Kotaku 
Enter your username and password.
Denver, 1:04 AM
Mon Nov 23
16 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip us: tips@kotaku.com
Editor-In-Chief:
Brian Crecente
Email | AIM | Twitter
Deputy Editor:
Stephen Totilo
Email | AIM | Twitter
Senior Editor:
Michael McWhertor
Email | AIM | Twitter
Senior Contributing Editor, Japan:
Brian Ashcraft
Email | AIM | Twitter
Contributing Editor, East Coast:
Michael Fahey
Email | AIM | Twitter
Contributing Editor, Oceania:
Luke Plunkett
Email | AIM | Twitter
Contributing Editor, Weekends:
Owen Good
Email | AIM | Twitter
Correspondent, San Francisco:
AJ Glasser
Email | AIM | Twitter
Columnist:
Leigh Alexander
Columnist:
Tim Rogers
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
08/22/09
08/22/09
I'm looking at you, Prototype. I had such high hopes for you. Now you anger me with your memories that taste like LIES.
08/22/09
"Studies show large amount of people who play poker also like to eat meat."
"People who play poker also drink alcohol."
This is why a lot of these social sciences studies are complete crap. You cannot make a scientific conclusion based on a shoddy study like this, where there is no control group or any other sort of basis to compare your data against.
08/22/09
08/22/09
08/22/09
Now i'm imagining him on the front lawn of his house shouting at the kids ^_^
Well i guess i'm the odd duck here because the only gambling i've done is with some bad games and while playing monopoly with my friends.
08/22/09
08/22/09
08/22/09
08/22/09
08/22/09
08/22/09
08/22/09
08/22/09
08/22/09
05/25/09
...Nicely played God, nicely played.
05/25/09
05/25/09
05/25/09
05/25/09
05/25/09
You ever watch the news and see a spinster crying when 4 of her 5 cats die in a housefire? It's kind of like that. Life is fucking tedious sometimes, and most people dedicate themselves to something in order to keep sane.
05/25/09
05/25/09
05/25/09
05/25/09
05/25/09
05/25/09
05/25/09
05/25/09
It's sad that governments react to these sorts of situations in such a way. If you ask me it does a complete disservice to the dead child, and as with eerily similar situations worldwide, the general populace always completely misses the point...
05/25/09
Bangkok, and Phucket, really now people? And blaming gaming while you are at it?
05/26/09
05/26/09
Was gonna say that.
href="#c13068998">DragnFiyar:
Racist people eh? I just love how people using a bastard language (aka the one I'm typing with now), seek to just slip in as much toilet humor as they can into other languages simply because they can.
Granted I know I'm speaking it too. Damn the whole world using the ugliest language in human history. At least I have Chinese to fall back on. Then I start flinging veiled insults at people whose only insults lie in variations of 'fuck'.
05/28/09
Normally I don't go for ad hominem attack on a god damn blog but dude:
I've been in China (Shenyang actually) for almost 3 damn years now, and I have it on good ground to say that Putonghua is quite possibly the lamest most retarded language ever devised by hominid minds. Sure that's opinion but any language that is:
1) Chock full of homonyms, some true homonyms a lot are near homonyms that are only separated by fucking TONE.
That's right in putonghua you got mai3 (third tone) means "to buy" but mai4 (forth tone) means "to sell" WTF two commonly co-located but completely opposite ideas that are simply too close together in sound for no logical reason.
The reason for all the damn tonal bullshit and homonyms is that the Chinese have a hardon for things to "sound nice" (there words, not mine) so they far prefer one or two syllable "words". By far most are two syllable. Hell they'll even double up a single syllable word to make it two syllables just to make it 'sound nice'.
The Chinese have a hard time with any English word with more than say 4 syllables. My students would just drop a syllable here and there. Or add in that damn "er-hua" accent and color the vowels. Sorry I'm rambling.
Back on track, in summary: The nature of the Chinese (spoken) language makes it relatively difficult to create new words and concepts (neologisms) compared to say English (which can simply tack on new syllables at will), instead they co-opt old phonemes. The problem is that putonghua has a limited number of phonemes compared to say English so a lot of things start to sound alike. They try and help increase the number of possible permutations by using the four basic tones of putonghua, so they can "recycle" a phoneme (such as "mai")and get a bit more use out of it.
It would be a hell of a lot easier just to use more/different syllables though.
Still, one could say, "Impure, all that is just a different way of speaking, and that should be allowed." Okay sure fine. But there is absolutely no logical excuse for:
2) The written Chinese language.
That's right, I'm calling out the entire Chinese culture on this one. Hanzi is a completely stupid writing system. Oh, you want proof do you? Ask any Chinese over the age of say 25 (past school age a bit) to 'spell', that is write out the character, for a fucking "sneeze". Oh sure they can say it of course, but even a very educated Chinese person would probably not remember how to write it (unless of course they are a doctor). Why? Because Chinese is logosyllabic, that is it (roughly) uses one glyph per syllable. But the glyphs are not phonetic at all. So even though you might know how to say "sneeze" in putonghua, unless you remember how to draw the glyph you are truly and completely fucked on writing it. In any (mostly) phonetic language you can at least guess at the spelling and then look that up in a dictionary. In Chinese, dictionary work mostly in one of two ways: the old way is some complex ass system of stroke counting that most Chinese don't even know how to use. The newer way is to use the PHONETIC pinyin spelling of the Chinese word to look up how to draw the character. Doesn't that seem a bit redundant to you? Why not just make a phonetic system in the first place? Hell it doesn't even have to use Roman letters or anything. Sequoyah invented a complete written language for his people, the Cherokee. Why the hell can't the Chinese do that? Because they let "tradition" get in the way of common fucking sense -- all the time. I tell you right now, I fucking hate most all traditions. If a tradition isn't a benefit or if it isn't even FUN, toss it out.
This is a very un-Chinese concept.
So instead they force their children to learn hanzi. Which, by the way, takes them almost TWICE AS FUCKING LONG to learn up to the same level of literacy as any (not just English) phonetic language user. Yeah, that sounds real fucking logical to keep this writing system.
Bah, I'm out of this place in two months, good riddance.
Oh and Byakko... .
P.S. You know I have a lot of choice putonghua for you but I think my post is pushing the anger limit already.