#Also my first language is Chinese

[thattabletstudier]

Not sure if I'm on the autism spectrum, but I consistently feel the urge to write down vocabularies of different languages, here's an example, I wonder are there people (whether autistic or not) who hyperfixate on words like me do?

[dearmyloveleys]

just curious, do yall still want/are interested in another translated version of the mdzs original text? I’m fully fluent in English, love books, write fiction myself (graduated with a minor in creative writing as well), and 80% fluent in written and spoken Chinese. If I may, I can offer a more writerly/authorly + detailed (definitely not in the way of more embellished) interpretation and formatting translation of the og text which I feel that the Seven Seas ver is lacking. But I will probably need one or two others’ help in proofreading and cross checking translations!

[parlerenfleurs]

I am now on Duolingo, and I think this is my villain origin story. Not because I'm suffering or anything, I just absolutely enjoy being evil (ripping the first place spot from that one guy in my league who really, really wants to be first, but unfortunately for him I also really, really want to be first and enjoy the idea of ruining his day with my superiority).

[astertheworld]

whys everyone so mad at me for saying its reasonable to consider katseye kpop likeeee. sorry man they are literally a kpop group 💀

[deus-ex-mona]

starting the year ✨wrong✨

[mathmusicreading]

@yummysuika @ospreywhite I really appreciate your translation work; can you explain more about shichen timekeeping to me? Because I know a tiny bit of modern Mandarin Chinese, but I can't recognize the shichens as the zodiac animals:

Zi (I don't know "rat", so I actually can't make any argument here.)

Chou (I don't know "ox", but I reasonably could have expected "niu" for "cow".)

Yin (I know "tiger" as "hu".)

Mao (I don't know "rabbit", but to me "mao" is "cat".)

Chen (I know "dragon" as "long".)

Si (I don't know "snake", but now I find it interesting that it sounds like death, like snakes could be seen as evil in Chinese culture similar to how they are seen in the Christian world.)

Wu (I know "horse" as "ma".)

Wei (I know "sheep/goat" as "yang".)

Shen (I don't know "monkey", but I would have expected "Sun" or "Wu" or "Kong" because of "Monkey King".)

You (I know "rooster/chicken" as " ji".)

Xu (I know "dog" as "gou".)

Hai (I don't know "pig/boar" unless "pork" and "pig" are the same "siu".)

I tried asking my parents, but they just starting talking about how the Chinese zodiac is actually a 60-year cycle with the 12 animals and the 5 elements. So are these shichen names the "Pre-Han dynasty semi-descriptive terms"? Is it kind of like the difference between "midday" and "noon" in English? The former is a "descriptor", the latter is a "name", but they "mean" the same thing?

(I tried checking the etymology for "noon" on dictionary.com, so to be fair "ninth hour" is a descriptor, but in Modern English it's not really recognizable as such and so for the sake of my shichen question, I'm calling "noon" a "name".)

Or is this another language/dialect or due to the evolution of language (changing words and pronunciations)?

I was also looking up the Dragon Boat Festival being on the unluckiest day of the year, and it says, "The Chinese name of the festival is pronounced differently in different Chinese languages. Duanwu (端午) literally means 'starting horse'—i.e., the first "horse day" of the month according to the Chinese zodiac." so I was able to get the exact character for "wu". I think it's interesting that Wikipedia says "literally ... horse" but putting 午 into Google Translate yields "midday, noonday, seventh earthly branch, 11 a.m.-1 p.m." It's unfortunate that Wikipedia only says "different Chinese languages" for "Duanwu" instead of specifying them or time periods, but I appreciate it listing different romanizations by country for Cantonese.

Would you say there's any pattern to Chinese writers or English translators using the above terms vs. using "hour/time/head/body/tail of the (insert zodiac animal here)"? Like if one sounds better for a historical fantasy setting, or choosing to use the pinyin in English instead of translating to not be translating literally? ETA: I should have gotten onto a computer sooner. I asked my parents and then you guys because searching "shichen" in Wikipedia just resulted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_units_of_measurement. But further digging took me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_timekeeping. I'll probably get answers there (Maybe I'll even be able to explain to my dad why he was thinking of ten stems and not matching mathematically with "60 is from 12 times 5, not 10 times 6" when he was trying to lecture on the 60-year cycle for the Chinese zodiac, lol.), so my apologies for bothering you. I'd still appreciate your thoughts on what was formerly the last paragraph about writing and translation choices!

[kenonade]

esalen………………………………………………………………………

[lactosefreevanillayoghurt]

:)))

[claire-starsword]

oh there's the proof I wanted. while you can easily access the enemy assets by unpacking the jar file, it does not include their palette swaps.

I guess that in order to do a thorough sprite rip i'll have to actually play the whole game and see all enemies. how tragic. having to replay one of the most important games of my life. a sacrifice i make for the greater good

[trans-girl-uchiha-itachi]

no no no no no i can feel myself being dragged into the special interest event horizon where i try to semi-realistically worldbuild/develop narutoverse japanese (specifically for the purposes of a scholomance crossover fic i probably won't ever finish where the elemental countries were basically shoved into a pocket dimension and closed off from the rest of the world in perhaps 1530 to get rid of the sage of the six paths) and i KNOW this is a huge mistake (don't go into the caves etc etc) but hhhhhhhhhhhhhh

like i'm already playing around with this concept that the hidden villages "feel" more modern than the rest of the naruto world and ESPECIALLY the non-ninja sengoku-flavored samurai social class and i think it would be cool if that extended to language (also something i'm playing with a LITTLE bit, because in my fics people from konoha tend to use honorifics in a modern way and i'm tryingggggg to figure out period-accurate honorifics to use in the daimyo's court but given that i Do Not Know How To Read Japanese this is really hard) BUT in the grand scheme of things the naruto world is still a small isolated society where you'd expect language change to not be very fast, and japanese has shifted a fuck of a lot in the irl world where we all live since the sengoku period, so i think it would be very fun if in the scholomance fic people from the naruto world talk 80% like they're in a stupidly well-researched period drama and 20% like they're speaking a different language

(ALSO IT MAY ALREADY BE TOO LATE FOR ME TO ESCAPE given the existence of my conlang notes on anbu sign language but shhhhh)

[oliveskylarks]

anyone else think necromancy is a better translation than demonic cultivation? like “demonic” and “diabolism” have heavy christian connotations i feel like, and necromancy is just more true to what it is, which is using the spiritual energy of the dead

[bigbrainbiology]

I'd like to be able to stream and hang out when I draw one day <3

I decided to name this OC 'Saengdao' - แสงดาว, meaning 'Starlight'

Whilst it's not quite how Thai nicknames work, I think shortening her name to 'Dao' - ดาว, as a nickname would be cute as this also means Star!

[ruiconteur]

every time i hear someone reference crazy rich asians when i talk about my country my temper gets a little bit shorter. kevin kwan doesn't know shit and the movie isn't any better.

[fortune-maiden]

is... is the King’s Avatar novel getting a Russian release?

[cometchasr]

hi. singaporean chinese guy. it's a problem here too, mostly tied in with our mother tongue problem (tldr every student fucking sucks at chinese/malay/tamil/etc. now) and how everything is dying as english becomes more prominent. even singlish, whose peak ended in 2007 when PCK was discontinued, really. we really do not know our own heritage from where we came from, or even from singapore. hawker centres are dying, no one knows their own culture anymore, all we know is whatever we see on social media, which is overwhelmingly english american media. no one young here listens to local artists, watches local shows, knows anything other than whatever popular english song is on right now. hell, there's a reason jj lin's entire youtube channel is in traditional chinese despite him being singaporean.

we all speak english by default nowadays, because PAP said so. we were always more susceptible to it, and now it's reached the point where i do genuinely believe that we are going to run out of chinese teachers and will have to start bringing them in from china and taiwan within my lifetime, same for the other mother tongues.

yeh, it sucks

DO NOT LET SOCIAL MEDIA TURN YOU INTO AN AMERICAN

[faeriekit]

...I had a guy come in today asking about how to get his kids library cards. I told him. He asked me how hard it would be for them to get them, and I said that all it took was their presence and his government ID.

He told me about how nice the system was here, where it was so easy to get a card; he said that there was a beautiful public library in Beijing that was top of the line and everything, but that the only way to access it was if you were a high ranking government official or a top professor or something. Instead, our library "serves the reader." His kids will be able to take chapter books home at no cost. He'll even be able to get books in Chinese here so that his native language skills don't atrophy.

I didn't even really know what to say, so I told him how to ask us to buy books for him that we don't already have so that he can still read them at no extra cost. I don't know how to shore up what it must feel like to know that there are books out there you can't read; I've always grown up with a good library nearby. It reminded me of working in my old library, though, where families who spoke Spanish were startled to find out we took any government ID with a formal address in town— even foreign IDs— so that their kids could get access to all of our titles in all the languages we offered.

Ah. Anyway, I hope you check out a library book with this thought in mind. I checked out the first volume of YJ98 today with that thought in mind. I didn't have to pay anything. I put it on hold, and there it was.

Edit: for those who struggle with reading comprehension; no, this patron interaction is not meant to represent the status of the Chinese public library system at large nor the country of China itself; this was my response to a random Chinese immigrant dad's anecdotal concerns as he expressed them to me, because the whole breadth of concern I'm responsible for while on desk starts and ends at recommending which library services would fulfill his needs. If you think he misunderstood or was lying about the status of public libraries in China, that isn't something I'm charged to verify before writing my thoughts and feelings about the patron interactions I was exposed through throughout my day. Expecting anything else is absurd.

Edit edit: Also, your library may not actually use Libby as the distribution method for their ebook collection. The best way to find out about how to access your library's ebook collection is to call them directly.