Chinese Questions And Answers
Raelene Heersink
Note: I can only make judgement calls on answers I can either understand or confirm in some way. So I'm only going to look at questions about standard Mandarin (maybe someone else can make a similar post with broader scope).
PS. While preparing this post, I tried quite a number of examples. It's good at some questions ("what's the difference between [x] and [y]?"; "is there a chengyu which means [pla pla pla]?") and not others. E.g. if the question contains an image, it can't be input into Sage (at the time of writing).
One issue I'm seeing: Sage doesn't give evidence to support it's claims. So it'll say something like "The word "县子" (xinzi) does exist in colloquial Chinese, particularly in certain dialects and regional variations" (in response to this question), and maybe it's read something others haven't, but it doesn't give an example, so it could also be simply wrong.
For my Chinese class, I have to make a film recording an exchange in a restaurant. I'm trying to say "This is a lot of money! Goodbye college money..." in reference to someone spending too much on their meal.
In the context of "悠久", the character "悠" is used to describe a periodof time that is long and uninterrupted, much like a leisurely andunhurried stroll. The word "悠久" implies a sense of continuity andendurance, suggesting that the period of time it describes has enduredover a long period without interruption or disruption.
In the sentence "今年我旅游很多好过去年" (jīn nin wǒ lǚ yu hěn duō, hǎo gu qnin), the phrase "好过" is used to indicate that the current situation(having traveled more this year) is better than the situation in thepast (having traveled less last year).
It is worth noting that "好过" is often used in comparison to a specifictime or situation, much like "不如". In the absence of a specificreference point, other words or phrases may be more appropriate forexpressing the idea of improvement or superiority.
The reason for this is that "年" is already a quantifier that indicatesa unit of time, specifically a year. It is similar to words like"hour", "minute", or "second" in English, which are already units oftime and do not require a classifier.
In summary, while "年" cannot be used with a classifier, it is aquantifier that indicates a unit of time and can be used incombination with other words to form compound nouns or phrases thatfunction as units of time.
In its earliest form, 制 was written as 刂 (dāo), which represents aknife or a cutting tool. This component was later combined with thecharacter 制 (zh), which originally meant "to cut" or "to engrave"using a knife or other sharp tool.
Over time, the meaning of 制 expanded to include the concept of"making" or "manufacturing" by cutting or shaping materials using aknife or other tools. This meaning is reflected in the character'scurrent usage, which can refer to the act of producing ormanufacturing something.
The character 制 also has other meanings, such as "system,""regulation," or "control," which are derived from the idea of cuttingor shaping something according to a particular standard or pattern.This meaning is reflected in compound words such as 规制 (guīzh), whichmeans "regulation" or "control."
Overall, the evolution of the character 制 reflects the historicalimportance of cutting and shaping tools in traditional Chinesemanufacturing and craftsmanship, as well as the development of morecomplex systems of regulation and control in society.
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Feature papers represent the most advanced research with significant potential for high impact in the field. A Feature Paper should be a substantial original Article that involves several techniques or approaches, provides an outlook for future research directions and describes possible research applications.
Abstract: This paper focuses mainly on the problem of Chinese medical question answer matching, which is arguably more challenging than open-domain question answer matching in English due to the combination of its domain-restricted nature and the language-specific features of Chinese. We present an end-to-end character-level multi-scale convolutional neural framework in which character embeddings instead of word embeddings are used to avoid Chinese word segmentation in text preprocessing, and multi-scale convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are then introduced to extract contextual information from either question or answer sentences over different scales. The proposed framework can be trained with minimal human supervision and does not require any handcrafted features, rule-based patterns, or external resources. To validate our framework, we create a new text corpus, named cMedQA, by harvesting questions and answers from an online Chinese health and wellness community. The experimental results on the cMedQA dataset show that our framework significantly outperforms several strong baselines, and achieves an improvement of top-1 accuracy by up to 19%. Keywords: question answer matching; medical domain; question answering; answer selection; character embeddings
Now here is the question. How does the system know where to get the simplified or traditional chinese strings.xml. Is there some sort of assumption baked in that says if I am supposed to display simplified chinese get it from values-zh and get traditional from values-zh-rTW?
But what if a user is located in HK and set his device up to display simplified chinese? Or what if an emigrant somewhere else in the world sets his device to traditional chinese but his region is e.g. US or CA?
From further investigation I believe that a Android phone user can not set the country separately from the language. They can only set what is called the locale in the UI. It consists of language and country, but the list is limited so many combinations are not possible.
E.g. a Chinese person living in the US that wants to use Traditional Chinese could set the language to traditional chinese (at least on a rooted phone) and would then have a locale of zh-rTW. He could in no way set his country separately to be US. In a similar manner any sort of emigrant can not set their native language with the country they currently live in..
However any other creator of an Android system e.g. for a phone sold in China or so could change what they add. The overall theoretically supported set can be found by looking at the list of locales found in the icu4c app:
However keep in mind that the Settings app would have to be modified to have the different selections of locale. So at this stage simplified chinese translates to zh_rCN and traditional zh_rTW and you should be apart for users that have such a modified Android image that supports other locales.
You could e.g. log that and send the data to your tracking system (whatever you use) or you could check for supported ones and throw an exception with the locale setting in the message and that would then show up in your market interface... it would however mean a minimum of one crash of your app (if you are on the ball you can publish and update a few minutes later ..)
So to recap .. the minimum setup would be mirroring what is done in the settings app (only have zh-rCN and zh-rTW), but if you want to provide for default locales for Singapore, HongKong, Macau supplying traditional chinese as default you can do that too and it should work. I have however no evidence that such a configuration is used anywhere..
The question and previous answers are pretty old. It is hard to tell how correct they still are. This answer is for other people coming here who just want to support both Traditional and Simplified Chinese in their app, but are not overly concerned about the details of locality.
In Android Studio right click the res folder and choose New > Android resource file. Type in strings for the File name and choose Locale from the list.
As I understand the documentation, lookup will first check if there is an exact match for language and region (Example: Chinese-Traditional-Taiwan). Then it will fall back to broader checks. (This system is as of Android 7.0.)
If you already have one translation in either Traditional or Simplified, you can auto convert the text online. Start with Google Translate to convert to the other (just paste in your strings.xml file). It does a fairly good job already. Then do it again several times using one of the many online converters. Use a text comparing tool or site (text-compare.com is good) to compare the result of the conversions. That will help you catch any mistakes that Google made.
Android 7.0 (API level 24) introduced support for BCP 47 language tags, which you can use to qualify language- and region-specific resources. A language tag is composed from a sequence of one or more subtags, each of which refines or narrows the range of language identified by the overall tag.
Half a century after beginning the study of Mandarin, I still find the third type of q & a to be rather mind-boggling. I suppose that many Language Log readers feel as though their own mind is about to burst as they try to make sense of how "yes" and "no" play out in the Chinese responses.
The whole business is difficult even for native Chinese speakers, as is revealed by the fact that several of the informants who replied to my question about the grammar of the third set cautioned that it is "tricky". To show how the Chinese and English usage radically differ, I'll simply quote the following responses from native speakers of Mandarin who also know English well (the notes in square brackets are explanatory / clarifying additions by VHM):
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