In honor of yesterday's post about how now is my reading season, I decided to show a picture of a book I've been reading. It's the Chinese version of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Although I'm not really reading it from cover to cover, I just pick it up when it's my Chinese study time and I'm sick of my textbooks.
Surprisingly enough it's actually easier than the articles in my textbook. There are sometimes when I can get through a whole page without coming across a word I don't know. Then again I am reading for "fun" so I don't worry if there is a word I don't know, unlike the rage i feel when I forget a word in my textbook.
Then again part of it could be the translation. Unlike westerners where we try to seem as clever as possible in our writing, Chinese writing is usually simple and straightforward. So I wonder if this also comes across in translations. I have seen it pop up in movie subtitles where the subs in Chinese are not as elaborate what is being said in English, then again you have to make some changes when translating to another language. But I have also seen Chinese translations of American books which have all the clever and minutely descriptive words in Chinese as well. Chinese does have all those words, but thankfully it's not common practice to use them. I'm definitely not complaining.
I also thought this would be a good way to talk about the reading and writing direction of Chinese. Really it goes in all directions. A long time ago it was in lines top to bottom starting from the right of the page to the left of the page. As seen in the picture above, so actually the front cover of the book is what would be the back cover of our books in the west. As time went on and with more and more influence form the west, writing started to be done horizontally from left to right. This especially became prevalent when everybody started typing, so many essays and reports are typed just like we do. But we also can't forget the Japanese influence so sometimes things were/are written horizontally right to left.
So what's the most prevalent style? Well it really depends on what it is. Books are usually as you see above. Comic books are read right to left, but the word balloons could be vertical or horizontal and usually left to right, but of course there are exceptions. Newspapers can be both vertical and horizontal. Official documents are filled out western style, unless it's an older institution, so it's vertically. Websites and emails are horizontal left to right, basically anything you type up and send to somebody else or print out, is horizontal (with exceptions of course). Written notes can be either, but often seem to be vertical, and formal written letters should be vertical.
So it really keeps you on your toes. Vertical or horizontal, left to right or right to left. You have to be ready for anything. The one thing that I'm never ready for though is the names of westerners. In Japanese they use a character set to construct foreign words so you don't get confused, but in Chinese they use the same characters that are used for everything else. Many times I will come upon some words i don't know or a strange combination of words that I do know and be totally thrown. I'll spend a lot of time trying to decipher it or looking it up only to eventually realize "oh it's a _____ name!"
You can insert your own choice word into that sentence. And if you a real quiet you can probably hear me scream it the next time I loose ten minutes (well probably two at most but it feels like an eternity) trying to figure out what something means only to find out it means nothing cause it's a name.
