Hi all... just stumbled across this group during a google search for
the caffeine content of various teas. Glad to see it too!

My question now is this... is there some handy, pocket-sized index of
chinese characters and their english translation that anyone knows
about? I don't want to know how to find the bus stop or what to order
at a fast food place... so I'd rather not try to pick through a
"traveler's guide." What has puzzled me for the last several years is
how to make sense of the Chinese characters on tea containers. I go to
the asian market to buy tea, and although many brands provide a small
english subtitle somewhere, there are many more which simply don't. I
can't tell you how often I've bought a particular container of tea
basing my choice on whether I liked the color of the package<grin>!
Although, to be honest, I usually can find someone who will at least
tell me whether it is supposed to be green, black, oolong, etc.

Still, as any tea fancier knows, that doesn't really tell one that
much. I yearn to be able to descipher what the manufacturer is telling
me on the label. Does is come from a particular province? Is it
almost guaranteed to promote longetivity, happiness and a calm spirit?
Does it own a special name? ("5 Step Happiness Tea?") I, however, am
ignorant and illiterate in the Chinese language and would love to
acquire just a BIT of it, anyway. Trying to take on the whole language
is too daunting and fatiguing a prospect!

So if anyone here could point me in the right direction on this
problem, I would be very grateful. (I DO know one character by
heart... the one that means TEA. Beautiful little thing it is too.)

Thanks,
Whytebyrd

whytebyrd wrote:
> Hi all... just stumbled across this group during a google search for
> the caffeine content of various teas. Glad to see it too!
>
> My question now is this... is there some handy, pocket-sized index of
> chinese characters and their english translation that anyone knows
> about? I don't want to know how to find the bus stop or what to order
> at a fast food place... so I'd rather not try to pick through a
> "traveler's guide." What has puzzled me for the last several years is
> how to make sense of the Chinese characters on tea containers. I go to
> the asian market to buy tea, and although many brands provide a small
> english subtitle somewhere, there are many more which simply don't. I
> can't tell you how often I've bought a particular container of tea
> basing my choice on whether I liked the color of the package<grin>!
> Although, to be honest, I usually can find someone who will at least
> tell me whether it is supposed to be green, black, oolong, etc.
>
> Still, as any tea fancier knows, that doesn't really tell one that
> much. I yearn to be able to descipher what the manufacturer is telling
> me on the label. Does is come from a particular province? Is it
> almost guaranteed to promote longetivity, happiness and a calm spirit?
> Does it own a special name? ("5 Step Happiness Tea?") I, however, am
> ignorant and illiterate in the Chinese language and would love to
> acquire just a BIT of it, anyway. Trying to take on the whole language
> is too daunting and fatiguing a prospect!
>
> So if anyone here could point me in the right direction on this
> problem, I would be very grateful. (I DO know one character by
> heart... the one that means TEA. Beautiful little thing it is too.)
>
> Thanks,
> Whytebyrd


Hi Whytebyrd,

I have started something along those lines specificaly targeted at
Pu'er Tea. While it is not nearly as comprehensive as your request, it
is a start. It can be found at http://www.pu-erh.net/cheatsheet.php

Another very good resource for Tea Terms in general is the Babelcarp
which can be found at http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html ,
while it is not available to be printed as a book, it will allow you to
search hundreds maybe even thousands of Chinese tea terms.


Mike
http://www.pu-erh.net

"whytebyrd" > writes:

> Hi all... just stumbled across this group during a google search for
> the caffeine content of various teas. Glad to see it too!
>
> My question now is this... is there some handy, pocket-sized index of
> chinese characters and their english translation that anyone knows
> about? I don't want to know how to find the bus stop or what to order
> at a fast food place... so I'd rather not try to pick through a
> "traveler's guide." What has puzzled me for the last several years is
> how to make sense of the Chinese characters on tea containers. I go to
> the asian market to buy tea, and although many brands provide a small
> english subtitle somewhere, there are many more which simply don't. I
> can't tell you how often I've bought a particular container of tea
> basing my choice on whether I liked the color of the package<grin>!
> Although, to be honest, I usually can find someone who will at least
> tell me whether it is supposed to be green, black, oolong, etc.

I'm not aware of anything like this for Chinese tea in general - it
might not fit in your pocket! - but, for Pu'er, there's Mike Petro's
"cheat sheet":

http://www.pu-erh.net/cheatsheet.php

Also, while this won't help you in a Chinese grocery store, the
website in my signature can translate a lot of tea Chinese (both
Chinese characters and their transliterations.) It does one phrase at
a time, though.

/Lew
---
Lew Perin /
http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html

In Western markets Chinese tea boxes will indicate the PinYin name and
the corresponding Chinese characters. In the West we know the names of
Chinese tea from the PinYin(English representation of Chinese) like
Cha,LungChing,QiMen,MaoFeng,etc. Some English terms for Chinese also
have developed historically and not a PinYin translation of the
Chinese. If you were in China you'd probably would need some Chinese
character dictionary for teas which probably wouldn't help because how
do you 'lookup' a Chinese character. They use Radicals and we use an
Alphabet. I've developed my own tea dictionary over the decades. The
Internet makes it easier to find information on PinYin and Chinese
character tea terms. When I get stuck, I ask here, because others have
developed their own dictionaries and we have several people conversant
in Chinese who catch everything that falls through the cracks. My tea
dictionary which I call the Rosetta Stone was initially developed by
manually coding the PinYin and Chinese characters from commercial tea
boxes. With the dawn on the Information Age it now resides as a flat
file on my computer searchable by english,pinyin,chinese. The most
recent additions are Puer related terms I find on the Chinese auction
site TaoBao.

Jim

whytebyrd wrote:
> Hi all... just stumbled across this group during a google search for
> the caffeine content of various teas. Glad to see it too!
>
> My question now is this... is there some handy, pocket-sized index of
> chinese characters and their english translation that anyone knows
> about? I don't want to know how to find the bus stop or what to order
> at a fast food place... so I'd rather not try to pick through a
> "traveler's guide." What has puzzled me for the last several years is
> how to make sense of the Chinese characters on tea containers. I go to
> the asian market to buy tea, and although many brands provide a small
> english subtitle somewhere, there are many more which simply don't. I
> can't tell you how often I've bought a particular container of tea
> basing my choice on whether I liked the color of the package<grin>!
> Although, to be honest, I usually can find someone who will at least
> tell me whether it is supposed to be green, black, oolong, etc.
>
> Still, as any tea fancier knows, that doesn't really tell one that
> much. I yearn to be able to descipher what the manufacturer is telling
> me on the label. Does is come from a particular province? Is it
> almost guaranteed to promote longetivity, happiness and a calm spirit?
> Does it own a special name? ("5 Step Happiness Tea?") I, however, am
> ignorant and illiterate in the Chinese language and would love to
> acquire just a BIT of it, anyway. Trying to take on the whole language
> is too daunting and fatiguing a prospect!
>
> So if anyone here could point me in the right direction on this
> problem, I would be very grateful. (I DO know one character by
> heart... the one that means TEA. Beautiful little thing it is too.)
>
> Thanks,
> Whytebyrd

Jim... I am really, really impressed by your "Rosetta Stone." What an
accomplishment that is! I can only imagine the amount of actual time
you invested in that project (which is apparently ongoing).

Not all manufacturers have include a Pin Yin name either. Although I'm
sure that most of the products which are packaged especially for the
overseas English speaking areas do. The market I go to most frequently
(Well-Farm) has a wide mix of products and very many teas are
apparently packaged for domestic (their own) use. Not to mention the
very interesting-looking assortments of packaged herbs and herbal
"teas". (I would just love to experiment with these, if I even knew a
tiny bit about what they actually are)

In my brother's Japanese character "dictionary", the ideograms are
generally classified by the number of radicals they have. This, mind
you, is just what he tells me, I haven't taken that particular bull by
the horns yet. There are also other systems of classification,
apparently.

I just can't imagine that there is not somewhere a decent "abridged"
version of the above. How do they teach children to read & write? I'm
not looking for an equivalent to a desk model unabridged dictionary.
For my purposes, that would be like swatting a gnat with an atomic bomb.

"whytebyrd" > writes:

> [...learning Chinese characters...]
> In my brother's Japanese character "dictionary", the ideograms are
> generally classified by the number of radicals they have. This, mind
> you, is just what he tells me, I haven't taken that particular bull by
> the horns yet. There are also other systems of classification,
> apparently.
>
> I just can't imagine that there is not somewhere a decent "abridged"
> version of the above. How do they teach children to read & write? I'm
> not looking for an equivalent to a desk model unabridged dictionary.
> For my purposes, that would be like swatting a gnat with an atomic bomb.

You might try _What Character Is That?_ by Gam P. Go, published by
Simplex Publications in 1995.

/Lew
---
Lew Perin /
http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html

Space 4/29/06


> In Western markets Chinese tea boxes will indicate the PinYin name and
> the corresponding Chinese characters. In the West we know the names of
> Chinese tea from the PinYin(English representation of Chinese) like
> Cha,LungChing,QiMen,MaoFeng,etc. Some English terms for Chinese also
> have developed historically and not a PinYin translation of the
> Chinese. If you were in China you'd probably would need some Chinese
> character dictionary for teas which probably wouldn't help because how
> do you 'lookup' a Chinese character. They use Radicals and we use an
> Alphabet. I've developed my own tea dictionary over the decades. The
> Internet makes it easier to find information on PinYin and Chinese
> character tea terms. When I get stuck, I ask here, because others have
> developed their own dictionaries and we have several people conversant
> in Chinese who catch everything that falls through the cracks. My tea
> dictionary which I call the Rosetta Stone was initially developed by
> manually coding the PinYin and Chinese characters from commercial tea
> boxes. With the dawn on the Information Age it now resides as a flat
> file on my computer searchable by english,pinyin,chinese. The most
> recent additions are Puer related terms I find on the Chinese auction
> site TaoBao.
>
> Jim

Jim, why not put your linguistic database up
for all of us so we can benefit from your hard
work and effort.
Michael

You'll need Chinese fonsets GB2312,Big5 or Japanese Shift_JIS,EUC-JP or
an appropriate OS for Unicode to see the Chinese characters in my file.
The file would also be viewable if you downloaded a Chinese editor
like Northstar. I don't have any native language fontsets or Unicode
loaded on my computer. When I need to see the graphical representation
I use Zhongwen or Unicode.Org. I've developed routines to do that for
me using the various native language code pairs or Unicode. I'd have
to scrub my file for a presentation that wouldn't make me look like an
idiot. I'd have to exlain it is Wade-Giles or Cantonese and not
PinYin. Some terms by themselves don't mean anything like Yellow Sprout
which refers to a Yellow tea or one of my favorites the Babelfish puer
translation 'returns to gansu' which means 'sweet aftertaste'. To me
the file makes sense but to most it would be gibberish. Sites like
this with tea terms are easy to find if you know what to look for
http://www.sanzui.com/bbs/archive/in...p/t-18053.html. It will look
like gibberish if you don't have GB2312 loaded and in my case I know
how to handle the language pairs gibberish. If you're not calling me
out then there is more to it than meets the eye.

Jim

Michael Plant wrote:
> Space 4/29/06
>
....I delete me...
> Jim, why not put your linguistic database up
> for all of us so we can benefit from your hard
> work and effort.
> Michael