Chinese the Fourth

Wednesday, October 6, 2004 » school update

Since you may not know this, many Chinese characters come in two flavors, traditional and simplified, the latter taking significantly less time to write. While taking Chinese 1 through 3, the class would frequently come across references to the simplified forms, and everyone would be very disappointed when instructed to stick with writing out the traditional characters. "Once you get to Chinese 4, you can use simplified characters," they said.

Well, Chinese 4 is here, and we didn't spend the first week relearning slimmed-down versions of characters en masse, we've been getting maybe one or two simplified versions per day.

So yesterday we're going over how to ask and give directions. This, of course, involved resurrecting a bunch of old prepositions from Chinese 2, most of which use the character biān, which is this bad boy:

Just imagine having to write that out every time you want to say where something is. The classic "describe your room" assignment from Every Single Language Class Ever became a deadly ordeal.

Anyway, yesterday the professor is explaining how to say north, west, east, etc.: "So to write these, you need to use biān. Oh, and we have a simplified version of biān." Then he writes this up on the board:

WHAT. They couldn't have just been a little generous and tossed that out back in January? Just think of all the ink we could have saved.