Can anyone help identify or translate this beeng?

[Exempt]

[shah82]

Feels stupid that I could translate that. I look at too much chinese!

Mengku Bingdao.

Top rim is yunnan gushu qizibingcha

Factory is on the very bottom saying Menghai blahblahblah LaoShuTeaFactory

The characters in the blahblahblah are to indistinct for me to figure out.

[apache]

Feels stupid that I could translate that. I look at too much chinese!

Mengku Bingdao.

Top rim is yunnan gushu qizibingcha

Factory is on the very bottom saying Menghai blahblahblah LaoShuTeaFactory

The characters in the blahblahblah are to indistinct for me to figure out.

I'm very impressed and I think shah82 has a great gift to learn the language! Most people would find it difficult to read Chinese characters.

The blahblahblah is
勐海縣班章老樹茶廠出品

Instead of stealing his thunder, let the great shah82 to finish the job.

[shah82]

awww, I don't know the character before the banzhang...

/me gets out that http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/sinograms.html?r

doesn't work...

/me cheats, using Google Translate...

So...

Menghai County Banzhang Old Tree Tea Factory.

[apache]

Yes, 縣 is the artistic form of 县 and it means county.

With Google Translate you could do all sort of things, like playing the sound or speaking the word and see whether it recognises your pronunciation. It makes learning languages a lot easier. Also there is no such thing as grammar in the Chinese language and it is really easy to learn if you could master the tones and the written characters, only need a couple thousands of them to read news papers.

[Evan Draper]

It says 357, but why does that look like a minibing to me?

[apache]

It says 357, but why does that look like a minibing to me?

I see! Mmmm, it is an illusion caused by the .... hand ...

[茶藝-TeaArt08]

With Google Translate you could do all sort of things, like playing the sound or speaking the word and see whether it recognises your pronunciation. It makes learning languages a lot easier. Also there is no such thing as grammar in the Chinese language and it is really easy to learn if you could master the tones and the written characters, only need a couple thousands of them to read news papers.

Shah, nice work on the Mandarin! I've posted in the forum before, but a great app for Mandarin is the Pleco app! It has many different dictionaries and is fairly exhaustive...and it allows for one to finger-write in a character when one does not recognize a Mandarin character, it's sound, or radicals.

Apache, while I understand how someone might be lead to assert that Mandarin (or Cantonese for that matter) is "without grammar" this is very distinctly not true. Even pidgins and creoles, as contrasted to standard vernacular language, have internal grammar and rules. What can be said is that Mandarin language is open to many different constructions and allows for a variation of constructions dependent on the emphasis a speaker is wanting to make. Mandarin then, one could say, is more contextual and fluid...but definitely not without grammar. And there is a big difference between speaking/writing Mandarin that is intelligible and speaking/writing intelligent and sophisticated Mandarin.

Having studied Hebrew, Mandarin, and Spanish, and some French, in the university and living in a Mandarin speaking home, I can affirm that Mandarin is not without grammar. That said, in Taiwan I am often telling people there that Spanish is actually a more difficult language than Mandarin to me, due to its grammar constructions, tense and gender agreements, verb conjugations, etc. For English speakers, since Mandarin is also primarily a Subject-Verb-Object language the grammar constructions are more intuitive. But now take someone coming from Japanese to Mandarin and for them the Chinese grammar is often more confusing due to its contrast with Japanese sentence grammar, even though they already have a familiarity with Konji.

Blessings!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_grammar

[apache]

Apache, while I understand how someone might be lead to assert that Mandarin (or Cantonese for that matter) is "without grammar" this is very distinctly not true. Even pidgins and creoles, as contrasted to standard vernacular language, have internal grammar and rules. What can be said is that Mandarin language is open to many different constructions and allows for a variation of constructions dependent on the emphasis a speaker is wanting to make. Mandarin then, one could say, is more contextual and fluid...but definitely not without grammar. And there is a big difference between speaking/writing Mandarin that is intelligible and speaking/writing intelligent and sophisticated Mandarin.

Having studied Hebrew, Mandarin, and Spanish, and some French, in the university and living in a Mandarin speaking home, I can affirm that Mandarin is not without grammar. That said, in Taiwan I am often telling people there that Spanish is actually a more difficult language than Mandarin to me, due to its grammar constructions, tense and gender agreements, verb conjugations, etc. For English speakers, since Mandarin is also primarily a Subject-Verb-Object language the grammar constructions are more intuitive. But now take someone coming from Japanese to Mandarin and for them the Chinese grammar is often more confusing due to its contrast with Japanese sentence grammar, even though they already have a familiarity with Konji.

Blessings!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_grammar

Of cause, the order of subject+verb+object is important and saying it without any rule or grammar is a bit of an exaggeration, but I never come across a Chinese grammar book. If it does exist, I doubt it would be as thick as an English grammar or a French grammar book. I think in Chinese it is more about usage than grammar. I reckon the hardest thing to master in modern Chinese is writing. It is rather difficult to remember how to write
the characters and very often I know the sounds but I can't remember how to write the characters or choosing the correct character from several which all have the same sound. Then the ultimate challenge, the almost impossible classical Chinese ... Having said that, I still can read and understand a little bit of Chinese written over 1500 years ago, but no way I can read any English written more than four or five hundred years old.

[shah82]

Hey, what make you think American teens can handle Shakespeare without heavy annotation!

[茶藝-TeaArt08]

Of cause, the order of subject+verb+object is important and saying it without any rule or grammar is a bit of an exaggeration, but I never come across a Chinese grammar book.

Apache, I'd like to let you off here but my background in Analytic Philosophy, Linguistics, and Philosophy of Language, as well being married to a Taiwanese woman and living with her family... and formal Mandarin study at a private university in Taiwan, just can't do it. Saying Mandarin is without grammar is not a bit of an exaggeration: it's a falsehood; it's untrue. Expressing the nuance of this would lead to a digression into Linguistics and syntax, etc. But take my word for it as someone whom spends three months a year in Taiwan, does business in Taiwan, and is involved with doing translations for friends and business of Mandarin to English and English to Mandarin.

As for your reference to a Mandarin grammar guide, they do exist. In fact every single one of my Mandarin textbooks, all the way up to Classical Chinese, where I stopped with my Mandarin study, includes many detailed breakdowns and constructions throughout the entirety of the textbooks for grammar, even in textbooks from different publishers and nations (U.S. textbooks vs. Taiwan textbooks, etc.) Just a simple example..look at the various nuances in semantic difference in the varying syntax of sentence constructions use the le/了 particle; depending on where the particle is placed in Mandarin sentence constructions the meaning of one's expression changes drastically.

As for antiquated English, Here ye, here ye, I love the " olde" English language and its richness. Though Shah has a point: the texting generation likely stumbles a great deal on antiquated and verbose English language constructions.

Blessings!

[apache]

Am I right that English is your first language? I never learn Chinese grammar and never know that it exists. It might be that you would need to learn the grammar of a language when you learn it as a second language and I internalized most of the rules in Chinese grammar without knowing. I once came across someone who was doing a degree in Chinese as a second language at university. Someone asked her why didn't she study Japanese instead? Her answer at that time was Japanese had grammar and Chinese had no grammar. Obviously, this isn't correct to say Chinese has no grammar. Interesting you pick up particle 了, only very recently do I realise Mandarin has much simpler and much fewer particles that Cantonese, in Cantonese those particles can also be stringed together and give nuance meanings which have no equivalent in Mandarin.

So did you study Classical Chinese as well, like 四書五經 ? Those are very difficult stuffs even for the natives. I had tried to read the I Ching and after only a few pages that is quite enough.

When I say old English, I mean Anglo-Saxon. Thou, ye, art etc are o.k. but try to read something like:
Fæder ūre þū þe eart on heofonum (Father of ours, thou who art in heavens)

is well beyond me and I see this kind of languages from time to time on old monuments in the UK.

[Rui]

Few weeks ago Victor Mair from Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13) brought to our attention a brand new publication called A Grammar of Mandarin by Jeroen Wiedenhof. Hopefully this will be of interest.

Just found the original article:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=21739

[apache]

Few weeks ago Victor Mair from Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13) brought to our attention a brand new publication called A Grammar of Mandarin by Jeroen Wiedenhof. Hopefully this will be of interest.

Just found the original article:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=21739

I saw the book is 477 pages and thought "What?"
https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/z.197/main

It is not entirely grammar, it also include examples of everyday conversations. Without looking inside, I think it has lot and lot of usage examples, pure Chinese grammar can't be that many pages. It's Chinese, not Latin!

[茶藝-TeaArt08]

Few weeks ago Victor Mair from Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13) brought to our attention a brand new publication called A Grammar of Mandarin by Jeroen Wiedenhof. Hopefully this will be of interest.

Just found the original article:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=21739

I saw the book is 477 pages and thought "What?"
https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/z.197/main

It is not entirely grammar, it also include examples of everyday conversations. Without looking inside, I think it has lot and lot of usage examples, pure Chinese grammar can't be that many pages. It's Chinese, not Latin!

Rui, thanks for the link....

Apache, I appreciate Mair as a reference and the book looks interesting to me and I'll very likely buy it, especially since I enjoy deep geeking-out in relationship to language. I loved studying Frege, Quine, Wittgenstein, etc. and I very much enjoyed my Linguistics studies.

Yes, English is my first language and then I studied Spanish (I don't particularly care for Spanish but it has been useful.), then Hebrew, then Mandarin. My hope is to study Japanese next. Yeah, it likely is the case that, just like most native speakers, you've internalized the grammar construction patterns/rules of the language if you are a Cantonese speaker. This is one of the reasons I really enjoyed teaching English in Taiwan: it gave me a deep knowledge and appreciation for English. Reading Classical Chinese is not on the table for me right now...it would be tedious and laborious and full of referencing. But I do hope to get there someday soon.

Blessings!