Christmas Card

[pne]

Got a Christmas card from Ela yesterday—in Chinese! Looks as if she took my suggestion seriously. (Ela, you can have a look at it here [filtered] if you wish and tell me whether I misread any of the characters. Incidentally, I think you want 返回 instead of 反回.)

It was "interesting" trying to understand it; my Chinese is pretty minimal. I'll venture to say that her German is better than my Chinese, so I expect I gave her less difficulty then she did me. But eh, "was nicht tötet, härtet ab." (Most difficult were the small particles such as 尤其 or 並且, which I never learned; "content words" such as nouns and verbs were easier, especially since I knew a fair number of them from Japanese.)

It was also interesting trying to type it up; some of the readings I guessed, but I had to resort to radical lookup several times. Also interesting that my IME didn't have certain characters, e.g. it wanted to use 裡 for 裏 and 著 for 着, so I copy-and-pasted those characters from a Japanese word processor.)

I finally managed to get it through Babelfish to help me a bit more, though I had to futz around a fair bit—Babelfish only understands Simplified Chinese, and I had to wrestle with NJStar's "Universal Code Converter" to get it to translate Unicode Traditional to Unicode Simplified (I think in the end I did it by selecting "Unicode (UCS2) to GB" [which simplified the characters] followed by "GB to Unicode (UCS2)" [which made them pastable into a browser window again].)