Re: The pitfall of Chinese/Mandarin

Tristan wrote:
>On Sun, 9 Dec 2001, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > Tristan wrote:
> > >Even I, a native English speaker who has never spoken a language
>without
> > >he/she/it, mucks them up, as well as brother and sister (so I normally
> > >fall back on `sibling')...
> >
> > That's another weirdity of learning English in school - they tell you
>that
> > there simply is no direct translation of the Swedish word _syskon_
> > "sibling", and that if you desperately need to translate ie you have to
>use
> > "brother or sister" (unless you've got a feminist teacher - she would
>tell
> > you to write "sisiter or brother"!:-)).
>
>Well, if it's any consolation, `sibling' isn't the kind of word people
>randomly learn like they do `brother' or `sister'---it's generally
>specifically learnt.
>
I know it isn't every-other-sentence word like Swedish "syskon", but I wish
the teachers would be honest enough to say it if you ask for a gloss of
"syskon", even if they'd then have tell you not to use it too much.

                                                 Andreas

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp