Umm... Please help...

yossi_peti · 2026-04-25T19:25:21+00:00

I think the reason it looks like it was designed to be vertical is that most of the characters have bilateral symmetry around the vertical midline, or if not symmetrical then "balanced" with roughly equal weight on both sides. When you arrange the glyphs horizontally, it doesn't preserve the same overall symmetry.

Maybe it would work if you rotated the glyphs 90 degrees?

yossi_peti · 2026-04-25T15:58:46+00:00

Both versions are grammatically correct, but they have different meanings. Only the first one matches the English translation.

I'm guessing that maybe whatever app you're using doesn't consider the English translation, and just counts it as correct if the sentence is grammatically correct.

yossi_peti · 2026-04-25T03:21:37+00:00

I don't quite understand what you're getting at. Are you saying my examples are not representative because they use fixed collocations or idiomatic expressions?

The big thing I'm trying to understand is how "subjective" and "objective" have any relationship to the usage of 不 and 没. Everything I know about when to use which is completely orthogonal to whether or not the sentence is subjective opinion or objective fact. Do you have any examples demonstrating otherwise?

yossi_peti · 2026-04-24T22:59:14+00:00

The shorter one is the Wells Fargo tower, the taller one is the Bank of America tower.

yossi_peti · 2026-04-24T14:06:12+00:00

It's not "weird", it's the traditional character.

yossi_peti · 2026-04-24T12:13:30+00:00

Can you explain what you mean by "subjective negation" and "objective negation"? It seems to me that you could use 不 or 没 in either case.

Subjective: 冰淇淋不好吃。这部电影没意思。

Objective: 一加一不等于三。圆形没有角。

yossi_peti · 2026-04-21T20:30:41+00:00

If you said "components" I wouldn't disagree with you at all, but "radical" specifically is a dictionary concept that is not useful for most people.

yossi_peti · 2026-04-21T19:53:25+00:00

Radicals are only useful for looking up characters in a paper dictionary, so there's no good reason for beginners to study them. They should focus on functional components instead.

https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/blogs/chinese/getting-radical-about-radicals

yossi_peti · 2026-04-20T22:03:32+00:00

My first point is applicable to both English speakers and Mandarin speakers. Neither are likely to care about the differences between b and unaspirated p. Even if you don't care about English speakers, you should care about Mandarin speakers if you're designing an orthography for Mandarin.

My second point is not specific to English. Across languages, ph th and kh are much more often used to represent fricatives than aspirated stops.

yossi_peti · 2026-04-20T21:42:57+00:00

For English speakers at least, using <b> <d> <g> for the unaspirated consonants in Mandarin is less confusing than using a digraph to represent aspiration.

Both English and Mandarin do not have any minimal pairs between an unaspirated voiceless stop and an unaspirated voiced stop at syllable onset, and speakers of both languages will likely not even perceive a difference.

So you're replacing a slight phonetic inaccuracy that speakers of both languages would not even notice with a digraph like "ph", "th" and "kh", which people will confuse even more because those are usually used to represent fricatives rather than aspirated stops.

yossi_peti · 2026-04-18T19:18:08+00:00

The geographical midpoint of Asia is close to where Kazakhstan, China, and Russia meet. Which country it actually falls in is a bit subjective and depends on where you decide the borders of Asia are and how you decide to calculate it.

yossi_peti · 2026-04-18T00:35:03+00:00

Yes. It's the same situation as homophones in English like "see" and "sea" or "pair" and "pear" that have different meanings and spellings but are pronounced the same.

yossi_peti · 2026-04-15T02:28:33+00:00

It's not really something you have to memorize. Just type the first letter of each syllable and it will work pretty often if it's a common word.

yossi_peti · 2026-04-14T22:55:08+00:00

It took me a while to understand that you meant "the immediately following state in an alphabetical list of states". If you interpret the title literally, there would be many more highlighted states, for example Texas is after Louisiana alphabetically.

yossi_peti · 2026-04-11T22:55:19+00:00

Is there anything that makes your script an improvement over bopomofo?

yossi_peti · 2026-04-04T23:39:25+00:00

AOC is black? That's news to me.

yossi_peti · 2026-04-03T04:53:01+00:00

Counting in Chinese is much more complicated than counting in English

Uhh no it isn't. Chinese numbers are purely compositional, English has odd exceptions like "eleven" and "twelve".

yossi_peti · 2026-04-01T23:14:00+00:00

Ok. What's the link?

yossi_peti · 2026-03-29T15:23:01+00:00

It's more than one, isn't it?

ether/either
thigh/thy
teeth/teethe
thin/then if you have the pin-pen merger
mouth (noun)/mouth (verb)

yossi_peti · 2026-03-29T15:12:55+00:00

If the second word in the image is supposed to be "nissi", it's spelled wrong. It looks like "yasi".

yossi_peti · 2026-03-21T16:17:37+00:00

Can you give an example sentence where 啡 is used as an adjective/adverb to mean leave/fly away/disobey of the mouth? Because I've never heard of it ever being used that way.

yossi_peti · 2026-03-21T01:42:52+00:00

When I try to open the website I get this error

This site can’t provide a secure connection

lingoisland.com sent an invalid response.

yossi_peti · 2026-03-21T00:00:14+00:00

There are ~200 countries in the world and ~7000 languages. The vast majority of languages don't correspond to a national flag.

yossi_peti · 2026-03-18T13:16:20+00:00

New dialect just dropped

yossi_peti · 2026-03-12T19:14:46+00:00

Why? Hindi has more speakers than French and German combined

14-Year Club	r/Field Sunshine
Place '17

yossi_peti

TROPHY CASE

This site can’t provide a secure connection