What interests me now is early US stock market history -- say around the years 1880-1935.
me too ... and I used to find interests on military history ... one thing I used to argue with my bro is that he always thinks the German Panther tanks were the best tanks in WWII, but I think the T-34/85s were the best, as proven in the Battle of Kursk. They were fast, swift, cheap, well-matched with the Panthers in terms of firepower. But I don't understand why the Russians always wanted to put 2 large bottles of oil on the back of the tank. You know they were very vulnerable in a single bullet attack. Could you explain ?
My feeling is that anyone who has learned Cantonese (I think one of the most complex spoken languages) should be able to learn any language. Cantonese I think doesn't have a true written form, but to write a Cantonese will use the traditional form of Mandarin. Over the last few decades the Mainland decided to change "simplify" many of the characters. Correct me if I made any mistakes here.
That's very true. Cantonese basically is a slang. It is very informal to write the language in Chinese characters, and the mainlanders don't understand it anyway. But singers tend to like to sing Chinese songs in Cantonese because the sound of rhythm is better than Mandarin. In fact, lots of Taiwanese sing Cantonese songs as a mean to learn to speak the language. As far as the simplified form of Chinese characters used by the mainlander, I never like the look of them. I tend to prefer to write the characters in traditional forms, because that shows the art of writing the language. And they look better.
Written Japanese is much more complex than Chinese because the meaning of a character depends on the characters adjacent to it - every Kanji has multiple meanings - as amy as 20 or more in some cases.
The Korean and the Japanese characters are different from the Chinese characters... that have something to do with military purposes. It is hard for the foreigners to decipher what they say, especially for the Chinese. |
