Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 September 1

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September 1

How is Chinese writing taught to complete foreigners?

By "complete foreigners", I am referring to people who start with no knowledge of the language. Do teachers say out the brushstrokes in Chinese while writing? What about the radicals of characters? 50.4.236.254 (talk) 00:52, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

[1]. --Jayron32 01:15, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Oh. I meant in a physical classroom setting, not online. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 02:14, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

• Like Chinese people, they would probably start with Pinyin, not Hanzi. Ian.thomson (talk) 02:16, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

And when you get to the characters, you start with simple ones like 一 二 三 and 人 and 天, and build up from there. The same way that character writing is taught to Chinese kids, pretty much. And it's easier to start with the more logographic ones. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 09:19, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

So... teachers normally don't say 竖弯钩 when writing down the brushstroke. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 11:15, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

You would have to introduce what "竖弯钩" means before you can talk about it - this applies both to kids and foreign learners. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 12:30, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Hanzi are divided into four categories, Beginning, Elementary, Intermediate, Advanced. See wikt:Appendix:HSK list of Mandarin words. Additionally, you would study the radicals: wikt:Index:Chinese radical (especially to become familiar with their shapes, strokes, and sort order). Indices by number of strokes, from one to sixty-four, is very helpful: wikt:Index:Chinese total strokes. —Stephen (talk) 23:04, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

The reason I asked the question was that I wondered how do completely non-native speakers of Chinese learn Chinese writing, specifically whether they would come to recognize the radicals by, for example, the English name (i.e. roof radical) or whatever language the learner speaks natively or Chinese name (i.e. 宝盖头）of the radical or brushstroke movement. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 23:37, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

I doubt that even native Chinese speakers know how to name the strokes since there are some disputes in calligraphy as to how many different strokes there are. People are more familiar with radicals since you need them to look up characters. Generally, it's not that different from writing Latin letters. You'd have a sequence of boxes with one more stroke added each time. Just copy them like a child. Names can be acquired later. --92.74.25.214 (talk) 06:24, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Fine. Then, my experience is special then. At least I know two native Chinese teachers who tend to say out their brushstrokes while teaching students how to write. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 16:59, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

My experience learning Japanese in an English-speaking environment was that the teacher would sometimes call out the strokes, but it is not necessary to do so in Japanese. Similarly, I don't think there would be any issue with a teacher of Chinese describing (for example) "乚" as "down, around and tick" instead of "shu wan gou" (if that's the stroke you meant - there are at least two very different strokes that are often called "shu wan gou" in China). --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 09:11, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

• How about incomplete foreigners? μηδείς (talk) 16:44, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Like, for example, second-generation immigrants with some home-acquired command of a Chinese language but no formal schooling in it? Can't be many of those around. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.204.180.96 (talk) 19:59, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Can't be that many of those around?? There are around 50 million Overseas Chinese people, and the proportion of them who start out billingual - and therefore would probably be "incomplete foreigners" to the OP, is increasing all the time. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 09:14, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

For foreigners who feel incomplete, learning Chinese writing can make them complete foreigners. :-) StuRat (talk) 20:16, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Jin Kazama

While the article's reception section is quite a bit, I barely managed to find creation information for Jin Kazama. I only know of two books that might contain information about it: Tekken 3 artbook and Tekken Hybrid. I have no access to neither of them. Cheers.Tintor2 (talk) 14:57, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Scientists who study meteors

Is there a name for scientists who study meteors? If they study minerals, they're called minerologists; but meteorology means something completely different. Thanks. 173.228.123.121 (talk) 17:55, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Try astronomers. And by the way, "meteorology" originally meant the study of things high in the sky, which is why weathermen are called meteorologists. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:00, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

To this day, the International Cloud Atlas treats clouds as a species of hydrometeor, itself a species of meteor. jnestorius^(talk) 23:22, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

The science is meteoritics and a person working in the field is a meteoriticist. --Wrongfilter (talk) 18:12, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Excellent word for Scrabble. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 07:16, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Whether you choose a career in meteorology or meteoritics, may your career not be mediocre but rather meteoric (which in this case means to NOT crash and burn). StuRat (talk) 20:21, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Jacques-Philippe Cornut

Would somebody be able to help with the English translation of: "Canadensium plantarum, aliarúmque nondum editarum historia nondum editarum historia cui adiectum est ad calcem enchiridion botanicum parisiense" for the above article please? I believe the first part is "Canadense plants" and the last part I think is "to be added to the end of the Handbook of Parisian Botany" but the part in the middle I'm unclear on--Jac16888 ^Talk 17:58, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

The title given in the New York Public Library catalog is "Canadensivm planatarvm, aliarúmque nondum editarum historia. Cui adiectum ad calcem Enchiridion botanicvm parisiense, continens indicem plantarum, quae in pagis, siluis, pratis, et montosis iuxta Parisios locis nascuntur", which is more or less "Canadian plants, and other unpublished material. Which can be appended to the end of the Botanical Manual of Paris, listing the plants that are native to the villages, the woods, the meadows, and mountains." - Nunh-huh 18:19, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

That's great, thank you--Jac16888 ^Talk 19:27, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

"To which should be is appended" I think, rather than "Which can be appended to"; but it doesn't make a great deal of difference to the meaning. --ColinFine (talk) 21:36, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Further nitpicking: "historia" is the subject of it all, so it's "A History of Canadian Plants, and other unpublished material, to the end of which has been appended the Botanical Manual of Paris" (plus "containing an index of the plants that are native to the countryside, forests, meadows, and mountains around Paris" in the part that Nunh-huh added). So it does change the meaning a bit - the Canadian plants are at the beginning and the botanical manual is at the end, as Colin noted. Adam Bishop (talk) 00:07, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

In that context, "historia" would be better translated "account", rather than "history". The meaning in Latin is wider than it is in English. Wymspen (talk) 11:10, 2 September 2017 (UTC)

Removed my "should be": I misread adiectum as a gerundive. --ColinFine (talk) 11:43, 2 September 2017 (UTC)