Dhivael/Anne’s Hyperactive Blog

If you buy the large boxes of Pop Weaver popcorn from Wal-Mart, you might have noticed something interesting on the bag. Aside from the usual ‘caution, this bag is hot’ and ‘this side up’ written in English, there are three other phrases; in Spanish, French and Chinese.

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.

Normally, this isn’t something I would bother to blog about. However, I only just now got around to eating my fortune cookie. One side has the usual drab fortune and ‘lucky numbers’, the other has that ‘learn Chinese’ thing going on.

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’m sure you already know this, if you’ve ever tried Google translation or Babelfish. But, today, I installed the ‘FoxLingo’ FireFox add-on. It can (by using various translation sites) translate webpages to and from a variety of languages.

So, I decided to try out various translators on my blog.

Translating ‘And don’t come back! I am still sick.’ from English to Italian, I got:

1. E non ritorni! Sono ancora malato. - Worldlingo & Bestiland
2. Ed il docente universitario’t è ritornato! Sono tuttavia malato. - Freetranslation
3. E non ritornare! Sono quieto ammalato. - Intertran
4. E don’t ritornano! Sono ancora malato. - Voila.fr

I asked an Italian speaking friend for help and found that they mean:

1. And don’t come back{formal}! I’m still sick{masculine}.
2. And the university['t] teacher is back! I am however sick{masculine}.
3. And don’t come back{informal}! I’m quiet (yes, quiet; not quite) sick.
4. And [don't] {they}come back! I’m still sick{masculine}.

Two translation services choked on the irregular apostrophe in “don’t”. Apparently, ‘dont’ (no apostrophe) is considered to be an obscure term for a university teacher or professor by Freetranslation. I’ve never heard of such a term. And Answers.com doesn’t have it listed, either.

So the first ones (Wordlingo and Bestiland) apparently did the best job overall, since they can’t know if I am a male or female. Definitely interesting, since I would have thought that those sentences were simple and easy to translate. I’m told that Worldlingo does a fairly good job, for a machine, of translating the rest of my blog.

Here are a few sites you may find interesting:

Linguistics & Languages - a blog all about languages. They also have links to several linguistic sites of interest, including Omniglot.

Not strictly a language site, but there is Jamendo. This is a music site and, while I haven’t downloaded any yet, there is music in languages other than English, like that of Eva Garcia.

LibriVox - Download audio books in various languages (including English), for free.

ggg is for ggginger - No, I don’t really understand the title either. Anyway, this site has a rather long poem with a list of English words that should rhyme but don’t or do rhyme but shouldn’t, according to spelling. Definitely a tongue twister, if you attempt to read it aloud.

It used to be the ‘thing’ for average people to spend a few weeks in Europe. These days, I don’t think most people travel abroad, for one reason or another. Personally, however, I would love to be able to go to Europe. Anywhere, almost, for at least a few days.

But once I got there, where would I go? Luckily, it is possible to download an audioguide to listen to on your MP3 player of cities in Europe. Paris, London, Rome, Barcelona. And in multiple languages, too!

I’m considering downloading the ones in French and Spanish, even if I can’t actually visit the cities, so that I’ll have some extra language stuff to listen to.

I want more language dictionaries. More grammar books. More, more, more. Alas, such books do not come cheap. I usually have to ‘make do’ with second hand books.

Used books are okay, but they are not quite ‘as fun’ as getting a brand new book or two.

They do, however, have the virtue of being fairly inexpensive. My German-English dictionary cost, if I remember correctly, $0.35. New, it cost $0.50… back in 1960. So it’s over 40 years old. It doesn’t have any ‘newer’ words like computer or internet. But it does have ‘television’, which is ‘fernsehen’.

I also have an old French-English dictionary from the same time frame.

I’ve got a lot of language books. But nowhere near enough!

I’ve also got some language audio files that I should listen to more often. Maybe if I did, I would actually start to remember all these language stuffs.

I love languages, even though I tend to forget to study them. The consequence? I can’t remember half the words I have studied. It helps, however, to have a good multi-lingual dictionary. AllWords.com is a fairly decent dictionary. You can search for an English word, and have it simply give the dictionary definition, or you can search for a word in French, German, Dutch, Spanish or Italian.

It is not a perfect dictionary, but it does give several suggestions on words in other languages to use. A search for ‘day’ yields:

the period of time from sunrise to sunset.
Dutch: dag (de)
French: jour (m), journée (f)
German: Tag (m)
Italian: giorno, giornata
Spanish: día

Some other words have more suggestions, some have only one word per language.

I have purchased a fair number of paper translating dictionaries and some are better, some are not as good, as this website. But this website is free! Free is always good. If you want something better, you are going to have to pay a lot of money for one of the really, really nice translation dictionaries.

Plus, one feature that a web dictionary has that a paper dictionary does not is the ability to search for parts of words. If I wanted to know all the French words that ‘jour’ appears in, I would simply type jour into the text box, choose French from the pulldown menu and choose the ‘words containing’ option. Click search… and I get 51 results. Some of these are phrases, some are sort of mistakes (’interview’ shows ‘French: (journalist) interviewer, (job) faire passer des entretiens’).

All in all, for being free, I think AllWords.com is pretty good.