Comments on: character characteristics

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:36:47 +0000

傅 is recognized as Simplified script, anyway!

Once I tried to switch my name on Facebook from “Andrew Pouw” to “Andrew Yiwen Pouw” but the Facebook people rejected it. If you could have done it over, Dad, would you have just stuck with the Pinyin or would you have gone with Ewen again? Ewen is ungainly because it is meant to be pronounced “yew-an…”

By: t..h.p

t..h.p — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:30:36 +0000

In this case, their names were more a compromise as we were looking for some phonetic equivalent of Ewen as a middle name. Ask Andrew; he can explain better.

By: mandy

mandy — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:24:09 +0000

hehe…Now that there’s a 傅奕文，is there a 傅奕武 too? Chinese parents wish their children could be 文武双全, like 姜文 and 姜武.

By: mandy

mandy — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:01:59 +0000

the former.
http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/1762551.html?fr=ala0

By: t..h.p

t..h.p — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:31:56 +0000

傅奕文 or 付奕文? Which one look better?

By: mandy

mandy — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:25:45 +0000

Survival the fittest. Simplified characters introduced in 1950s are recognized and used popularly on the mainland, but the attempt to further simplify the characters in 1976 failed. A friend’s surname is Cai 蔡, different from vegetable 菜. He was upset at the announcement of the second generation of simplified characters, coz 蔡 and 菜 were simplified to be a same new character. It was a relieve to him that the second generation was finally discarded and he escaped from sharing the same family name with vegetables.

Actually it’s not that difficult to make out the traditional script, even though we only learned simplified characters at school. You can check it out with any of your students, guess it’s because we’ve been exposed to HK TV programs with captions of traditional script.

By: t..h.p

t..h.p — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 01:53:47 +0000

The kids that grew up in mainland China all learn the simplified version and yet just about all of them also are able to read and (probably write) in the traditional form, that is at least true for my generation. If you live in a Chinese speaking environment, you will be exposed to both as I remember that many books I read were in traditional forms as they either were old books or came from outside China. For someone outside China learning the language, I see that it poses a problem.