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yes, the character usually gives a clue how to pronounce it

Here is an example: sòng, which means give. Where is the hint for prononciation?

Hey everybody,

thank you very much for your contributions. I really appreciate the time you spend to discuss that question.
Some clarification:

• My kids are 10 and go to the Catholic High Primary School in Singapore, Primary 4 level.
• They speak Chinese to their grand parents who don't speak English.
• What they are learning is "higher Chinese" (AFAIK a term not used outside the Singaporean educational system) that is supposed to put them on equal footing with native speakers on university level at end of Secondary 4.
• They learn Chinese since Kindergarten.

So we are beyond the stage of the first 500 chars -- and it is still a chore. Therefor I was asking.
Summing up responses so far (in no particular order):

• Flash cards (the physical thing)
• Rosetta Stone
• Anki
• Nciku
• Buzan
• Dating Chinese girls (I like that one)
• Mnemosyne
• Zon (the MMO to learn Chinese while playing) read a review
• Found some nice books: Fun with Chinese Characters
• iFlash for Mac (I wonder is there a Linux or OLPC version too)
• PinYin Info
• ByKi
• Zhong Wen (for unaware readers: that means Chinese in PinYin notation)
• WenLin Software
• SuperMemo (with a comparison to Anki and a store to buy Chinese content
• VeryPracticalChinese (found via this blog
• Skritter
• I found ChinesePod. Not sure what to make of it
• Lao Shi (Chinese for "Teacher") - OpenSource

Again, thx a lot! (and sorry for the caveman English -- don't get it? Read the comments)

"Kai" basically means something like "open (a door)" - which gives derived meanings like "begin"; I'm not quite sure how it came to mean "drive" as well. The traditional form of the character "che" is a picture of an ox-cart, BTW. If you are interested, this is a good place:

http://www.zhongwen.com/noads.htm

He also changed his name to Shi Huangdi, meaning "First August God"

To quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Huangdi:

he created a new title, huangdi, combining the word huang from the legendary Three Huang (Three August Ones) who ruled at the dawn of Chinese history, and the word di from the legendary Five Di (Five Sovereigns) who ruled immediately after the Three Huang

His original name was Qin Shihuang, and it is a simple, but clever trick when he invents the title 'Huangdi' (~'emperor') and changes his name to Shi Huangdi, which was almost hist name before. If you want to look it up yourself, try this online dictionary: http://www.zhongwen.com/noads.htm.

Apart from that, I find you opinion absurd. The Chinese don't 'tolerate' Hu Jintao and the Communist Party because they are 'culturally conditioned' or whatever. The simply like what they see around them, in general: increased wealth, increased status in the world etc etc. They want more of it - wouldn't you? Don't tell me that Americans would choose freedom over wealth and progress any time. And calling the Chinese president an 'emperor' is simply childish name-calling and just goes to show that you don't have anything else to have your opinion in.

I don't know how well (if at all) bayesian filtering and stuff would work for "kanji"

All right, this question has come up several times in the thread.

The Mandarin dialect has approximately 31 phonetic components. These can be combined as single phoneme, dual phoneme, and triple phoneme groups. Some sounds always stand alone, some combine into triples, some do not. Some phonemes only exist as initials. Some only as finals, etc. etc. The end result is a hundred-odd unique phonetic combinations.

Then there are tones. Five tones per phonetic combination. There are a few sounds that never appear in certain tone patterns, but this is the exception, and not the rule. So this brings us up into mid 3-digits of total possible sound groupings, including intonation.

Now, you've probably heard somewhere that there are thousands of characters. So if there are only a few hundred unique sounds, but thousands of characters, of course, you have homonyms everywhere.

(I was going to do a demo of how this works, but /. doesn't like me writing in hanzi. Go to http://www.zhongwen.com/ and go to the "pronunciation" section of the dictionary. You'll see it as clear as day that way).

Now, the problem is that there are many characters mapping to each sound. As such, while you can only mess with English words so much before they become unrecognizable (porn, pron, pr0n, prawn, etc.), you can make hundreds of permutations of any common phrase in Chinese simply by swapping out the correct character for a different one.

I am not aware of a Chinese version of l33t-speak. There's trashy, slang Chinese, sure. But either you have the right character, or you don't. Without a standard nomenclature for screwing up words, it becomes hard to try alternate 'spellings' to work around the filter.

Languages - well , the whole language can be broken down in 1 4hr lesson into a massive 1 foot sized flow chart and

Might apply if lower class US English is in focus (or German as recently spoken, I have no bias :), but what about zhongwen???

CC.

The Shanghiers speak, amazingly enough, Shanghaiese (Shanghaihua in Mandarin (lit. "Shanghai Speech")).

Being a tonal language, "ning" could mean any number of things. The excellent hanzi dictionary, zhongwen.com lists six different meanings for "ning". It is important to note that zhongwen uses standard Mandarin (putonghua) pronouciation and not Shanghaiese. How much variation there is between the two I don't know. The only thing even close to slang for testicles is "lemons", and I doubt that's right. I would think iit was a proper noun.

FWIW standard Mandarin is really close to what is spoken in Beijing, but not exactly. Beijingers tend to end some words with 'r'. (e.g. "dian" becomes "diar" ("a little bit" or "hour") and kinda flat-vowel/whine some other words (e.g. "na" becomes "nei", "zhe" becomes "zhei" ("this" and "that")). When I asked my Chinese (meaning both the foriegn language and the nationality) TA about it, she said "You want to use the standard Mandarin. You don't want to sound like you're from Beijing!" When asked why, she said, "They're stuck up. Like New Yorkers." I said it was fine with me, as long as I didn't sound like a hick.

Ni de zhongwen ke jieshu le. (Hopefully that says, "Your Chinese lesson has ended." :) )

The Shanghiers speak, amazingly enough, Shanghaiese (Shanghaihua in Mandarin (lit. "Shanghai Speech")).

Being a tonal language, "ning" could mean any number of things. The excellent hanzi dictionary, zhongwen.com lists six different meanings for "ning". It is important to note that zhongwen uses standard Mandarin (putonghua) pronouciation and not Shanghaiese. How much variation there is between the two I don't know. The only thing even close to slang for testicles is "lemons", and I doubt that's right. I would think iit was a proper noun.

FWIW standard Mandarin is really close to what is spoken in Beijing, but not exactly. Beijingers tend to end some words with 'r'. (e.g. "dian" becomes "diar" ("a little bit" or "hour") and kinda flat-vowel/whine some other words (e.g. "na" becomes "nei", "zhe" becomes "zhei" ("this" and "that")). When I asked my Chinese (meaning both the foriegn language and the nationality) TA about it, she said "You want to use the standard Mandarin. You don't want to sound like you're from Beijing!" When asked why, she said, "They're stuck up. Like New Yorkers." I said it was fine with me, as long as I didn't sound like a hick.

Ni de zhongwen ke jieshu le. (Hopefully that says, "Your Chinese lesson has ended." :) )

"I Can READ That!" is a gentle introduction to reading Chinese characters, focused on stuff you'd see while traveling in China. Won't really teach you how to say anything, though.

For self-paced learning of conversational Mandarin, nothing beats the Pimsleur language programs. I can say from personal experience that after listening to just the first-level program, you will be able to ask for stuff in restaurants (and drop a few jaws in the process if you don't look Asian!), hold simple conversations with Chinese speakers, and start to make a little sense of the dialogue in Chinese movies and TV shows. There are three levels, each with about 15 hours of material.

If you have a Palm handheld, PlecoDict absolutely rocks for building up your vocabulary of both spoken and written Mandarin. It has a great graduated-interval flashcard mode.

The New Practical Chinese Reader is the latest edition of the textbook that's been used in just about every introductory Chinese language course in the English-speaking world in the last couple of decades. It is available with cassette tapes to help with pronunciation.

For more vocabulary, both spoken and written, Rosetta Stone is good. Its major weakness is that it uses the same vocabulary words for all the languages it covers, and the word list is based on some Western assumptions; some things that take just one word in a typical western language take several in Mandarin, and you find yourself getting a small flood of new words with no clear idea of exactly what each one means on its own. But once you've learned the basic conjunctions and so on, that's not a big deal.

For actually learning how to write (stroke order) there's Easy Chinese Tutor, not a great piece of software but the material is decent and it even comes with a bunch of character tracing sheets you can print out and practice on.

Zhongwen.com has a bunch of good resources.

What I really want, though, is for someone to do the equivalent of Destinos for Mandarin. Maybe in the form of a historical kung-fu soap opera comedy drama fantasy like the awesome Tian Xia Di Yi. I'd pay good money for that!

Further, 'character' is pretty specific to alphabetic writing. I wonder if a Chinese idiograph or Egyptian hieroglyph count as a 'character'?

You're incorrect. "Character" is generic, "letter" is not. As seen in "Chinese characters". The term "glyph" is equally generic.

Chinese characters aren't strictly pictograms or even ideograms. Some characters combinations of other characters where some parts of the compound character are used hint at the proper pronouciation.

Also not all words, are represented by a single glyph. The word "da4", which means "big", can be combined with "xiao3", which means "small", to create "da4xiao3" which means "size". (The numbers after the syllables indicate the tone.) Some characters must be used in combination with others, because the individual character has no intrinsic meaning.

Further complicating matters is when Western words are transliterated into Chinese. (Japanese and Korean words sometimes have Chinese characters already associated with them. It appears to me that in the few cases I know the words also have a common ancestor, but I'm not a Asian linguist.) While the meanings of the individual characters or even the combination of characters carry little weight, care must still be used lest you transliterate "George Bush" to "Robot Monkey Carburetor", or even worse, "Butt Fucker". For instance, the fast food chain "Subway" is transliterated to something that sounds like "sa ba wei", and means "10,000 Tastes" or something like that, instead of "di4xia4tie3" which means "underground train".

Explaining why creating nonsense words that bear a striking resembelence to English words in order to prevent saying something stupid in a non-English langauge is left as an exercise to the reader. Please note, that the "Mexican Chevy Nova" story is a myth. It assumes Spanish speakers don't have enough command over their native langauge to distinguish between "nova" and "no va", unlike English speakers ability to distribuish between "notable" and "no table". Futhermore the myth hinges on the listener to have ignorance of the fact that the Mexican government sells gasoline under the brand name "Nova".

Thus concludes your linguistic lesson.

Further, 'character' is pretty specific to alphabetic writing. I wonder if a Chinese idiograph or Egyptian hieroglyph count as a 'character'?

You're incorrect. "Character" is generic, "letter" is not. As seen in "Chinese characters". The term "glyph" is equally generic.

Chinese characters aren't strictly pictograms or even ideograms. Some characters combinations of other characters where some parts of the compound character are used hint at the proper pronouciation.

Also not all words, are represented by a single glyph. The word "da4", which means "big", can be combined with "xiao3", which means "small", to create "da4xiao3" which means "size". (The numbers after the syllables indicate the tone.) Some characters must be used in combination with others, because the individual character has no intrinsic meaning.

Further complicating matters is when Western words are transliterated into Chinese. (Japanese and Korean words sometimes have Chinese characters already associated with them. It appears to me that in the few cases I know the words also have a common ancestor, but I'm not a Asian linguist.) While the meanings of the individual characters or even the combination of characters carry little weight, care must still be used lest you transliterate "George Bush" to "Robot Monkey Carburetor", or even worse, "Butt Fucker". For instance, the fast food chain "Subway" is transliterated to something that sounds like "sa ba wei", and means "10,000 Tastes" or something like that, instead of "di4xia4tie3" which means "underground train".

Explaining why creating nonsense words that bear a striking resembelence to English words in order to prevent saying something stupid in a non-English langauge is left as an exercise to the reader. Please note, that the "Mexican Chevy Nova" story is a myth. It assumes Spanish speakers don't have enough command over their native langauge to distinguish between "nova" and "no va", unlike English speakers ability to distribuish between "notable" and "no table". Futhermore the myth hinges on the listener to have ignorance of the fact that the Mexican government sells gasoline under the brand name "Nova".

Thus concludes your linguistic lesson.

Further, 'character' is pretty specific to alphabetic writing. I wonder if a Chinese idiograph or Egyptian hieroglyph count as a 'character'?

You're incorrect. "Character" is generic, "letter" is not. As seen in "Chinese characters". The term "glyph" is equally generic.

Chinese characters aren't strictly pictograms or even ideograms. Some characters combinations of other characters where some parts of the compound character are used hint at the proper pronouciation.

Also not all words, are represented by a single glyph. The word "da4", which means "big", can be combined with "xiao3", which means "small", to create "da4xiao3" which means "size". (The numbers after the syllables indicate the tone.) Some characters must be used in combination with others, because the individual character has no intrinsic meaning.

Further complicating matters is when Western words are transliterated into Chinese. (Japanese and Korean words sometimes have Chinese characters already associated with them. It appears to me that in the few cases I know the words also have a common ancestor, but I'm not a Asian linguist.) While the meanings of the individual characters or even the combination of characters carry little weight, care must still be used lest you transliterate "George Bush" to "Robot Monkey Carburetor", or even worse, "Butt Fucker". For instance, the fast food chain "Subway" is transliterated to something that sounds like "sa ba wei", and means "10,000 Tastes" or something like that, instead of "di4xia4tie3" which means "underground train".

Explaining why creating nonsense words that bear a striking resembelence to English words in order to prevent saying something stupid in a non-English langauge is left as an exercise to the reader. Please note, that the "Mexican Chevy Nova" story is a myth. It assumes Spanish speakers don't have enough command over their native langauge to distinguish between "nova" and "no va", unlike English speakers ability to distribuish between "notable" and "no table". Futhermore the myth hinges on the listener to have ignorance of the fact that the Mexican government sells gasoline under the brand name "Nova".

Thus concludes your linguistic lesson.

What ? No mention of zhongwen.com ?

This site is just mind-boggling. This guy not only digged the meaning, etymology and mnemonics for thousands of characters, but he managed to put it on the web in a user-friendly way. I don't know what I find most admirable - the scholarly erudition or the technical "Do-The-Right-Thing" insight.

Thomas-

Predictable, consistent disregard of world opinion coming from the very same crowd of turferclones that cheerlead for a radical preemptive invasion sold by war profiteers using lies about clear and present WMD as a chickenhawk substitute for pursuit and prosecution of the Wahabi attackers of the Pentagon all while forcing oilcon rulers onto other nations and running economies into the ground.

Such an extreme case of do as I say, not as I do.

It's, it's, O'Lielly diplomacy!

Bush sucks? Shut up shut up shut up! Hussein sucks! We will replace your government by force! Chávez sucks! We will attempt to replace your government via intrigue! Korea, er, let's cut to commercial.

At least the British keep it in the family.

China Tech News has great articles about the hotbed of activity there.

And Kylin is supposed to be a windows, linux, unix and *BSD and MacOS beater ! Interesting stuff!

After the 2008 Olympics people will wake up to a reality, how advanced China is! I think it is great! Lets hope China becomes a huge adopter of linux! :-)

How many Chinese /. do we have? To keep up, I suggest we all Learn chinese characters!

Looking forward to 2008. See you there!

Given that you seemed to be starting off with economic interactions, you really do have only two options - buy or don't buy

Well, if that is your view, why don't you tell DeBeers and Jaguar not to advertise? By your reasoning, they also have only two options: to offer something for sale or not to offer it for sale. By your reasoning, there should be no marketing, advertising, or anything else. By your reasoning, buyers and sellers just bump into each other randomly, I suppose.

Of course, you can probably expect someone to exercise their freedom to point out that you're simply arguing that people should substitute your subjective values for their own currently held values, for no particular reason other than because you think they ought to.

I gave a much more specific argument than that. If you demonstrate your ability to dispose of income by buying a diamond, you are lining the pockets of the DeBeers cartel and contributing to unnecessary and destructive mining operations. If you demonstrate your ability to dispose of income by contribution to a charity, cultural or artistic cause, or to medical or scientific research, you may achieve some additional good.

Now, maybe you don't care about any of those things. But I bet a lot of other people do.

And that's, not surprisingly, why charitable giving "in lieu of gifts/flowers" is actually becoming more and more socially acceptable.

You should definitely buy a diamond. And a Jaguar. You are failing to consider the social benefits of owning premium goods, and therefore your values are incorrect.

I know the value of owning premium goods: products for which you pay a premium because they are created using better craftsmanship, better designs, and better materials.

That is entirely different from goods whose primary purpose is to demonstrate that you have lots of money. Demonstrating that you have lots of money is a bad idea. In fact, most people who feel compelled to demonstrate that they have lots of money probably don't actually have a lot of money. The compulsion to show off one's wealth diminishes as the actual wealth increases. Trust me on that one. But understatement is perhaps a concept the nouveau riche don't understand... You can read all about it here.

The last paragraph is more closely related to NetBSD (or all BSDs in general) problem. I read an article somewhere years ago that, Intel actually engaged a consulting firm in order to come out with a name for suitable for the 586. One of the criterias was that it must be something not offensive in any languages spoken worldwide.

Call it political correctness, but you don't offend anyone if you can help it. Especially a wo[r]ld class entity doing business worldwide.

You know people always defend creating bogus words bysaying that "we can't offend someone in another language". That's utter bullshit. Why?

China.

If you sell products in China, you must label them in Chinese. This is not simple transliteration because Chinese doesn't have a phonetic alphabet. Chinese uses ideograms. Each character represents both a phoneme and an idea (either concrete or abstract). This means that EVERY word including bullshit like "Pentium", "Levitra", and "xyzzy" means something. It may not make sense, but it does mean something.

For example, Subway resturants are called
"si ba wei" which means something like "four thousand tastes". My girlfriend (who's from China) likes this name because it's actually clever. Most of time nonChinese names have questionable, if not outright meaningless names. (Think Lisa Simpson when she reads the movie marquee "Young Einstien Staring Yahoo Serious". ("I know these words, but that sign doesn't make any sense.")) Another example is "Johnson" (as in "Johnson's & Johnson's" is "qiang sheng" which means "strength birth". Still others end up meaning little more than "robot monkey carburator" or "Yahoo Serious".

zhongwen.com has a faq about his very topic.

The last paragraph is more closely related to NetBSD (or all BSDs in general) problem. I read an article somewhere years ago that, Intel actually engaged a consulting firm in order to come out with a name for suitable for the 586. One of the criterias was that it must be something not offensive in any languages spoken worldwide.

Call it political correctness, but you don't offend anyone if you can help it. Especially a wo[r]ld class entity doing business worldwide.

You know people always defend creating bogus words bysaying that "we can't offend someone in another language". That's utter bullshit. Why?

China.

If you sell products in China, you must label them in Chinese. This is not simple transliteration because Chinese doesn't have a phonetic alphabet. Chinese uses ideograms. Each character represents both a phoneme and an idea (either concrete or abstract). This means that EVERY word including bullshit like "Pentium", "Levitra", and "xyzzy" means something. It may not make sense, but it does mean something.

For example, Subway resturants are called
"si ba wei" which means something like "four thousand tastes". My girlfriend (who's from China) likes this name because it's actually clever. Most of time nonChinese names have questionable, if not outright meaningless names. (Think Lisa Simpson when she reads the movie marquee "Young Einstien Staring Yahoo Serious". ("I know these words, but that sign doesn't make any sense.")) Another example is "Johnson" (as in "Johnson's & Johnson's" is "qiang sheng" which means "strength birth". Still others end up meaning little more than "robot monkey carburator" or "Yahoo Serious".

zhongwen.com has a faq about his very topic.

The word "nu" (depending on the nuance) in Mandarin Chinese (ie: that spoken in Mainland China and Taiwan, ROC) is "woman" (or, more generally, Female).

Nu.

"tian wang-mo" as best i can tell ("sky network"). "Sky Net" itself would just be "tian wang"

thank YOU, zhongwen

Actually, that's what books look like in Korean, champ. This is Chinese.

I could be facetious and say 'none', since my speakers stay off these days, but I do have a few mp3s, and they're mostly live/rare/unreleased, so no 'real' copies. I've bought cds for which I'd downloaded songs; mainly stuff I was going to get anyway and wiped for disk space once I had the albums.

As for how the try-all-then-buy would work in my case, the answer is "very badly". Before I buy something readily available in full, for free, I'd have to be getting added value for money in terms of useability/nicer format/reward a deserving creator.

Frex, I doubt I'll buy a Doonesbury collection while they keep the entire archive online (and the library has the cd version) no matter how much I enjoy Duke strips, and the only thing Baen's samples have ever done is convince me not to get X's latest, though I like how they post 3 chapters, not just one. Otoh, I ordered Harbaugh's character dictionary based on the quality of his site, but it took me 2 years, and was because I wanted to read entries at leisure and Mozilla was buggy on the frames.

I appreciate people putting their whole works online, but I think that from a sales point, going beyond moderate samples (say, short stories/essays in full, shopping link for novels/collections) is detrimental. Few authors/artists are good enough to sustain my interest when it comes to turning freebies into own-copies, and given the choice between buying hardcopy of someone's useful textbook and spending that money on Feynman books, Tuva or Bust wins. I also think that most people are paying out of guilt or on principle.

That said, given the choice between a more costly physical copy (of reasonable quality and price) and a cheap/er online copy from a favourite (and worthy) author (Pratchett or Hambly, say), I'll take the tactile (not to mention archival) version. And I'd be really happy if I could buy print-on-demand facsimiles of oop/obscure works.

(completely off topic, but...) Its Mandarin, and imho, its not _that_ hard to learn. I actually do it to relieve stress ;-) At CMU, I learned basically a 4 year old's vocabulary in 3 months. As long as you practice ~4 hours a day, conversation comes easy after a while. Personally, I believe it is so easy because its not a romantic language (and thus, you don't start messing up one region's rules with another). A good place to start learning is zhongwen.com Writing characters is also fun...but it take PRACTICE! If you want to learn how to write a character correctly, be prepared to do it at least a couple hundred times. ;-) zai2 jian4! (i hope I got that right ;-)
--------------------------

your cat's name is bootsie?

Ni yao han yu ma? The shi zhong wen dui ni: "ni ma ma tai bu hao kan, ni ba ba shi biao zi." ni dai dai gan.

ni yao shi shuo zhong guo hua, shuo you yi si!

> *ahem* If anyone ever bothers to go through the replies to the posts ever again,

Are you kidding? This is a hot thread!

> here is what I think happened. Fan Qie Jia is Mandarin for Ketchup,

Are you sure? All I know is what my dictionary says, and that's that ketchup is: fan1qie2jiang4

> but I guess someone mixed it up for Tomato along the way,
> and also forgot the order of the syllables, and re-typed it out to be Fan Jia Qie.

Too complicated an explanation, no? Again, my dictionary lists two pronunciations for &#33540: jia1 (lotus stem) and qie2 (eggplant). So how's this: if you look at the dictionary quickly and don't know better, you may think the pronunciation of the character is "jia qie".

> Fan Qie is Mandarin for tomato, as mentioned before.

> P.S. This is my first post EVER...

congratulations!

> Whaddya think of the name? If you don't get the joke, read on...
> P.P.S. It's supposed to mean, "Not in the face." Some brain-teaser, huh? :)

not bad

> *ahem* If anyone ever bothers to go through the replies to the posts ever again,

Are you kidding? This is a hot thread!

> here is what I think happened. Fan Qie Jia is Mandarin for Ketchup,

Are you sure? All I know is what my dictionary says, and that's that ketchup is: fan1qie2jiang4

> but I guess someone mixed it up for Tomato along the way,
> and also forgot the order of the syllables, and re-typed it out to be Fan Jia Qie.

Too complicated an explanation, no? Again, my dictionary lists two pronunciations for &#33540: jia1 (lotus stem) and qie2 (eggplant). So how's this: if you look at the dictionary quickly and don't know better, you may think the pronunciation of the character is "jia qie".

> Fan Qie is Mandarin for tomato, as mentioned before.

> P.S. This is my first post EVER...

congratulations!

> Whaddya think of the name? If you don't get the joke, read on...
> P.P.S. It's supposed to mean, "Not in the face." Some brain-teaser, huh? :)

not bad

> *ahem* If anyone ever bothers to go through the replies to the posts ever again,

Are you kidding? This is a hot thread!

> here is what I think happened. Fan Qie Jia is Mandarin for Ketchup,

Are you sure? All I know is what my dictionary says, and that's that ketchup is: fan1qie2jiang4

> but I guess someone mixed it up for Tomato along the way,
> and also forgot the order of the syllables, and re-typed it out to be Fan Jia Qie.

Too complicated an explanation, no? Again, my dictionary lists two pronunciations for &#33540: jia1 (lotus stem) and qie2 (eggplant). So how's this: if you look at the dictionary quickly and don't know better, you may think the pronunciation of the character is "jia qie".

> Fan Qie is Mandarin for tomato, as mentioned before.

> P.S. This is my first post EVER...

congratulations!

> Whaddya think of the name? If you don't get the joke, read on...
> P.P.S. It's supposed to mean, "Not in the face." Some brain-teaser, huh? :)

not bad

You should be able to read the Chinese characters in this post if you're using IE or Mozilla and have a Unicode font with Chinese.

Otherwise you can look it up in .gif at this cool Chinese character site and hear it pronounced here (when it's back up?).

I don't think thats right, beacuse the word for 'bite' in chinese is "Yau" in the 3rd tone, or "ding" in the 4th. ( zhongwen.com ). I do remember hearing that though.

Webslacker: Woh Duh Monitor Way Sa Ma Lan Sah?

1. Webslacker was not using standard Mandarin pronunciations. The correct way to put the pinyin as follows:

Wo3 de5 Monitor wei2 she2 me5 lan2 se4?

2. 'Monitor' is not Chinese. Chinese for 'monitor' is 'xian3 shi4 qi4'.

3. The grammar of the sentence is wrong. Simply put, Webslacker's translation sounded like a Chinese dub of Yoda's speech. Correct way to speak 'Why is my monitor blue?' in Chinese is follows:

Wei2 she2 me5 wo3 de5 xian3 shi4 qi4 shi4 lan2 se4?

For those without proper browser, the UCS-2 codes for the sentence as follows:

U+70BA U+751A U+9EBC U+6211 U+7684 U+986F U+793A U+5668 U+662F U+85CD U+8272 U+003F

References:
Chinese Characters and culture [http://www.zhongwen.com/]
Unihan Database [http://charts.unicode.org/]