Neocities.org
thanks for pointing out the delineation of xiang3 vs think. it's tempting to draw conclusions about what the two languages presume is primarily on your mind (desires vs beliefs). in general i think it's really fun to observe how the two different language (families) draw lines around concepts and group them into words -- thinking/speaking in mandarin changes how i think about things compared to english.
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"It makes it seem like people who read/speak Chinese do so in some utterly alien way": yes, thanks for verbalising part of why I didn't like it. also, I hadn't thought about word-by-word as mostly for illustrating grammatical construction, but it makes a lot of sense! i agree (:
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balckwell
1 week ago
I feel like the main utility of a "literal" translation would be attempting to explain the grammatical structure of a language to someone trying to learn. The sentence that emerges is usually complete nonsense in the target language, but reveals the way that the words and particles fit together in the original.
balckwell
1 week ago
However, a "literal" translation that is just the dictionary definition of each word one after the other (like in the example you linked) is quite unhelpful, and I think you're right to say that it exoticizes the language. It makes it seem like people who read/speak Chinese do so in some utterly alien way, when in reality they parse sentences as naturally and fluidly as someone would in English.
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saddleblasters
6 days ago
I've seen non-chinese-speakers talk this way before about the two meanings of 想, but even in English, think also has (at least) two very different usages: (1) to think/contemplate about something, and (2) to think/believe something is true. the second usage isn't at all a logical necessity -- chinese doesn't really use 想 that way, you'd typically use 认为 or 觉得 to express it
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saddleblasters
6 days ago
so one could easily take an english sentence like "I think this is beautiful" and translate it word by word into Chinese to make all sorts of weird conjectures about the English-speakers' psychology
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sorbier
3 weeks ago
really, it's a new blog post (https://sorbier.neocities.org/blog/emotions) nothing else has been changed
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that said i think (haha, jue2de) that the average mandarin word performs more roles than the average english word, which renders mandarin more figurative/conceptual broadly. apologies for stating it so definitively though -- agree that it's totally my subjective impression.