Just in case you thought learning Chinese by reading fortune cookies was a valid method of self-education, I’d like to use this time to demonstrate why that’s not a good idea. These fortunes were two of the three we recently opened at a meal. I always try to make people who don’t know Chinese read the pinyin and I guess the definition. I was explaining how the characters for March descended from obvious literal characters representing the objects three and moon when Jaime pointed out hers didn’t quite fit that description.
Ah, you obviously are ignorant of the arcane system in which the Chinese assign fruits to each month, and vegetables to each day, so that you can refer to any date using the triplet of the year’s zodiacal animal, a fruit, and a vegetable. It’s advanced stuff, you know.
Either that or the “san yue” guy was filling in for the “ping guo” guy one day and he got lazy.
Left by John B on May 7th, 2007