Agronesia

No, I don’t know stuffs about Chinese. Probably except the first two newbie lessons on ChinesePod. What interests me most about Chinese is how its hanzi sound map to Japanese kanji’s, how many characters used in Chinese are alien in Japanese, and how simplification makes the character between traditional and simplified Chinese awfully different.

I was reading about the romanization of Chinese today when I found the link for Google Pinyin, a Chinese IME. Before, when I need to access a Chinese hanzi I would draw it using Microsoft Japanese IME’s handwriting recognition. Of course many of the simplified characters like 吗 isn’t available there. The solution is to write the traditional characters like 嗎 and get the simplified equivalent through the dictionary program Wakan. Clumsy I know. That’s why when I read about Google Pinyin I thought “Let’s try a Chinese IME for the sake of it”. The fact that Google makes an IME also interested me much.

First of all, why the need for Google Pinyin at all? Well, because Microsoft’s built in Chinese IME sucks? Probably. I’ve tried both (very shallowly!) and I can say that the Google one seems to be more fun and easy to use.

To use it, just go to its website, download the program, and install it. The link is 下载 which in Japan would be read as kasai but I won’t even guess how it sounds in Chinese. Then you need to install Microsoft’s Chinese IME from the Control Panel. After that just switch to Chinese from the language bar. The default will be Google Pinyin but you can switch to Windows XP’s IME using Ctrl+Shift.

Thanks for reading. 我叫アグロ。我很好。我爱你。你呢？谢谢。谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢。(笑)

The Indonesian language has this weird construction of phrases that seem like verb phrases but can actually be noun phrases. For example, the phrase “makan malam” (literally “to night-eat”) looks like a verb phrase, and it is indeed so in the example sentence “Kemarin saya makan malam.” (I ate dinner yesterday). However it can also mean the noun phrase “dinner”, such as in the sentence “Makan malamnya sangat sederhana.” (The dinner was very modest). Using the standard grammar to change a verb to noun, one expects it to be “makanan malam” (night food) which isn’t the case.

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I just did some reading about subordinate clause because I need to write about it for my Indonesian Japanese language learning blog Yumeko. It seems that in English and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) we need relative pronouns such as who, which, and yang:

Nick gave a handful of potato chips to the dog who was sniffing around the picnic tables.

Nick memberi sejumlah keripik kentak ke anjing yang sedang mengendus-endus di sekitar meja-meja piknik.

On the other hand, the subordinate clause in Japanese has the same form as its independent clause:

It means that in Indonesian and English the underlined clause cannot stand on its own as a complete sentence while the one in Japanese can.

On the consistency in the grammatical structure of describing nouns, English isn’t consistent. Look at these three examples of how a simple adjective modifies a noun:

blue book (MODIFIER HEAD)

buku biru (H M)

青い本
aoi hon (M H)

We can see that when subordinate clause is used, the English language switches to use the H M structure.

The last interesting point is that the Indonesian subordinate clause above can directly function as a noun phrase without any modification:

Did I misanalyze?