SQJ Taipei

I love learning Chinese… especially the written language. The characters are beautiful and elegant and very interesting.

I really like the TV show, The Unit. My dad and brother watched that when I was back in the USA last year and I got hooked on it then. Although it has gotten weaker in some respects lately… one of the best episodes of any show ever, IMHO, was the episode from this season that originally aired on February 27th called “Dark Side of the Moon“. Check your listings and watch that one if it repeats.

I like to search for anomalies… in movies, etc… Angie is amused at the way that I grab the remote and jump back to look at something in the perfectly decent video we are watching… at least I think she is amused?

Ketchup… Catsup… I don’t care how you spell it… I love it. I’m somewhat infamous in my family for my use of the king of condiments. Funny considering how tomatoes is my “hate food”. An interesting piece of trivia about ketchup is that it most likely originated in China.

These 4 “favorite things” have converged with this little video… from a recent episode of The Unit.

Here’s the thing… that character… isn’t pronounced like the guy says it and it doesn’t mean exactly what he says it means either. However… there are many dialects and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the pronounciation IS correct in one of the dialects. However… the character is completely wrong, I think. The guy doesn’t write it very well… the stroke order is correct, but the proportions are wrong. Here is a link to the etymology of the character and I just don’t see the connection. I’d think there would be a Chinese speaker/reader on the set to at least ask. The character does mean “loyalty” so I think they should have just said that. However… it just doesn’t seem to fit because the pronounciation is not right either.

I think the pronounciation is most likely a dialect (and signs point to Taiwanese/Amoy/Hokkien, interestingly enough) but the character is most likely NOT the one they are showing in the video… it did make for good TV though.

One thing I can agree with the character in the show about… Chinese IS a wonderful language!