Help with Chinese character

It almost looks like the character for "sheng", only upside down. I am no native Chinese speaker, and no calligrapher, but this looks like a four stroke character, and the last stroke seems kinda odd if this is indeed right side up.

tried to draw it as in your picture using

but it didnt come up with any character that looks similar

I should have said feel free to rotate the image 180'. I showed that orientation because of the Traditional Radical zhi4. That could be sheng upside down but the '6' doesnt look right for the top part of the character. I used the Wubi wildcard input method to look at all characters with the top part of the zhi4 character. I didnt see any possible matches. There was a native Chinese speaker at the puer tasting. I forgot to ask. If I could just figure what strokes the 9 or 6 represent.

Jim

I think your suggesting a tablet application for characters drawn by cursor or some type of build a character. Ill check it out.

Jim

Jan 25, 10:19 pm, SN snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:

Ox. On Firefox Linux the pencil icon opens up outside the tablet, Firefox isnt supplying the right coordinates. Guess Ill have to fire up Vista where unfortunately everything seems to work. My throat is still horse from pronouncing pu 'er'. Everybody was saying 'arh' but is suppose to be the almost impossible 'ahr' for us Westerners. If I get that sound down Ill go to Bejing and pretend Im a native.

Jim

The frustrating thing is when native speakers act like because you are slightly mangling the word they have no idea what you are saying. If I'm in a tea shop or actively discussing tea and my pronunciation isn't 100% I think it is safe to say they could easily figure it out. When a non-native English speaker is mangling words left and right I can still manage just fine. That's one of my pet peeves about talking tea in person.

I had a lady repeat the word "Tuo" about a million times correcting me (even though we were saying it the same) rather than just accept my (apparently slightly off) pronunciation and move on. I never find it necessary to correct the "L" and "R" thing (let alone repeatedly) when they talk to me in English, I manage just fine.

- Dominic

PS I'm waiting to see what the character turns out to be, it's like a bad soap opera :)

I can share the frustration of not being able to get what seems (to you) to be a simple idea across. But I think in a lot of cases they

*honestly* have no idea what you're saying. This is for several reasons: 1) There are just plain a lot of sounds that are difficult to make for English speakers or other non-native speakers of Chinese[1]. 2) Even if the sounds are (phonetically) exactly right, if the tone is wrong, most English speakers would understand what you mean, but to a native speaker, it's a completely different word. And understanding a single Chinese word is sometimes difficult even for native speakers when the word is by itself and... 3) ...without context, which is the other thing that makes it hard to understand. It's like if someone was speaking to you in a foreign (to you) language and then used one English but completely mispronounced it, and didn't give you that much context about what they mean, other than that it had to do with food. 4) There are a lot of different dialects and regional differences of pronunciation (as well as differences in tea terminology) in China and the Chinese diaspora. The person you're talking to might not be a native Mandarin speaker or a Mandarin speaker at all, or they might be used to the word being pronounced differently from the "standard" way. 5) Just because a specialized word is common in the online tea community doesn't mean that's the exact word that everyone uses to express the same idea.

Now if it's a native speaker who deals with a lot of other western tea lovers, they might be able to guess what you mean. But I think it's a little ridiculous to assume that the person is just pretending that they can't understand what you are saying. Other people whose native language is English (or Chinese people who speak English at that level of fluency) will probably be able to guess what you mean because either they mangle the pronounciation of the word themself, or because they know how the pinyin would sound if pronounced phonetically.

And by the way, I have certainly been on the opposite side of things, where someone is mangling an English word to the point where I have no idea what they're talking about. Plus, I assume that in your example (of someone mangling English words left and right), it still involves someone who is speaking entirely English, not speaking a language that's not your first language with a single English word mixed in, out of context. And someone who speaks English well enough to have a conversation in it probably comparatively good English (mangled or not), to the Chinese of your average tea loving Westerner who's not a native speaker of Chinese.

I have had a lot of situations where Mandarin-speaking friends, co-workers, members of my girlfriend's family, etc. simply do not understand the word I'm saying, even though (in my head), I'm saying it absolutely correctly, with the correct tone, etc. Even if I repeat it, or try to explain. It's of course very frustrating for me, but I am 100% certain that these people are not just pretending not to understand me to teach me a lesson; it's just that I'm saying it wrong.

[1] And when I use "Chinese" to refer to a spoken language in this post, I am talking about Putonghua / Mandarin, though I know that "Chinese" isn't an actual spoken language. w

I totally understand, and yes I have very close friends and family who speak a number of languages so I wasn't trying to come off so harsh as I now see it may have seemed. What I was trying to say (unsuccessfully :) is this: I was recently in an Asian import shop in a local mall, I was speaking with the owner about tea and Yixing (so we were on the same page) and she brought up Puerh, I then stated I am not a huge fan but can enjoy it every now and then so I generally do not buy large amounts and instead stick to small tuos or loose tea. Instead of just continuing the conversation she stopped and (I'm sure she understood) corrected my pronunciation of "tuo." No big deal, I'm happy to learn the right way... I'm totally fine with it. I repeated, she then still did not like it and repeated. I repeated. She repeated. We repeated... about 20 times with no discernible difference in tone or pronunciation (although I'm sure I was off minutely). She never gave up. Then when I thought we were finally done she broke out some silver needle tea, she didn't recognize the words "silver needles" so I then tried "Bai Hao Yinzhen" and "Bai Mu Dan" She caught them but then lunched into another rousing bout of pete and repeat with me.

Both times I was close enough that she knew what I was saying to correct me. If a foreign speaker was that close in or out of context, I'm sure I would just let it pass. Now, in this case she could see I knew more than the average customer so I'm sure she was trying to be helpful... but I have also been a part of times when it was just to be snooty about it. I do genuinely care and try my best to accurately pronounce the words. I began learning to say the words from Teaspring.com a couple years back, on their site you can click the characters and hear a woman pronounce them. From there it has come from a number of sources, so it could be a mish mash of particular dialects. I do try to not just be a dumb American and brashly mangle the words (even if I still do). I do care. But there has to be some leeway for a non-native speaker, which was what I was trying to say initially.

- Dominic

The character is indeed 'sheng', written in Xing-shu:

5th row from the right, 7th character from the bottom. Extend the left hook and round the corner, join up the right, and extend the base.

The character is written in a sort of Chinese calligraphy so it makes it harder to read. It's "shou" which means long life.

If it is the 'shou' character then the writer was not aware of the strokes. Be it Cao-shu or Xing-shu, the middle stroke has to push through the top bar and the character is missing a dot on the right of the swiping curve.

As in the 1st character from the left:

When it comes to calligraphy, they don't really concentrate on the exact strokes. It is more or less the shape of the character. To be frank, it wasn't me that called what character it is, it was a Chinese teacher that happened to be standing behind me that majored in Chinese history that told me what character it was. Believe him, who had studied Chinese History and Literature for 20 years, or not.

This has nothing to do with 20 years of study or steeping in Chinese History and Literature...it is about perception: tilt the picture 180 and ask him again...

I want to make sure.

Is this the sheng character from your first table.

xiexie, Jim

Yes, curve the left arm, join the right corners, extend the base, and turn the character 180... bu ke qi...

Somebody suggested earlier my character was upsidedown. Why is your character upsidedown. Everything else in the table looks rightside up to me.

Jim

Thanks for the interesting pointers to Xingshu and Caoshu, Kevo. But it's frustrating just seeing some examples of these scripts. I wonder if there's anything on the Web or in print that gives something like systematic rules for how these scripts differ from what we normally see in print.

I would also love to be able to read what Chinese waiters write on checks, but maybe what they do is more sloppy than systematic?

/Lew

Possible to show a pic of all the characters in the table? That way we can deduce better if it is 'sheng' or 'shou', otherwise this discussion leads to nowhere...