The verb "to return" in Chinese

The transitive verb "to return" is rendered in at least the following two ways in Chinese. It can be particularly nuanced when the object is a book.

To return a book to a library, use the verb 還 (huán; this character is also pronounced hái, for which it has an entirely different meaning):

I'd like to return this book. 我要還這本書. (Wǒ yào huán zhèi běn shū.)

To return a purchase (including a book!) to a store, use the verb 退還 (tuìhuán):

I'd like to return this book. 我要退還這本書. (Wǒ yào tuìhuán zhèi běn shū.)

Origin of the Chinese word for "organic" for produce, etc.?

Ever since learning that the word 有機 (yǒujī) means "organic" with respect to produce, I had difficulty coming up with a satisfactory reason why it should.  The two characters just don't make any sense (well, to me, anyway) for such a meaning, and multiple native Chinese speakers have not been able to explain the origin of / rationale behind 有機 to me, either.

I finally came up with a possible reason: the French word for organic is biologique, the middle part of which bears a decent phonetic similarity to 有機.

This may not be as far-fetched as it might initially seem. The Chinese word for latte is 拿鐵 (nátiě), which is a purely phonetic conversion. Perhaps something similar occurred for "organic", from the French word for it?

Update 1:

Alternately, the definition of 機關 (jīguān) is "organ",  but that is in the sense of an organization/office, so it's not related to this meaning of organic, but perhaps whoever came up with 有機 mistakenly thought it did?

Update 2:
A native Cantonese speaker suggested that 有機 in Cantonese was chosen as being a decent phonetic match with "organic", further pointing out that Hong Kong would have been a natural place where Chinese language equivalents were created for foreign words. This idea seems to be the most reasonable explanation.

Different forms of "or" in Chinese

One of the difficulties ("nuances") about learning Chinese is that there are multiple ways to express "or". A specific one of those (還是; háishi) indicates a question or implies a questioning stance, while a different word(s) express(es) "or" as a statement (for that I normally use 或者 (huòzhě), but there are other(s)). I periodically catch myself in mid-sentence correcting the Chinese word I'm using for "or", which is at least better than unknowingly using the wrong one!

Do you usually buy two or three? (a question seeking an answer; Do you usually buy two, or do you usually buy three?)
你通常買兩個還是三個?
(Nǐ tōngcháng mǎi liǎngge háishi sānge?)

You usually buy two or three. (a statement, not a question; I know that you usually buy two or three.)
你通常買兩個或(者)三個.
(Nǐ tōngcháng mǎi liǎngge huò(zhě) sānge.)

I am told by a native Chinese speaker that it could be more natural to omit the 者; time will tell if I can get used to doing so.

I don't know if you usually buy two or three. (a questioning stance; I don't know if you usually buy two or if you usually buy three.)
我不知道你通常買兩個還是三個.
(Wǒ bù zhīdao nǐ tōngcháng mǎi liǎngge háishi sānge.)

A Chinese character not pronounced in any of the standard tones

Chinese characters are normally pronounced in one of four standard tones (five, counting the neutral tone).

There is, however, at least one character which is commonly pronounced in a style which differs from any of those four (five) tones. I've heard it often enough in (melo-)dramatic moments in movies or TV programs. If you've seen your share of those, you might have heard it as well.

The mystery character?
唉 (formally āi)
It's a sighing sound, and is often pronounced in a slowly falling tone, typically accompanied by the exhalation of breath commonly associated with a sigh.

One of my dictionaries gives "(an interjection of regret or disgust) alas"; my feeling is that it is more frequently a sigh of regret than of disgust.

Another of my dictionaries gives the fixed phrase 唉聲嘆氣 (āishēngtànqì) to sigh with distress; to moan and groan. In a context like that, where it is not someone's actual sigh, it would be pronounced in its formal first tone.

Tutoyer, vouvoyer

In the late 1980's, I had a French conversation with an American friend who had a wonderful French accent (she had married a Frenchman and had lived in France for some time). At one point she cut in to tell me, "Tu peux me tutoyer." ("You can use tu with me."), introducing me to an infrequently used, but still quite useful verb.

Tu is the familiar form of "you", while vous is the formal form. My belief is that it is fairly natural in an initial French conversation between two speakers, at least one of whom is an adult, that the younger (or perhaps somehow "newer") person would use vous to address the other person. I hadn't previously imagined that there were verbs dedicated to usage of tu (tutoyer) and vous (vouvoyer [not "vousvoyer"]; subsequently realized this sounds the same as Vous voyez ["You see"]).

More than a decade later, I was giving a 2-hour ride to a polite young Frenchwoman (from Martinique, actually), who began by using vous to address me, and switched to tu after I took what may be my only opportunity in this lifetime to legitimately remark "Tu peux me tutoyer.". That car ride was a wonderful, unexpected chance for me to have some French conversation practice.

I suspect tutoyer is used rather more commonly in spoken conversation than vouvoyer, since it strikes me that one would more commonly tell another person that "You don't have to be so formal with me." than the reverse.

Two forms of the character for "inside"

When I first learned the character for inside, I was taught the form 裏, which I will refer to as the "tall" form. In Taiwan, I eventually discovered it had another form (from TV program subtitles, I think), 裡, which I will refer to as the "wide" form.

Someone taught me that the components of the wide form were equivalent to the components of the tall form. Starting with the tall form:



Take away from its middle the 里 (lǐ) component:



Join the two remaining components (the "lid" and the bottom part), and you get 衣 (yī), the character for clothing:



Thus, the first form has both 衣 and 里.


The wide form:



has, on the left, the radical for 衣 (the way it is written when it is the left component of a multi-component character), and on the right, 里. So the wide form also has both 衣 and 里.


My handwritten wide form tends to look less awkward than my tall form, and I've been using it almost exclusively for many years. That may make my usage a bit safer, because I know of one case where the wide form seems preferred over the tall from (or perhaps only the wide form is correct). The wide form can be used to mean the lining of clothing, and the inner lining would be 內裡 (nèilǐ), wherein 裡 isn't actually used to mean inside.

Recalcitrant iPod Home button and AssistiveTouch

The Home button on my 4th generation iPod Touch running iOS 5.1.1 has gotten inconsistently responsive over time. It no longer consistently registers a single press, or a double press, typically necessitating repeated presses beyond what the number which should be normal. At times I press it once, but that registers as a double press. completely failed. The degradation of response is no surprise to me. The device is a replacement remanufactured one, which I got from Apple at no charge near the end of the one year warranty period from my original 4th generation iPod Touch purchase. At that time, after confirming that it had not been immersed in water (there's an internal indicator for that), the Apple Store employees agreed that its Home button response had degraded badly enough to merit a hardware replacement. The replacement's Home button worked great for several months, but apparently the honeymoon (and, more significantly, the 90-day free replacement period) is over. (Interestingly, I don't remember noticing this problem with my 3rd generation iPod Touch, which I had also used under iOS 5.1.1.)

I stopped into an Apple Store and asked a floor employee (I didn't have a Genius Bar appointment) about possible remedies. The fellow I spoke with introduced me to iOS 5's AssistiveTouch, of which I was only dimly aware, if at all (It is documented in the iPod touch User Guide For iOS 5.0 Software, and probably elsewhere as well). It can be set in:
Settings > General > Accessibility > Physical & Motor > Assistive Touch
I also activated Triple-click Home > Toggle AssistiveTouch. (After the Home Button completely stopped working, I changed this to Triple click Home > Off since I needed the AssistiveTouch button all the time.)

AssistiveTouch wasn't intended as a fix for a recalcitrant Home button, but it works pretty well for that. When it's active, the AssistiveTouch button appears in one of 8 positions for the pre-5th generation iPod Touch: 4 along each of the left or right edges of the screen. The longer screen of the 5th generation iPod touch may add 2 more positions. Drag the AssistiveTouch button (even part of the distance) to change its position; it will jump to the new position.

It will likely be helpful to have a usual position for the AssistiveTouch button, so your finger automatically knows where to go. For portrait mode, which I use far more often than landscape mode, the 4 positions in the lower half of the screen are a poor choice, since they can interfere with keyboard input. When using the iPod with one hand, the 2nd position down on the left was a comfortable position for my left thumb. You might, as I did, rearrange apps and app groups on your various Home Screens to work better with the AssistiveTouch button's normal positioning. You can still open an app which is obscured by the AssistiveTouch button, but you will have to be more precise with your tap.

The concentric circles in the AssistiveTouch button are opaque white when it's first activated. After a short time, those circles and their square background become translucent, allowing easier identification of the area of the screen behind. The AssistiveTouch button is thus normally always present on the screen, either opaque or translucent -- you might want to turn it off before, e.g., watching a video. Screenshots are regrettably heavily obscured by AssistiveTouch, although some options supposedly exist for getting around that obscurement if you jailbreak your device.

Tap the AssistiveTouch button to bring up the options, one of which is a software version of the Home button. Tap that once or twice as desired, just like you would the hardware Home button. With AssistiveTouch I could make one additional tap (to bring up the options) and then do a single or double tap of its Home button, or I could make some unpredictable (because I never really know how any given tap will register) number of taps of the hardware Home button to do the same thing. I use the hardware and software Home buttons at different times, and am pretty happy doing so.

Depending on usage, I sometimes drag the AssistiveTouch button elsewhere (because I need access to the area of the screen where it had been sitting), but much of the time it's fine on top of the position of the app (or app group) sitting in the second row and first column of a Home Screen. When drafting this revision in Notespark, it was useful to move the AssistiveTouch button to the upper left corner, the lone position out of the 8 possible which would not interfere at all with my text editing.

The software Home button is additionally quieter than the hardware Home button. It's also more gentle/discreet to, from the AssistiveTouch options, tap Device > Shake, instead of physically shaking the device (e.g., to Undo Typing).