In the last language exchange I learnt quite a lot of new words, I only hope I manage to remember a few of them. Unfortunately, I have the impression I forget words as quickly as I remember them. Trying to extend my vocabulary feels like bailing out a leaking boat with a teacup, that is to say with effort I can get ahead of this problem but relax for a moment and I am in trouble. One word that I will remember, and hopefully not in the place of another, is the word for computer 电脑 the two parts of which are ‘electric’ and ‘brain’. So simple and so correct.
When I read and listen to Chinese I have the problem of not knowing the compound words like the two parter ‘electric brain’, so I don’t know where to cut the stream of characters or sounds coming at me into intelligible chunks. This is the same problem that trips up the translation software. It may be that in this problem there is something that can work for me. I’m not quite sure what it is but I feel like I have to explore my difficulty with the language and use this very directly rather than view it as an obstacle that is preventing me from making a more fluent performance. I will have to look for ways to translate words into actions and vice versa. I will probably start on a quite literal level and see different ways that this can be framed and then go from there. It should be intelligible as a system but it should also prove flexible enough so that it does not feel like a straightjacket after ten minutes. I hate one trick pony performances.
The ideas board is coming along and starting to register more of the things I am working with.
Finally, I saw a nice example of Chinglish yesterday CARVED IN STONE. It is so much better when the stakes are higher and you see this sort of stuff in stone rather than simply on a menu. Seeing how the different examples of Chinglish all have different flavours I think there is more to this than simply Google translate. There must be some Chinese software that performs a similar task but in another fashion. I will have to get hold of some Chinese translation websites and/or software.
