You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October, 2007.
Hi again everyone ^_^ *peace*
So this entry is slightly out of sync because I took these photos last week but I’m slow at uploading things so you’re only getting them now! I would like to quickly point out at what a pretty word ‘fallal’ is! Regardless, I’m sure a lot of you know about Zhang Yimou’s most recent martial arts epic movie, ‘Curse of the Golden Flower’ (满城尽带黄金甲). It’s my favourite of Zhang’s most popular martial arts movies (’Hero’ and ‘House of Flying Daggers’ being the other two); it’s amazingly lush, extravagant, fantastical and psychadelic. It also features my favourite Chinese actress, Gong Li, who I think performs her role of a scandalous and abandoned yet determined empress, hell bent on revenge; yet, she plays this somewhat… anti-hero with a poetic beauty and sombreity you can’t help but empathise with her. Kudos go to Chow Yun Fat too, who is revered as always and, of course, to Jay Chou who is cute =^^=
Anyway! To celebrate the DVD release of ‘Curse of the Golden Flower’, somehow… the flagship store of HMV in London (Oxford Street branch) has some costumes from the film on display! My friend told me so I waddled off to see; they’re amazingly beautiful and intricate. I’m not really sure where they appear in the film or who wears them… *checks*
No, I can’t tell who wore them, if it was anyone important, or if they were ever seen in the film really; but they’re very beautiful so I thought I’d show you all. Also, if you’ve not seen the film yet, you really should! It’s great ^_^
Here’s a small extra bit! If you know anything about Chinese culture then hopefully you will know about the Mid-Autumn Festival! This year it was on September 25th. I don’t really know what you do for it, but I do know that you eat yummy Mooncakes and it’s about erm, a goddess on the Moon (basically!). Sadly I didn’t go to Chinatown for it nor did I have any Mooncakes *sniffles* but here is a picture of Chinatown, a few days after the festival. You can see the pretty lanterns! I hope everyone is safe!
*peace*
So, last week I started my Mandarin class at university. We didn’t learn much but it was fun! We mostly worked on trying to practice the pronunciation of the four tones so that was pretty cool. The teacher seems friendly enough ^_^ Anyway! I was reading the syllabus and in the exam we have to write in Chinese! Scary scary! Anyways, I wanted to really practice my Chinese writing so I bought a couple of books and have been practicing. The pictures show my first try! If you know how to write them then feel free to give feedback on how bad they look!
I should note that they are the simplified characters as the Chinese government, during the Cultural Revolution, found that a large majority of people were illiterate. So they set about simplifying some of the complicated characters in order to help aid literacy. Not every character was simplified and there are still large amounts of people that use the traditional characters (in Hong Kong and Taiwan for example) but, as we are learning Standard Mandarin, we are learning the simplified characters.
This picture shows the rows I wrote when practicing! I bought a notebook that has squared paper to try and help but I still have problems writing sadly 
Anyway, from top to bottom they read: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, you, you (polite), good, please (then please again, the first line of please is the traditional version; can you see the difference?), ask, honourable, surname. Some of the characters have more than one meaning but I only listed one.
I think the characters are so beautiful. I love how they are combined into new meanings etc. It’s a very… abstract and conceptual way of writing, totally different from using an alphabet. It’s like you are writing in ideas and not words. It’s very beautiful.
