Li is one of the most common Chinese surnames, and written 李 it simply means "plum". Judging from the character, which is composed of "tree"(upper part) and "child" (lower part), this fruit seems to be seen as child of a tree - very nice.
Another "li", which is not included in this sudoku, is 逦, lǐ, and means "winding". It contains the radical "to walk" (lower part) and the "lì" in the upper part means "beautiful". It suggests that e.g. a winding road would be someting beautiful for the chinese, which is also very nice. I really like discovering aspects like this, they make this language really fascinating (and cause you to remember the queerest words, although you really don't need them ;-).
By the way, good that Ai WeiWei has been released. I really hope this is independent of Wen Jiabao's journey to 欧洲 - Ouzhou, Europe... He should stay free and be able to come to Berlin soon. After all, he is just an artist...!
http://www.spiegel.de/thema/ai_weiwei
And another one... Wei ni wo yuan fangQI suoyou" is a nice line in a nice song by Tracy, a great Taiwan singer. The song`s title is a little easier: 1234567. Which also sports a QI, the seven :-)
Li is one of the most common Chinese surnames, and written 李 it simply means "plum". Judging from the character, which is composed of "tree"(upper part) and "child" (lower part), this fruit seems to be seen as child of a tree - very nice.
Another rather simple-to-write chinese character pronounced "wù" is 兀, which means "to cut off the feet". Reminds me of the "yì" meaning "to cut off the nose"...
One of the most frequent chinese characters is 中 (zhōng), which means "middle" or "center" and also stands for China (中国, zhōngguó). Now you see why it's so frequent...
Getting back to the sudoku routine, here is a new one.
This is the first of four pinyin sudokus with "yi". The most prominent yi, "yī", which means "one" and is written by a simple horizontal stroke, is left out here. The funny thing is that another yi (which will appear in next week's sudoku), "亿（億）- yì", means "a hundred million"... just a slight difference of you pronounce it wrong... I always wonder and find it fascinating how the Chinese can express complicated or very special issues with just one character. There are various such "yi": It can mean e. g. "one's current attainment in learning or art" (诣（詣）- yì), "talk in sleep" (呓（囈）- yì), or even "to cut off the nose" (劓 - yì)...
Via http://socialmandarin.com I found the character test applet by "clavis sinica" (which means "key to chinese") and tried the higher intermediate level:
Sudoku of the week, focussing on "you"... (No, not you over there, it's a pinyin syllable, pronounced "yo-u"). This one goes out to the Japanese firefighters... "Jia you" means literally "add oil" but it is not a joke but an expression of cheering on someone. 加油日本消防员!
