Although written in 1925, Zheng Zhenduo's essay on the cats in his family remains well known almost a century later. Originally aimed at adults, the story is often included in compilations of literature intended for high school students in China.
Leanne,We try to follow the national standards on pinyin romanization, which require words like 失踪 to be unified. Mark Swofford has a write-up of the rules at his great site Pinyin.info. The detailed rules are:http://pinyin.info/readings/zyg/rules.htmlThat's a strange issue you've run into with encodings. It looks like it's a font issue, actually, which is quite strange. Can I ask what browser you're using?
Hello,
Where the text reads: 它渐渐的肥胖了，但仍不活泼, talking about the cat, shouldn't it be 地 instead of 的？ I'm still learning, so I'm probably wrong.. but 肥胖 is a verb in this case isn't it?
Anyways, beautiful read. I love the short stories section on this website and look forward to more of them.
Thanks!
@stratman1,
Hi, thank you for the post. I was thinking about wrtie a short note about this and finally someone asked:)
It should be "地", although the article was written by 1920s/30s. The grammar and the way they used words were a bit different from what we do now. For 经典原著, we kept the original version, i.e. what you have seen:)
--Echo
echo@popupchinese.com
Never read that one (can't read Japanese) myself. I really like this story though: it has heart.
We have a bit of a partiality for cats generally (Echo loves dogs). There's a breed of long-haired white ones that are common to Beijing but that I haven't really seen elsewhere. Maybe they're Persians. Gorgeous cats and really tranquil: love being picked up and petted.
Its right both ways! I love not having to worry about this sort of thing. :) This would make a really interesting fill in the blank question for native Chinese speakers though. We should come up with a set of 15 or so questions where dominant usage goes against convention and just see how people end up answering it.Another one that came up while we were recording last night was the proper pronunciation of 尽 in 尽快. Third tone? Fourth tone? Both seem acceptable.
the story is great and the feature is great, but there seems to be a discrepency with the version presented in the 'text' section and all other versions i've searched on the web, particularly in the first few senteces where the construction and order of phrases and words is different... there are also several mis-speakings and at least one phonetic mis-pronunciation (chinging si4 into xi4), xin1suan1 gets reversed to suan1xin1, and some little phrases are just completely altered...would be so much nicer to have the acurate original version read correctly...
It's pretty common for there to be multiple editions of various texts from this period, so it's quite likely the version that was recorded was not exactly the same as the annotated version down to the character. Especially since I think Echo was reading from a printed text here rather than any of the online versions. We obviously want to be aiming for consistency, so even small discrepancies like this should be ironed out. I've added this to our list of things to look into. Thanks for the tip, nadasax! :)
Leave a comment:
Lesson Downloads
A high-quality MP3 file specially-tagged for your iPhone or iPod. Listen anywhere.
Subscribe for access.
