (basically whenever I asked the professor to write something in Pinyin). It was in some sense a crash course, and I had to learn at least 200 characters for the final exam, which I ended up getting a B on.
In Taiwan, however, the characters are very different from the characters used in mainland China.
Regarding the trip to Taiwan in the fall, I recently received a placement exam for Chinese via e-mail. I thought, “No sweat!” and popped it open. I actually laughed out loud when I saw it. First question:
( )今天是李小姐的生日,王先生___她吃飯。
- 送
- 請
- 買
- 賣
If you know the answer, hook me up in a comment, OK? Because I sure as hell don’t.
Fuck traditional characters.
Hi Voraus,
The answer is 請 (qǐng).
to ask / to invite / please (do sth) / to treat (to a meal etc) / to request
Good luck!
Any spam that helpful is allowed.
My site is non-commercial. Won’t bother you again.
Oh, I meant the comment in good spirit! It’s just unreasonable that the internet allows help to find me like that.
I’m happy to provide a link to your site, just because it so bizarrely well illustrates the minatory power of connection that has come to characterize this changeling called the internet.