Chantilly Say posted:

Is "Sky Dragon Kingdom" the next album from that heavy metal legislator?

Chantilly Say posted:

Is "Sky Dragon Kingdom" the next album from that heavy metal legislator?

Barto posted:

Back when I was going to NTU, I joined a student volunteer organization that took care of autistic children.
I remember there was one kid, his thing was flushing toilets and watching the water swirl away.
No one could figure out why he liked doing such a pointless and wasteful thing, but in any case he really, really, really enjoyed doing that.
And god help you if you tried to stop him from flushing the toilet 87 times on any given field trip.

the venerable gibbis china.jpg thread posted:

The Great Laowai invasion
"Loser back home" is a label affixed to an expatriate who was a loser in his home country and attempts to craft a new, more glamorous and interesting identity for himself in his new country of residence where no one knows him and the locals are unable to read the cultural signs which mark him as a loser.

This often entails knavery, clumsy seductions of local women, public intoxication, and generally shameful behaviour that tarnishes the reputations of all the LBH's fellow expats, causing them to be viewed forever after with suspicion and distaste. Like an alien entering into our atmosphere, we would be captivated by it's differnces and oddities, but far from our minds would be the label of a loser no matter how different they seemed. An LBH is a "special" type of person that just doesn't quite fit in.

Back home, they may have been teased, out-cast and shunned and either didn't know how or want to change their behaviour, to be able to socialize on a day-to-day basis with others. This is why so many LBH's flock to China because they are accepted for who they are and not judged and shunned as they would be back in our culture. Their impoliteness, loud mannerisms, overstated opinions and general know-it-all attitude would still make it a difficult process to attain the label of 'loser' in China, but like with any alien, one person will eventually step forward to learn more. It's when you are another Westerner meeting this type of weirdo guy or girl, in China, that you can recognize the social awkwardness and gag reflex behaviours they provoke, and safely look into their eyes (if you can manage this) and think that's an LBH in the flesh!

For those of us who don't possess a finely tuned LBH-radar, here are just a few ways to spot one: Never had a successful career – has moved from place to place and job to job (train wreck to train wreck) Doesn't have a stable family life – often has left a string of broken dysfunctional relationships and a number of children to different partners and has not contributed to the financial support of them (train wreck to train wreck) Is in China because he couldn't make anything of himself in [insert western country name] Lacks self-awareness Has delusions of grandeur (e.g. thinks himself a misunderstood genius) Invents an exciting and interesting background story about his life at home (that doesn't make sense on closer inspection) Indignant/angry/violent when details of his back-story are questioned or discovered to be obviously false Expert on China and all things Chinese (likely to live in a western style gated community, drinks and eats almost exclusively in western style bars and restaurants, has probably never been more than one hour from home-base) Expert on foreign politics, Chinese politics and anything newsworthy and will argue his opinion whether you want to hear it or not. Believes themselves to be untouchable and above the law (I'm an [insert country], they can't do anything to me/I know [insert title of local official they met once])

Dear friends, if you know an LBH or meet one (oh the humanity), smile, agree with everything they say then politely excuse yourself and get the hell away from them. Should you develop a relationship you will be automatically assumed to also be an LBH and when something bad does inevitably occur you will also go down with them. (Some of this blog is copied from others and some is original content. This is the internet afterall.) Comments and personal stories about an LBH you have met are welcome

The Worst Muslim posted:

I KNOW WHAT JOKES ARE, bellows Pandemonium from atop his 20 ft. tall steel robot.

I GOT IT, BUT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY TAIWANESE he tries in vain to convince people as his robot continues to destroy houses and crush people underneath its tread.

I KNOW I ORIGINALLY SET THIS ROBOT UPON YOU ALL AFTER I TOOK A JOKE SERIOUSLY, BUT LET ME CONVINCE YOU THAT IT WAS ALL A CLEVER RUSE.

His face begins to crack like porcelain and pieces begin to fall off into the chaos and hellfire below. His robot features showing, he stands up off the robots shoulder and whispers into its ear "wade giles" before a single tear forms on his eye, setting off a malfunction that causes a small fire on his face. 20 minutes later he is but a small, molten black mound on the robots shoulder still smoldering from the heat.

TetsuoTW posted:

Magna Kaser posted:

Why do people get so hurt over simplification but not how in the 70's CKS's government threw out/banned thousands of until-then commonly used 俗体字 to cement 国语 as some weird master-language for the island, and for undisclosed reasons opted to choose several variants of common characters that just happened to be different from what the mainland chose 10~ years earlier when standardizing their character set?

This is a serious question since I see a ton of westerners get really crazy about this (some in this thread), more so than the Taiwanese professors I had in school, and I've always been curious about it. I mean outside of the obvious bragging point of "heh, 忧郁？ i can write 憂鬱 cuz I'm a traditionalist" (real thing from some white dude in Taipei when I was studying there)

duckfarts posted:

i don't like simplified because it looks gross and the characters have less meaning to me

the end

Magna Kaser posted:

That's a totally ok and understandable reason to prefer one set over the other but some people get super mad over it and that's what I was more asking, especially since it's all kind of arbitrary and taiwan's character set has a fair number of "simplified" characters in it (台、才、等等）

Magna Kaser posted:

Why do people get so hurt over simplification but not how in the 70's CKS's government threw out/banned thousands of until-then commonly used 俗体字 to cement 国语 as some weird master-language for the island, and for undisclosed reasons opted to choose several variants of common characters that just happened to be different from what the mainland chose 10~ years earlier when standardizing their character set?

This is a serious question since I see a ton of westerners get really crazy about this (some in this thread), more so than the Taiwanese professors I had in school, and I've always been curious about it.

url posted:

This



will never get old, or stop being stupidly hilarious to me.

TetsuoTW posted:

I think it's because that's not really something most foreign students of Chinese are ever taught. It's like people getting uppity about Americanisms like "fall" or "gotten".

Magna Kaser posted:

Why do people get so hurt over simplification but not how in the 70's CKS's government threw out/banned thousands of until-then commonly used 俗体字 to cement 国语 as some weird master-language for the island, and for undisclosed reasons opted to choose several variants of common characters that just happened to be different from what the mainland chose 10~ years earlier when standardizing their character set?

This is a serious question since I see a ton of westerners get really crazy about this (some in this thread), more so than the Taiwanese professors I had in school, and I've always been curious about it. I mean outside of the obvious bragging point of "heh, 忧郁？ i can write 憂鬱 cuz I'm a traditionalist" (real thing from some white dude in Taipei when I was studying there)

Magna Kaser posted:

His American contemporaries were too stodgy so now "laugh" is still that and not "laff"....


My British coworkers always laughed at me for "eggplant".

Atlas Hugged posted:

Wait what's all this about eggplants?

Chantilly Say posted:

Aubergine.

Magna Kaser posted:

That's a totally ok and understandable reason to prefer one set over the other but some people get super mad over it and that's what I was more asking, especially since it's all kind of arbitrary and taiwan's character set has a fair number of "simplified" characters in it (台、才、等等）

TetsuoTW posted:

I'm p sure courgettes are zucchinis

Barto posted:

Luckily for the industry as a whole, although the Executive Yuan has already taken notice of and make preparations to act on the situation, because of the change in power they're choosing not to act yet. They don't want to make any waves they don't have to before the new bosses come in. That probably gives the situation about half a year to cool down. If everything's fine in half a year, the problem might be avoided (for now), if not, then the hammer will come down around July or August.

House Louse posted:

No courgettes are like little marrows, cucumbers are a bit different and harder to grow.


What does the hammer coming down mean, because that's when my contract finishes

Atlas Hugged posted:

A banning of the loan and contract practices for new enrollments. Meaning that if any business hasn't gotten their poo poo together by the time this happens, their revenue will suddenly be cut off and regardless of the quality of their classes or their ability to recruit new students, they won't be receiving the large lump sums they need to meet operating costs every month and will go under.

Edit: I just looked up 才 and I had no idea it was a simplified form of 纔. Can you imagine writing that multiple times a day? I will say that if you are unfamiliar with traditional it looks worse than it is. It's only five radicals, though the fourth is both halves of compare and the fifth is the entirety of rabbit.

Which leads me to another question. When counting radicals, do you reduce them to their smallest components or to their most well known? Like rabbit itself is four radicals, but in 纔 I'd describe it as one.

Magna Kaser posted:

Technically speaking the only radical that matters it the one used for organization, which in this case is糹。In a dictionary that character would just be 糹+ however many strokes it has. I've never seen characters organized by how many pieces they have total, but there could be a different organizational method I don't know about.

Realistically speaking everyone does what you do which is split characters into chunks that make the most sense to them because that's way easier to remember and junk, and I'm guessing 99.9% of Chinese speakers would also pull out the 兔 as a part.

And yeah it's not super complicated (糹+ 㲋 + 兔）but would be annoying to write since 才 is a p common word.

I think I've lost all ability to handwrite traditional, sadly. I just picked up a pen and couldn't even remember how to do the traditional form of 為。。。。

Magna Kaser posted:

In my experience most native Chinese speakers tend to use chunking-type methods to remember (or at least describe) more complicated characters as they describe them as "thing next to other thing on third thing" etc...