May 27 2008
There is a new machine on Nanjing Rd, and despite what Adam Minter of ShanghaiScrap.com has to say about it I found it enthralling. A little bit like a poker machine. You put a bottle in, cross your fingers, and if you’re lucky a prize comes out!
There is a video included in this post, if you can’t see it, see it at youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNvMdHkjQ2A
May 21 2008
Today I got another unsolicited SMS. This is for a more noble cause though.
I can only guess that this has been sent to everyone on the network (has it???) Some kind soul had the bright idea that not everyone will know of the what is being done about bodies, and may be concerned about the remains of someone they know being buried or disposed of without hope of them ever being identified. This message makes clear to anyone that reads it what is being done about the problem. We don’t often hear about the good things the Chinese Central Government does, so I just thought I’d let everyone know about this little message, and commend whoever had the idea to do it.
May 20 2008
I was looking for a taxi outside my apartment at about 7pm last night. There was one with its light on, but no driver. I waited around for a few minutes, and the driver eventually came out. I approached him.
Driver: 去哪？ Where to?
Me: 建国路。JianGuo road.
D: 建国路什么路？JianGuo road and what road?
Me: 岳阳路。YueYang rd.
D: (Thinks for a split second) 70块。70RMB.
I burst out laughing. I laughed loudly and rudely, pointed at him, and invited passers-by to ridicule him in a similar fashion. For the record, the fare is about 15, less than a quarter of what he said.
After humiliating him as much as I could, I whipped out my camera and took a photo. I couldn’t get a shot of both the number plate and the driver at the same time, and I made the split second decision to take a photo of him.
Apart from hoping to publicly defame someone who did his utmost to rip me off, I hope that this can serve as a warning: never accept a ride in a taxi that doesn’t go on a meter, and never believe anything the individual in this photo says.
May 18 2008
If you followed my anguish about my crashed hard drive, you might know how fanatical I have become about backing up data. My zeal for not losing things means that I’m all the more excited to find this site.
http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html
This site regularly crawls the net, saving pages. So if blogs are deleted by a faceless corporation, if you’re lucky you can still see some of the stories kept there. This is actually what happened with my last blog; I thought I had lost everything I had written there forever (and I have lost almost everything) but it’s nice to get at least some of it back.
May 17 2008
One of my favourite shows has to be Seinfeld. I have every episode on DVD, and at any given time discs are strewn around the apartment, a sign of how regularly I watch them.
Some well meaning person has added Chinese subtitles to each episode. For the most part they are accurate, but sometimes they are confusingly not. But these mistakes present something of a riddle to the bilingual Seinfeld fan (and I hope that I’m not the only one!). Trying to work out what the translator thought the characters were saying takes some solving. Take this bit of dialogue.
This first one is easy. Obviously the translator has misheard “read” as “eat”. Easy, right? Well hang on, they only get harder from here.
I’ll give you a clue if you can’t follow the Chinese (or the English). “David Putty” is someone’s name, but someone has translated his surname (”Putty”) as “伙伴”. Look up 伙伴 and you’ll find “partner”, “associate”, “sidekick” and a long list of synonyms. How could someone hear “Putty” and translate it as “伙伴“? Got it yet? Ok, I’ll give you a few moments.
The translator has heard the line as “Who, David, buddy?” and translated it that way. “Buddy” has been translated into Chinese as 伙伴.
I won’t help you at all with this one.
Obviously the confused translator has translated Kramer’s nonsensical “hoochie moochie” as “who?”. Next!
Say the original English line quickly, and you can see how the mistake was made. “Kahlua” isn’t such a common word and you can see why it was heard as “come over”.
Don’t forget that in Jerry’s accent, “leg” and “laugh” have almost the same vowel sound.
To make things extra difficult for the translator, these episode features a silly voice that Jerry has made up.
Next comes a line from Jerry’s nemesis, Newman.
“My favourite:
Here’s a few that I couldn’t solve. Maybe a reader can help out!
Here’s another difficult one that I’m not too sure about.
My answer only works if you swap around 你 and 我 though. If the subtitle was 你想我很聪明 my answer might work, but not as it is originally. Anyone have any better ideas? Leave them in the comments!
May 16 2008
I did something that I’ve wanted to do since I was a young kid, and have been able to ask the world famous Dr Karl on air.
Dr Karl is a radio personality who is known as the smartest man in Australia. He has a show every week on Australia’s ABC and another on BBC’s Up All Night. Both shows are available as podcasts, have a look at the right hand side of this page, under “Podroll”.
Dr Karl answers questions asked by listeners, usually on the phone in the Australian show, but on the BBC show, often answers questions sent via email. This week, the host of Up All Night, Rhod, was kind enough to ask Dr Karl one of my questions. 
I sat in suspense through the show until we got to “And now, an email from… Max in Shanghai!”
I got two great answers, from both “Dr” Rhod and Dr Karl (on air, Dr Karl addresses everyone as “Dr”, one of his eccentricities!). I won’t spoil it for anyone who wants to listen to the show, but I do recommend looking up null nodes and sine wave oscillation in Wikipedia.
So thanks to both Dr Karl and “Dr” Rhod for choosing my question, and the answers.
Have a listen to my 15 seconds of fame here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/drkarl/ . If you subscribe to the podcast, you’ll be able to download the fateful episode by clicking on “15 May 2008″. My question comes on at about 25 minutes.
May 15 2008
I got the following message at 3:04 this morning.
I’m going to go out on a limb here: this is a bloody scam. A bad one at that. What does this person think, that I’m going to wake up, groggily at 3 in the morning, look at the message and without realising it, send a complete stranger some money? Does he think that transactions happen so often that people will blindly send money to someone who asks for it?
May 15 2008
Here’s a movie about a syllable that many Chinese learners get wrong.
Try to get the distinction between yi and yu, and try not to make your yu sound like yi. Today’s lesson features a special guest star.
