Dear Kobo-Daishi,
thank you for replying and for making things clearer!!
You really helped in this discussion...it was getting confusing!!!
Thank you very much!
Ma Li
Actually I'm surprised how defensive everybody is getting here. When you post Chinese here, perhaps it's a good idea to indicate whether you're posting GB or BIG5. I post in BIG5. And Ma Li came across like he really knew what he was talking about for only having studied for 7 months. I'll have to agree with Voegel Gelb that what I saw was 乾 (dry). However, one should not confuse this with 幹 (to do, or @!#$) although there are some similarities in these characters.
Voegel Gelb (is that really your name, bird yellow?) writes in a very non-sensical way appearing to me to just sound pompous. What were you trying to say anyway? And English doesn't have a proscribed accusative case as you would find in other European languages. Actually, if you want a better effect with your so-called "accusative", try 肏+D.O. (pronounced like 操).
"often with the connotation of associating the party whereto this utterance is addressed with the implication that such an act of "F-...ing + Accusative case (i.e., a direct object)" is likely to be wished for and pending to be imposed upon the second party or his or her closest relative -- often his or her parents, which more often than not constitutes an insult of monumental scale. In some instances, the party uttering such a [gan!] could lead to a premature calling upon by His Promenade, if you know what that means."
And I find it interesting that Ma Li has been using the SIMPLIFIED form all along but goes on to explain in so much detail how the heart is at the center of the love character. However, I've never seen any heart at the center of the SIMPLIFIED character for love, which if I can do it right in BIG5 would be this: 爱.
And I find it strange that Ma Li has a very peculiar Chinese habit when s/he writes in English, so I wonder what Ma Li's background really is. This habit is forgetting to put spaces after punctuation marks in English, the most obvious being after periods (.) and commas (,). When Chinese learn English, of course they know about spaces between words, but are never really taught explicitly to put spaces after punctuation marks, which is quite different from Chinese. Ma Li claims to have only studied Chinese for seven months, though s/he is writing English in a way that I've never seen a westerner do, and I've seen many Chinese do.
Thanks to James for clearing up things quite a bit.
I'm studying Mandarin with simplified characters. Sorry I can't produce chinese characters here.
Love for me is composed of the sign of a hand on top, with the roof sign just under it followed by the sign of friend just below. (the latter being already composed of a left hand and a right hand), right ? There's no heart sign in there anywhere. I interperet this mnemonically as a hand protecting the friend sheltered under a roof, hence in a house. Isn't that beautiful?
Now, this being said, we should note that this ai4 is a generic word for love and it would gain more sense combined with other words. Don't you agree with me? Starting to study chinese, in many learning methods, we are first given simple words (and that's normal) which often are more or less ambiguous. But later we learn lian4 ai4 which is love in the sense of a romance, ai4 qing2 denotes love between man and woman, (how to say maternal love, somebody can post it for us here?) ai4 hao4 to love in the sense of to like, and also a hobby or interest.
Just like in english, we dont mean the same idea when we say "Oh, I love that!" or "I love you, darling!". I think it's the same in Chinese. I think its better to learn composed words as soon as we can because often we can construct plenty of other words by combining two or more simple words that we know already. Oooh, we all know that, and still we discuss about ai4 and gan1 shield or dry, gan4 to work, and gan3 to feel or a feeling. While, I'm there, gan3 qing4 is a feeling and emotion and xing4 gan3 is sexy.
So James or Vogel gelb or other amateurs of Chinese, let us know finally "gan4" with that bad connotation that we so often hear all around and don't dare to write, does it exist or not with or without accusative case ? Can anybody tell us by the way how to say "make love with a good connotation"?
