Does ‘dance’ rhyme with ‘romance’ and should it have similar spelling? What about ‘sure’, ‘shore’, ‘zoo’ and ‘pleasure’. Should the ‘s’ in ‘pleasure’ be grouped with the z of zoo, the s/sh of sure and shore… or is it its own sound entirely?

Maybe some day ‘thru’ will replace ‘through’ (though I hope not), but I think it’s foolish and stupid to attempt to change all odd spellings all at once. If you change all spellings, you will loose a lot of etymology.

For example, do you know why ‘segue’ is pronounced ‘seg-way’ instead of something like ‘seg-oo’? Segue comes to English from Italian, via music. In Italian, the ‘gu’ grouping is always pronounced ‘gw’ as in ‘anguished’ and since all vowels are always pronounced, the ‘e’ is also tacked on. Thus, you get ‘se-gw-e’. You’d lose that interesting bit if you started spelling it something like ‘segway’.

I like etymology.

Personally, I don’t have too much trouble understanding most foreign accents (I like listening to the French & Italian cooks on PBS). But there are some that I would have to agree could use some accent reduction classes.

Yes, I would have to say that Americans in general should be more open to learning other languages, but if you don’t speak English as a first language and you attempt to learn it… you should at least try to be understandable. Don’t just go halfway and stop. Take a course from Executive Language Training. You, and those you interact with, will be glad you did.

I have no self-control. I want to know everything.

But one thing I’ve found helpful (even though I haven’t gotten too far yet) are things like listening to a Spanish audio book.

An Ear for Books has a lot of foreign language audio books, starting at just over $9. I’m not sure how good those are, but they do have Pimsleur books as well. Although expensive, Pimsleur books are supposed to be some of the best for learning another language. And An Ear for Books has a lot of different languages to choose from.

Even if you don’t want to learn another language, An Ear for Books has other audio books that you can buy. If you want to know the sort of audio quality they have, you can download some books (though they’re not foreign language books) for free.

So I’ve been wondering exactly what the popcorn bag says in Chinese. It’s been bugging me for months, but I never looked it up. Last night, I finally decided to do so. Here are the characters on the bag:

So it took me quite awhile to look these characters up using a combination of the dictionary at Mandarin Tools and the WaKan software I have installed. I had a friend helping me look, on his computer, but since I couldn’t get a scan of the bag, I had to describe the characters. And he still managed to find them just about the same time I did.

Anyway, I finally found all four characters which are ‘ci mià n xià ng shà ng’ in Chinese pronunciation. As with most Chinese characters, there are several meanings for each; depending on things that I don’t understand because I don’t speak Chinese.

The funniest purposeful misinterpretation I could come up with is: ‘These noodles guide above’. But, if you want to be boring, the real translation is ‘This side up’.

None of the languages other than English caution about the hot popcorn inside. I guess people who speak English are more likely to be stupid and sue over something so insane.

Especially when I come upon treasures like Swedish idioms translated literally. I’m never going to learn Swedish, but reading the literal translations is funny and it illustrates the problems someone faces when translating from one language to another.

Now I’m going to have to look for idioms in other languages, translated literally…

I’m really not explaining it well, you’ll just have to go take a look to see how cool it is.

The fortune cookie said:

Delicious: Hao-chi

Since I’m actually at the computer, I decided to try to find out if the cookie was even remotely telling the truth. Being lazy at first, I go to Google Translation. Normally, I don’t trust Google Translation entirely but I figured that if it showed the same chars then at least there was some connection. Searching both Chinese traditional and simplified returned the same result: (pronounced mei wèi), a composite of ‘beautiful’ + ‘food’ according to my FireFox Chinese dictionary extension (DictCN – I knew having all these extensions was going to come in handy!). Or, yes, ‘delicious’ when taken together.

But the results clearly did not match what was on my cookie! I was talking to a friend online about this and they, being not so lazy as I, went to Mandarin Tools to search. They report back that not only does ‘mei wèi’ mean delicious, there is a ‘hao chi’ that means delicious. But it has the characters . Well, at least they got the pronunciation correct. But what do the Chinese characters mean!?

At this point, I’m not so lazy and go looking for how to search by character. But, not having much of an idea how to look up characters by stroke, I don’t get too far. I describe the actual characters to my friend at this point and they point out that it sounds like the characters for ‘can’ (as in I can do this) + ‘mouth’ and guess that perhaps it means ‘edible’. I search Mandarin Tools again and… Yes! It is ‘can’ and it is ‘mouth’. But the characters are not pronounced ‘hao chi’, they are pronounced ‘ke kou’. The composite together turns out not to be ‘edible’ but ‘tasty’.

In the end, I would have to give my fortune cookie a grade of C+. It got the right pronunciation for ‘delicious’. Plus, the characters ‘ke kou’ could mean ‘delicious’, I suppose. But the pronunciation and the characters don’t go together and that’s where it gets major points off.

Lesson of the day: if you want to learn Chinese, never trust a fortune cookie.

I know I should try to stick to one language, but they’re all just so interesting! It’s not fair! *sigh*

I still wish there was some way to just instantly learn a language. At first, you’d speak like machine translation. But, since you’re smarter than a machine (hopefully), you would slowly learn the proper idioms and such. It would be faster than ‘normal’ language learning, since you’d get the vocabular loaded in. That’s the part I have problems with, learning the vocabulary and making it stick. Bah!

It is so handy. Now I just need to remember how to pronounce all the bazillion (okay, not really) hiragana so I know how to pronounce Japanese properly.