My best friend in Taiwan

After my grandfather and I watched news segment about Obama, I spent fifteen minutes how to figure out to say to my him, "I voted for Obama!" As soon as I figured it out, I victoriously blurted it out: "Gong-Gong! Zai Meiguo, wo tou piao O-ba-ma!"

All he said was, "Bu cuo." Not bad.


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I just figured out how to use my Chinese dictionary!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, I already knew how to use it. Half of it. It was easy to figure out what Chinese character meant if I heard it spoken. I'm familiar with both the Roman pinyin and the Mandarin pinyin--which are both collections of phonetic symbols that "spell out" the character. If I could hear a word spoken, I could figure out a) how to spell it, both with the ABCs and "Bo Po Mo," the Mandarin ABCs, and b) its tone. Then, in my dictionary, I could find the pinyin spelling, the tone, and the number alongside which the character is listed. (Actually...no easy task. A lot of characters share the same pinyin spelling AND tone! That's like having the word "water" mean 10-30 different things.) Finally, I would flip to the number beside which the character is listed AND FIND THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION! HUZZAH!

But up until now, that was all I knew how to do. If I just saw a written character, I didn't know how to look it up. I had to hear it spoken. And I had no idea how to search for English words and then find the Chinese translation. The English words only gave characters for definitions, no pinyin breakdowns.

BUT I FINALLY FIGURED IT ALL OUT. HUZZAH HUZZAH HUZZAH!

This is how it works. Chinese characters are comprised of OTHER Chinese characters. For example, the complicated-looking character that eventually forms the phrase "to cast a vote" has the simpler character for "hand" in it. These simpler characters are called "radicals." My dictionary AND BEST FRIEND has a list of ALL the radicals used, which each character listed under it (with a number beside it).

So I looked up the word "vote" in the English-Chinese portion of my dictionary. I found a series of unrecognizable characters. But I broke down the first character, which I found contained the character for "hand." Flipping to the Chinese-English section, I found the list of characters that contain the radical "hand," and there was the character for "vote," with that precious number! I flipped to the number that I was given, and there it all was: the character in larger print, the pinyin pronunciation, and a full out English translation.

Yeah, baby.

I bet this was a really boring post.