#chinese notes

[zakuwatorka]

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HSK 6 (14) on my road to Chinese fluency

[thomastudies]

recent pictures i uploaded to my instagram account | ig: @thomreads

[mid-afternoon-studies]

saturday 2nd july | mandarin HSK6 notes

i haven’t posted language notes here in a really really long time! here are some recent mandarin notes i’ve been working on. i’m behind on my notes bec i kinda put mandarin learning aside for a while - was busy with uni applications and exam revision. but now i can actually focus on the HSK6 qualification over summer!

my plan is to either take the HSK6 exam this summer, or take it in winter if i don’t feel prepared enough. HSK6 is a challenge, so i need to put the work in :<

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[ilsestudiesstudying]

24102021

[chineselangblr]

Hello everyone!

Tomorrow I'll be starting a shiny new series of Mandarin Chinese vocab lists of your choice!

Please lmk in the comments what topics of phrases you'd like to learn.

Here are some suggestions of topics (although you're more than welcome to suggest anything else!)

Dating and friendship

Cooking terms

Asking for help

Inside the classroom

General conversation

Empathy, comfort, and feelings

Everyday phrases

Common sayings and expressions

Interests

Making plans

Questions

Food terminology

Don't give up, we've got this!<3<3<3

(This series will continue for a month)

[sitacchi]

29/10/2021—Tonight's mandarin lesson: how to use 把 in a sentence, from 涚涚中文's video! I was originally studied the short story that I found on the other day when I stumbled upon a 把 sentence, and it got me confused lol. Checking Shuo's video is a right thing to do because she explained it in a such simple way so my simple mind can understand :')

Listening to: Dear Sputnik by TXT

[sometimesophie]

莫恨香消雪减， 须信道、扫迹难留。 难言处、良窗淡月， 疏影尚风流。 Do not mourn the fading fragrance, the falling snow; Have faith, when every last blossom has been swept away, That in the window, under a pale moon, Their sparse shadows will remain untamed and free. from 《殘梅》 "Fading Plum Blossom" by 李清照 Lǐ Qīngzhào translation by @sometimesophie with help from @wangxianbunnydoodles​ and @hunxi-guilai

[ID: digital painting of Meng Zhi and Fei Liu from Nirvana in Fire, dressed in their matching blue outfits from Episode 2, with brown and black leather accents and boots. Meng Zhi has an arm over Fei Liu's shoulders; Fei Liu rests a hand on the hilt of a sword worn at his waist. Both of them are smiling slightly as they gaze upwards at branches laden with white plum blossoms. Two lines of poetry, written in Mandarin characters, run vertically down the right edge of the painting. /end ID]

Further nerdy notes below the cut. (Warning for spoilers!)

@merelhyn gave a prompt of "Meng Zhi + flowers" and because my brain is the least reasonable thing ever it flew right past "cute" to "but what if we made it hurt???"

Because...one of my favorite things in LYB (among, admittedly, many, many Favorite Things) the friendship that blossoms (heh) between best dashu Meng Zhi and everyone's favorite murder child Fei Liu. I've mentioned before how much I love me a good Meet Kill (meet-cutes are so yesterday, y'all), especially when it lays the foundation for interesting and mutually supportive relationships where beatdowns are a love language. I love the way Fei Liu just lights up when Su-gege says they can go visit "that person you can't beat," the way he casually says "Meng-dashu is better" while shit-talking Prince Jing in his own manor, the way he can tussle around with Meng Zhi without having to hold back because Meng-dashu can take it—

Of course, they never would have met if it hadn't been for Lin Shu, Mei Changsu, Fei Liu's beloved Su-gege, whom they both love and want to protect so much. I think it's a short step from that thought to the possibility that these two would find solace in each other if Mei Changsu dies at Meiling 2.0. They're both such affectionate, uncomplicated people; they'd know how to help each other process their grief while still remembering the one who brought them together, the one who is no longer there.

Which brings me to the plum blossoms. It's far from a coincidence that the 梅 méi in "plum blossom" (梅花 méihuā) is the same character as the méi in 梅长苏 Mei Changsu and in 梅岭 Méilǐng, the battlefield that bookended his first and second lives. It is similarly no coincidence that plum blossoms are associated with winter, and specifically endurance under harsh conditions. Aside from being a beautiful poetic image in their own right, plum blossoms are the perfect flowersona for Mei Changsu, an encapsulation of his grief, his fragility, his determination to beat the odds aligned against him.

Also, if you watch carefully in the show, meihua are everywhere—peeking over the walls of Prince Jing's house, littering the courtyards of Mu Manor, decorating Nihuang's hair and Fei Liu's flower vases. It's impossible to account for them all, just as it's impossible to extricate Mei Changsu's life and memory from the lives of the people who loved him. Even in his second life—especially in his second life—he still touched so many people, and it's possibly one of the greatest tragedies of the show that he ends it believing that nobody will mourn him as Mei Changsu.

So I used plum blossoms as a stand-in for Mei Changsu’s memory and his absence between these two lives he brought together, and then I thought, “why be subtle when I could add in some sad poetry and clobber my viewer with EVEN MORE FEELINGS?” It’s what Fei Liu would want. 

Source for poetry: original text here (pg. 95 of PDF, pg. 81 in-text), Pinyin transcription here. I took Wang Jiaosheng's translation (first source) as a jumping-off point but ended up doing a translation myself because I disagreed with some of his choices, such as referring to the plum blossoms in the poem with English feminine pronouns (she/her), or parsing the word 风流 fēngliú as "beautiful beyond words" when it can really be construed quite differently.

(Per a discussion with @hunxi-guilai, who knows way more about these things than I do, 风流 fēngliú is closer to "wild" or "unrestrained," to the degree that it can carry an almost masculine connotation. If it's romantic or beautiful, it's a chivalric sort of romance, a wild, rugged, wuxia-wanderer sort of beauty. So it's interesting that Lǐ Qīngzhào chooses to apply this masculine adjective to plum blossoms, which are more often described using more delicate, even feminine terms—but that's something to be explored elsewhere, outside this post.)

As a final note: if you've been wondering this whole time why I made it a point to draw Fei Liu with a sword in hand, please know that (as usual) it's Hunxi's fault—I already had a lot of feelings about the shot of him in ep54 in "real" armor with his hair up, and she just made it even more painful, as is her wont, which is why I love her.

[365text]

saturday, july 11 • more or less of a “lazy” productive day, but i’m glad i’m getting back into practicing chinese like i promised myself i would this summer !! and i’m glad i finally have a use for this 5-year-old notebook heh