天天向上

Zhong Shan Park on Sunday

2009-03-29T02:54:00.000-07:00

Zhong Shan Parkis one of the biggest park in Puxi, Shanghai. Today is Sunday, as usual there many Chinese old people doing exercise in the park. I found some of them were really cute....

The first old man wearing white clothes was doing Tai Ji Quan( 太极拳), and he played really good Tai Ji Quan. He looked very fit and healthy as well. There were some other people behind him doing similar exercise, too... however, none of them looked professional.

The following three people were playing a kind of quite strange exercise: slowly moving his body with a long stick on his head. I tried to google this exercise, but have got no result yet...

There were many people dancing in the park as well. Most of them were middle aged people. Though there are really more and more old people in the society, I could see that quite a lot of them are trying their own ways to keep healthy.

The phonogram 酪

2009-03-22T04:18:00.000-07:00

奶酪 nai3 lao4 means cheese in English. Most of the time I'd tell people that actually Chinese have another name for cheese from the sounds which is 芝士 zhi1 shi4.

However, there were still some students asking about the meaning of 酪 lao4 from the word 奶酪.
From the dictionary zdic.net, I found one of the meanings of 酪lao4 was 用果子或果子的仁做的糊状食品 [sweet paste made from crushed nuts;sweet nut paste]. And here you could see how it looks in the acient times:In one word, 奶酪 nai3 lao4 in Mandarin means sweet milk paste.

Why's Shanxi Road 陕西路 written as Shaanxi Road?

2009-03-21T23:02:00.000-07:00

One of my students found that one of the street names in Shanghai was strange: Why some of the Shanxi Road陕西路 was written as Shaanxi Road which for them was almost impossible to read?

I found the answer from Google:　本市从2007年8月起，对城市道路路名牌进行了全面更新工作，由于陕西路和山西路的拼音均为“shanxi”,故在陕西路的拼音内加了“a”，拼写成 “shaanxi”，此举主要是为了区别于山西路，并非疏忽，这一方案主要是为方便外国友人查找道路，同时，也通过了相关专家的评审。

So finally the reason is just to keep Shaanxi Road(Which in Pinyin should be written as Shanxi Road陕西路) different from Shanxi Road(It is also written as Shanxi Road in Pinyin 山西路). Actually it is very easy for Chinese people to distinguish 陕西路 Shaanxi Road and 山西路 Shanxi Road from the pronouciation with the help of different tones, in which 陕西路Shaanxi Road should be pronounced as Shan3 Xi1 Lu4, and 山西路 Shanxi Road should be Shan1 Xi1 Lu4.

This is also a reason I suggest people who are learning Mandarin to learn some characters instead of only Pinyin. I could imagine how boring and difficult for those who insist on Pinyin study... In my oipnion the best time to start a character study is when you know the basic conversations and have a very good Pinyin basis.