Areckx Posted January 12, 2012 at 04:54 PM Report Share Posted January 12, 2012 at 04:54 PM I always thought it was funny that Japanese and Chinese call us rice-country. Hang in there! A stubborn heart will push you into fluency! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kobo-Daishi Posted March 13, 2012 at 10:45 PM Report Share Posted March 13, 2012 at 10:45 PM Areckx wrote: I always thought it was funny that Japanese and Chinese call us rice-country. The Chinese don't call America "rice-country". Only the Japanese. The Chinese call American "beautiful-country". Kobo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kobo-Daishi Posted March 13, 2012 at 11:47 PM Report Share Posted March 13, 2012 at 11:47 PM Patrick_ChineseForum wrote: Maybe the Chinese do invent words for everything. For example, in Thai language (my first language) we call "America" a-me-li-ca (Thai has no R sound). In Japanese, they call it a-me-ri-ka (I used to study Japanese). The Chinese call it Mei Guo. They basically invent a new word for America. It almost seems like they purposely make their language complicate... weird (sorry for venting) Renzhe wrote: Mei is from a-ME-rica, Guo means country. Fa Guo = FRA-nce + Guo De Guo = DE-utschland + Guo Ying Guo = ENG-land + Guo Jbradfor wrote: There are a handful of countries, however, that Chinese does not do this, and instead picks one character that sounds close to the name, plus 国. In addition to the ones renzhe mention, Korea and Thailand come to mind. Japan is a bit of an exception as well. 亞美利加 (ya mei li jia) - America 亚美利加 德意志 (de yi zhi) - Germany 法蘭西 (fa lian xi) - France 法兰西 英格蘭 (ying ge lan) - England 英格兰 澳大利亞 (ao da li ya) - Australia 澳大利亚 I think there was another way of transliterating America but I may be mistaken. As for Japan and Korea, China has had longer interaction with them. And besides Japan and Korea both at one time used Chinese characters for writing so already had theirs picked out. Thailand used to be called Siam so there are Chinese characters for Siam but off hand I don't remember them. I think Thailand is a rather recent name. Kobo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skylee Posted March 15, 2012 at 12:23 PM Report Share Posted March 15, 2012 at 12:23 PM Consider 美利堅 for America. Siam is 暹羅. http://www.judicial.gov.tw/db/db04/db04-03.asp Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yialanliu Posted March 17, 2012 at 06:39 AM Report Share Posted March 17, 2012 at 06:39 AM The US is a huge exporter of rice to Japan. Used to be the largest exporter of rice from the 1960s to 1980s. So for a country that depends on a staple and gets a good portion of it from the US, it wouldn't be that weird to call it that. While it probably isn't the major reason, it makes the name quite normal especially since phonetically, it's right. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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