The New York Times "pronouncer" for "Tsien" is "chee-AHN". That is very far from the mark. Even for those who are not familiar with the niceties of Chinese consonants and vowels, "chee-AHN" doesn't sound remotely right because "Tsien" (like the vast majority of Chinese surnames) is one syllable, but "chee-AHN" makes it seem to have two syllables. Moreover, Chinese is tonal, whereas the "AHN" of the pronouncer makes it seem to have emphasis on the second, (non-existent) syllable.
Martin Heymann writes (Tue, 2 Dec 2014 22:26:55 +1100):
Tonight, I was watching the Australian federal Minister of Education interviewed on TV. He was discussing a senator called Dio Wang (see also here), and got in a bit of a scrap with the interviewer about how to pronounce the surname.
According to the Minister, "it depends on where you are in the spectrum" as to how the surname is pronounced. Here's the clip (it's quite hilarious, especially because the recording keeps repeating in a loop).
In the comments to "slip(per)" (7/22/14), we have had a very lively discussion on whether or not people would pronounce these two sentences differently in Mandarin:
wǒ yào tuōxié
我要拖鞋
"I want slippers."
wǒ yào tuō xié
我要脫鞋
"I want to take off my shoes."
I began drafting this post around Mother's Day, which we recently observed, but got distracted by other things. This is an old topic that I've been thinking about for years. Namely, I've long been intrigued by the use of mǔ 母 ("mother") in linguistic terms, such as zìmǔ 字母 ("letter", lit., "character mother") (e.g., sānshíliù zìmǔ 三十六字母 ["36 initial consonants"]), shēngmǔ 声母 ("initial", lit., "sound mother") and yùnmǔ 韵母 ("final", lit., "rime mother"). The first two go back to the Song period (960-1279), but I don't know how old the latter two are. See here, here, and here for references.
Gloria Bien sent in the following photograph and asked what to make of the Chinese text in it, especially the unusual character 叻, which is pronounced lè in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM; but see below for the Cantonese pronunciation and meaning). Wenlin says it's part of a name for Singapore, but not used alone, as it is in this picture. Google says Overseas Chinese use it for Singapore. But, as Gloria observes, "I'm the most Singapore" doesn't make sense.
This is from a package of noodles from Emeryville, CA, and says "Product of China," but complex characters are used throughout.
Some years ago (in 2008, as a matter of fact), I wrote a post entitled "How to learn to read Chinese". The current post is intended as a followup and supplement to that post.
The words were being hastily shouted down a phone, with loud sounds of wind and waves in the background, and the emergency call center operator could make no sense of them. Attempts at conversing with the caller failed; he seemed not to understand English. Yet the tone was unmistakably urgent: someone was in danger of his life. But who? And where?
About 23 people died in the event that led to that desperate, unintelligible phone call. It happed in 2004, ten years ago today. My vagueness about the number of victims is because no one who knew all the facts wanted to talk about the circumstances (the skull of one victim was only found in 2010).
A recent issue (1/7/14) of the South China Morning Post (SCMP) carried an article by a staff reporter entitled "Hong Kong student's poem recital goes viral in the mainland ". The article features this amazing video of a Hong Kong high school student reciting a couple of Classical Chinese poems:
