little problem, this is what I see on my computer '我家养了好� ' :(

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.html

That'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?

第一段“新鲜”的拼音不对，popup里面有zhaozhe

The characters are right (一二小时) and so is the the translation, but not the pinyin - it says shijian in the text if I remember it correctly.

Hey guys,

Thank you all. Corrected. .

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com

@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.

BTW, on Google, 渐渐的, used adverbially, seems to be a lot more common than 渐渐地.

Any advice?.. Follow the, lets say, 73% who use 的 or the 27% who use 地? (those are the proportions for 渐渐的了解 vs. 渐渐地了解,(17,800 | 6460)?

In the text, 浑 and 身 are translated separately, giving "muddy body". Should this be 浑身: "all over"?

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! :)

Finished working through it. The story is sadder after it sinks in. The repetition of "自此，我家好久不养猫" drives home the author's resignation. The second cat comes just a few days after the first. He waits a long time before raising the third cat, but the end result is still the same.

There's a helpless quality to the story... Whether through his own actions (beating the cat) or through the actions of others (the passerby on the street) the author can't stop the cats (friends? family?) in his life from dying or going away. The author is emotionally guarded after the first two cats. He doesn't want to love again... ultimately, it makes no difference.

While the plainness of the language makes the piece easy to read, emotionally the effect is all the more naked and bleak. The form accents this, too. The cat sections get longer over time... Cat 1 gets one long paragraph; Cat 2 gets more; Cat 3 gets half the piece. The reader spends more time with each successive cat. His attachment grows--along with the author's--until the cats are at last taken away.

A form outline shows how plain and emotionally bald this story is:

["I've raised many cats. They always die or go missing."]

Cat 1 - lively, spry

Result 1 - becomes withdrawn, dies

[After just a few days...]

Cat 2 - feisty, playful

Result 2 - stolen away

["After that, we didn't raise cats for a long time."]

Cat 3 - comes unannounced. taken in, but not especially loved or wanted

Result 3 - falsely accused by author, beaten, dies short time later

["After that, we didn't raise cats anymore."]

I'm curious. How typical is this short story (in tone and form) to other modern Chinese literature?

Hi Echo, can I ask what this phrase: '可怜这两月来相伴的小侣' means in context? Thank you. The definitions don't really help. :)