Re^3: Improving a palindrome script...

*laughs with joy and runs down the linguistic rabbit hole…*

As I speak a decent amount of Mandarin I know all about odd Asian word humor. The Chinese language also uses syllables (which are represented by one character for each syllables) Because Mandarin and most of the dialects focus on using tones to distinguish between two characters pronounced "ma" in English, allot of Chinese linguistic humor comes from fudging the ton or conflating characters. This will happen at all levels of society at all levels of humor.

This might be important to anyone working on an international website because the Chinese often use numbers to make simple puns in things like usernames and , stupidly enough, passwords.

51 = ‘wuyao’  
I want =’woyao’  

Hence the popular website:

www.51job.com
[download]

If you are really good, you can make a phonetic and tonal palindrome in Chinese. Once you can do that, you have arrived at total fluency…

Did you study Japanese in Japan?

-mox

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Re^4: Improving a palindrome script... by liverpole (Monsignor) on Oct 25, 2006 at 10:35 UTC
Yes, but the first time was in college. It's a fun language; very logical in many respects, but totally different from English. I've tried studying Chinese a few times, but never got very far. I find it too difficult to reproduce the tones correctly, and of course, being only one syllable per word (character) makes it very complex. Chinese characters, on the other hand, can be a lot of fun, and of course, once you've learned to write them, you can essentially read both Chinese and Japanese, as there's a huge overlap. I'm still a beginner at the written language (I can probably recognize several hundred characters, from a minimum of 2000 necessary to read a newspaper in Japan), but one of these days I'll learn more ... :) I keep toying with the idea of writing a Perl gui for practicing "hiragana"/"katakana". (Those are the 2 phonetic systess Japanese uses in addition to "kanji" (= Chinese characters)). It seems like a fun project which could be useful for those learning written Japanese (like my daughter). s''(q.S:$/9=(T1';s;(..)(..);$..=substr+crypt($1,$2),2,3;eg;print$..$/	[reply]

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Re^4: Improving a palindrome script...
by liverpole (Monsignor) on Oct 25, 2006 at 10:35 UTC

I've tried studying Chinese a few times, but never got very far. I find it too difficult to reproduce the tones correctly, and of course, being only one syllable per word (character) makes it very complex. Chinese characters, on the other hand, can be a lot of fun, and of course, once you've learned to write them, you can essentially read both Chinese and Japanese, as there's a huge overlap.

I'm still a beginner at the written language (I can probably recognize several hundred characters, from a minimum of 2000 necessary to read a newspaper in Japan), but one of these days I'll learn more ... :)

I keep toying with the idea of writing a Perl gui for practicing "hiragana"/"katakana". (Those are the 2 phonetic systess Japanese uses in addition to "kanji" (= Chinese characters)). It seems like a fun project which could be useful for those learning written Japanese (like my daughter).

s''(q.S:$/9=(T1';s;(..)(..);$..=substr+crypt($1,$2),2,3;eg;print$..$/

[reply]