Mandarin Vocab 4: 专辑
So, just like everyone else, I failed. I did not stick with my resolution to post a new Mandarin word every day or two. However, I have been making a slightly more concerted effort to improve my speaking, and hey, it’s still 2009, so I can come back to it.
I’ve been enjoying www.google.cn/music, which is the first officially sanctioned (by the idiotic music labels) free music download service I am aware of. Note to those outside China: you’ll need a Chinese IP address to download stuff. But, for the most part, it’s pretty well done, and it’s been a great way to discover Chinese music, in particular, though I’ve also used the service to download a bunch of western stuff, too.
The only headache, on the Mac, at least, is that the MP3 files’ ID3 tags appear to not be Unicode-encoded, which mangles all the Chinese, so there’s some work to be done to properly tag the Chinese music that comes down.
All this made me realize that I did not know the word for “album” (in the music sense), so it’s a good opportunity to do some further study.
The previous narrative has been abandoned (I’m sure you’re sad not to know what happens with the 震动棒), which kills part of my plan to reinforce the learning by using the words twice, but maybe a new one can start.
专辑
zhuān jí
(record, music) album
我昨天下载了六张王菲的专辑.
[wǒ - I] [zuó tiān - yesterday] [xià zǎi le - downloaded] [liù zhāng - 6 (of)] [wáng fēi de - Faye Wong's] [zhuān jí - album]
Yesterday I downloaded six Faye Wong albums.
Notes:
First, “张/zhāng” is the “measure” or “counting” word for “专辑” (album). There are a hundred or so measure words in Chinese, as far as I know, and they have to be used. So, you don’t say “六专辑”, you say “六张专辑” (liù zhāng zhuān jí). In my English-speaking brain, I think of it as saying “6 of record albums”. For some reason, that helps me remember it and makes sense as a loose translation (though it does not translate directly to anything in English).
The tough part is to remember all of them and which one is appropriate. If in doubt, us clumsy foreigners just use “个/gè”, which is probably the most common one. But often, it’s really wrong, though people will understand what we are trying to say. So how do you know which one to use? Fortunately, there is a kind of logic to these measure words, although at first glance it might seem kind of esoteric. “张” happens to be the measure word for flat things (like record albums, pieces of paper, etc.) There are other measure words for other types of things (long things, living things, and so on), as this chart illustrates.
Second, note the way the sentence literally translates: “I yesterday downloaded 6 of Faye Wong’s albums”. Generally speaking, the time comes before the action. You don’t “do something today”, you “today do something”. The time in this sentence could be before or after the subject; I chose to put it after.
Third, “了/le” in this context indicates past tense. Chinese verbs don’t have tenses, per se, but they do have these additional particles that loosely indicate that this action already happened. That’s what “了” is doing there.
As always, thanks for learning along with me, and please correct me if I’m making mistakes.