Here is to a wonderful Christmas and English new years holiday to everyone that has supported me this year. I will be back in the new year, with renewed efforts to learn Mandarin. In the mean time, all my best wishes for a peaceful, wonderful time this Christmas.

I came across this Chinese proverb today. I am completely confused as to its usage. Funny imagery though. I couldn't find a picture to do this proverb justice either. Maybe it is just a way to express one's anger.

The following article is written by Karen, who lives in Canada and is part of my growing series of Guest Posts from people I have met online that are also Learning Mandarin. She founded the Chen Pan Ling Kuo Shu Preservation Group in Atlanta, Georgia with a friend. Without martial arts, she would never have started learning Chinese.

This Chinese proverb is the same as the English proverb 'what's done is done' or 'Let bygones be bygones'. It means that things are too late noe to do anything about them. In this situation, it is wise to forgive and be prepared to move forwards positivley as it's too late to change anything now.

In this situation; the rice is cooked. It cannot now be uncooked, therefore this proverb talks about how you must let things be as they cannot be changed after it is happened. Just your attitude and perception of the event can be changed.

生米煮成熟饭
shēng ​mǐ ​zhǔ​ chéng ​shú ​fàn​
the rice is cooked

This Chinese proverb has a strong meaning for me today. It is the first anniversary of my girlfriend and I going out together. This proverb talks about how time flies, and resembles an arrow.

My first year with my girlfriend has gone scarily quickly, yet also seems like I have known her this way forever.

光阴似箭
guāng ​yīn ​sì ​jiàn​
time flies like an arrow

This Chinese proverb relates to when you keep business seperate from private issues. It means keeping your private interests seperate from business, no matter what.

公事公办
gōng​ shì ​gōng ​bàn​
Business is Business

This Chinese proverb is in a similiar vein to the English proverb 'to bear ones cross'. Which means - to accept trials or troubles patiently, as in the story of Jesus carrying his cross.

含辛茹苦
hán ​xīn ​rú ​kǔ​
to suffer every possible torment

This Chinese proverb is similiar to the English proverb "All roads to Rome". It means that there are many ways to go about things and there is no one right way to do it. This is very relavant when talking about how people learn Mandarin. There are so many different ways to learn, and none is 'one and only correct way' all the different methods are valid.

殊途同归
shū tú tóng guī
different routes to the same destination

This Chinese proverb can be used in situations where you are in high spirits. This proverb means to be elated, really happy, I imagine people would use this before and during festivities.

This Chinese proverb when broken down literally means 'three heads and six arms'. It is metaphorical of being above the ability of a normal man. I think this can be used in situations where someone does something so far beyond what was expected of them that it was a 'superhuman' effort.

These two Chinese proverbs are very much like the English pairs of proverbs that contradict each other.

Personally I feel that sometimes when you are really struggling to do something you end up making a mess of it by overthinking it. Yet times where you are relaxed you end up being more productive.

This Chinese proverb is about how things in order are perfect and methodical. For me it is a strong signifier of the historical Chinese figure Qin Shi Huangdi unifying the country. The emperor gave the unified empire a single currency, a standardised system of weights and measures and a legal system and introduced a common written language.

This Chinese proverb is in stark contrast to 不劳而获. The English equivalent to this proverb is no pain, no gain. It says without the work, there is no harvest.

This proverb is about how a good education program takes a long time to develop. It also makes me think about the methods I am using to learning Mandarin which are quite disseperate and not like a traditional syllabus.

Also interestingly, our education programs tend to be very un-environmentally friendly using a lot of paper and resources to sustain it.

This proverb is the opposite of the English proverb 'Reap what you sow', which means the hard effort you put in will be rewarded. This proverb is about something unearned. To reap without sowing or to have the rewards without having put the effort in.

Today's Chinese proverb is actually more of an idiom. However seen as I seem to be spending increasing amounts of my time marketing on projects recently this one seems very appropriate for me at the moment. As most of the time I spend trying to make other people becoming advocates, this is a phrase I would be using quite often.

When you break these characters down its meaning is very clear. To devolop and to promote (making something bigger).

发扬光大
fā yáng guāng dà
Advocate

Incidently I have learnt the last two of these characters with Heisig, which means 光 ray (of light) and 大 big.

This Chinese Proverb speaks of times when you are helpless in a situation. This is used in situations such as crises where things are unavoidable. In these situations it is useful to remember 防不胜防 (you can't guard against it).

A similiar English proverb is that "My hands are tied".

This Chinese proverb is about a gamble. It is to warn against putting all your stake on one bet. The common English proverb with a similiar meaning is 'To put all your eggs in one basket'.

孤注一掷
gū ​zhù ​yī ​zhì​
to stake all on one throw

Here are the 20 Daily Chinese Proverbs I published and translated into English, Hanyu Pinyin and Mandarin during October. I had a little trouble with keeping the proverbs daily this month due to my laptop breaking. I aim to be more on track this month.


You may also be interested in my daily proverbs for September and August.

This proverb is one that describes exactly what has happed causing the current global recession. It talks about solving a problem, by creating the exact same problem elsewhere. Which is exactly what has happened in modern society shifting debt around until it got out of control.

拆东墙补西墙
chāi​ dōng ​qiáng ​bǔ ​xī ​qiáng​
pull down the east wall to repair the west wall

This Chinese proverb means that sometimes things can't be prevented. Much like my recent experience of having a broken laptop could not have been prevented. This allows thought to be taken away from the incident and how to deal with it instead. If it could not have been prevented, now look to how to deal with it.

Just a quick note to say I am back, with my new laptop after my old one broke a while ago. It is very beautiful (windows 7 seems to be working well), much faster than the old laptop and has loud inbuilt speakers.

All very impressive I'm sure, but I have been busy in my absense. I started Heisig's Remembering the Simplified Hanzi as anticipated when the book came. Although I haven't been testing myself much, past asking my girlfriend to casually quiz me on them every now and then. I have learnt the first 170 fairly confidently, though not quite sticking to the 15 a day anticpated, it seems to be going well. (I think she is accidently picking some characters up too.) There are a couple of blog posts waiting to be written about this experience. They will come soon, I will also by downloading ANKI soon.

I would like to thank all of you who dropped by in my absense. I guess I will have missed out on many a blog post. I hope to get back round to you all and read some of what I have missed out on. Here is to continuing Mandarin and blogging about it.

The interenet regulator ICANN has now allowed web addresses to be in non-Latin characters – such as Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or Russian Cyrillic script. The first of these Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) is thought to be up and running by the middle of next year.

This is quite exciting and interesting although all web addresses will still need "http://" at the beggining. It is being billed as one of the biggest changes to the interenet in the last 15 years.

The Internet had its 40th Birthday yesterday.

"Of the 1.6 billion users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based," Beckstrom said at the opening of Icann's conference in Seoul, South Korea, this week. The conference approved the change today, its last day, following more than nine years of work and two years of testing.

"It's more incremental [than previous changes] but it's the single biggest change in 10 or 15 years," Beckstrom said. "It's about making the internet more global and more accessible. One world, one internet."

This is another Guest post from a friend that continues to learn Mandarin. Today's guest post is from Boyd, who runs several successful and interesting blogs related to Chinese culture. Boyd runs an Business English course for Chinese speakers. Chinese speakers My favourite of Boyd's blogs is Boyd's Bijou or his Musings on China. Here is a little about Boyd's journey Learning Mandarin.

• Forcing myself to interact with Mandarin speakers daily.
  
  
• Moving to and spending time in Mandarin-speaking areas such as Taiwan and China.
  
  
• Working in local companies and immersing myself in Mandarin-speaking environments.
• Reading Chinese-language newspapers daily (with dictionary in hand) and attempting to write letters to the editor.
  
  
• More recently, reading Chinese-language blogs and using character recognition input devices (so I can practice writing) and pinyin input to comment.

I wanted to do a proper post about learning Hanyu Pinyin and the Chinese tones.

I found this video which is remarkably helpful distinguishing the intials, finals and tones. Though it looks like it was made for children, It hink it is useful for anyone learning the language.




I will write a post when I get my new laptop with tables of the intials, the finals and the tones. With tips on how they are pronounced and equivalents in English. Hopefully this will give a little more deatail to what this video shows with how the syllables can be put together.

Just a quick message to those of you who do drop by here fairly often. A massive thank you for all helping me out with my Mandarin and I wanted to let you know that I haven't stopped and I certainly haven't quit writing here or learning Mandarin.

This Chinese proverb means to crave something, to desire it and this proverb although could be taken to mean to literally salivate. I prefer the meaning to have a strong desire or craving. 'to drool over'.

垂涎三尺
chuí xián sān chǐ
To drool over

The picture depicts my desire to get to China, and the celebration that will ensue. One of my goals is to spend Chinese New Year in China at least once.

This Chinese proverb comes with a fine story, about a wise man. It comes to mean a blessing in disguise. When smething bad happens, we must look for the good that follows. Equally when something great happens, we must be ready for something bad to happen as a consequence. Things are comparitive; the good comes with the bad.

This Chinese proverb describes someone taking advantage of a confused situation. It is similiar in use to 趁火打劫 (to loot a burning house.)

China seems to like to be the best at everything, even if it doesnt always turn out the way they had intended. (See South China Shopping Mall for example) Also see 'The Onions' satirical and funny take on a certain recent rather large parade.

Here are two Chinese building projects that are fantastic but a little crazy:

"You visit the first external ramp of the museum with your own private car, like a SAFARI, you park your car on the roof and visit by foot the internal ramp going down," said Francesco Gatti of 3Gatti, the architecture studio which won the commission.

Firstly, my Heisig book came today. Excited!!!! (due to being busy I start learning tomorrow.)

The main reason for this post is that I have been asked by several people recently, to include Heisig's suggested 1500 Traditional characters as I had eluded to them in a previous post.

Heisig proposes a method of learning where you only learn the meaning of the character and a way to remember how to write it through a story of its primitives and their meanings. Not the pronounciation in tones or the pinyin.

I include links to buy both the traditional characters (listed below) and the simplifed characters I talked about last week.

I apologise for not organising them as neatly as the last post. But I hope those that had asked for them, will be happy.

This Chinese proverb serves as a warning to us. It talks about how some people are never satisfied with what they have. It is also important to realise that happiness is found in moments not things.

This proverb is used to describe how someone might follow a fad, and as soon as it falls out of fashion change to something new.

This Chinese proverb describes the feeling of a paradox. Where something seems correct but leads to a contradiction or a situation which defies intuition.

似是而非
sì shì ér fēi
Apparently right, Actually wrong

This Chinese proverb describes perfectly what I hope the Heisig method of learning Mandarin will do to my learning process. Intensify it.

This proverb is actually more often used in a negative way though. How one may aggravate or cause a situation to intensify through their actions.

I ordered Heisig's the 'Remembering the Simplified Hanzi' last week as you may know if you read my post about my excitement. Whilst learning with this method I am still going to be carrying on learning sentences from books and carrying on with Rosetta Stone (although I have been finding my progress in it rather slow recently.)

I won't be doing much preparation before I start this method of learning the Hanzi. Though, I did hunt out the list of all of the 1500 Hanzi characters published in his first book to see what I would be trying to overcome. (Thanks to John @ Chinese Quest for helping me find them. Also check out his great post about the Heisig method and its criticisms)

If you want to download the excel file with all the hanzi, hanyu pinyin, stroke numbers and lesson numbers for the first Heisig book (this is the ANKI file for simplified hanzi in excel essentially) I include the link here for you.

Heisig & Richardon say that these characters (shown below) are the most frequently used 1000 hanzi plus some additional Chinese characters that make sense to learn with the primitives learnt along the way.

(If you would like to download the sample chapter from their book Remembering Simplified Hanzi 1: and give this method a go yourself you can do so here. I have breifly looked over it, but havent commited to learning them yet. I will start when the book gets here.)

Below, I list the hanzi in order they are taught in Heisig & Richardson's 'Remembering Simplified Hanzi'. It really serves its purpose for me because I wanted to print them out and stick them up in my room. But also illustrates quite how many characters I aim to learn and how dizzy 1500 hanzi can make the uninitiated.