Scope of this forum

Bu_Lai_En · February 24, 2002, 8:47am

I think it’s great that this new forum has been created- thanks administrators.

I just hope that the scope will be wider than a narrow definition of learning Chinese and that we can talk about other aspects of Chinese language(s) including the romanisation debate, and (if we’re up to it) stuff lik etymology and history of the language.

With that in mind, here’s a few more links that I think should be moved to this forum

Bri

ironlady · February 24, 2002, 4:07am

Hi Bri,

As your humble moderator, I have to state up front that I have no idea how to do anything yet, so it may take a day or two to get your threads in the proper place. “qing yuan liang”!

I’m not sure if we want to tackle some of the very-technical-Chinese issues that aren’t related to learning Chinese right here…the reason I might think this way is the broader audience of the forum. I don’t think most people get much past the intermediate stage of Chinese, and there is certainly a much broader mass of folks who might be more interested in threads dealing with basic issues than etymology or classical Chinese or stuff like that. But I guess if we mark the threads adequately, there’s no harm…that’s why the Qianlong Emperor decreed that there should be a “delete” button on every keyboard, right??

Maybe we can put up a poll on the topic. Also, if it turns out that most of the readers of the forum have “relatively more” experience with Chinese, I’m sure the topics will be deeper than if the majority were beginners.

So – anybody else? What do you want to see in the forum? Of course you can all start threads yourselves, too…the whole forum thing is kind of a benevolent dictatorship (as a former professor of mine used to say). It’s not just me or anybody else dictating topics (that would be truly boring!)

Terry

ironlady · February 24, 2002, 4:09am

Oooh…my bad…I re-read the decree of the Qianlong Emperor, and what he actually said was that a subject in his empire could skip over threads which did not interest him or her. I think it was K’ang-hsi that said something about the “Delete” button. Apparently, judging from teh number of characters in his dictionary, he didn’t practice what he decreed.

Terry