I am interested in learning translating Chinese Go literature. I have been memorizing the most common Chinese characters as well as the common Chinese Go terms.

I have a Chinese problem book and looking through it I can recognize many characters. I wonder if there are any other materials available to help with this. I was thinking about getting books that had been translated to see if that would help, though I haven't found any suitable books though.

There have been a few threads on learning a language because of Go.

• The latest one:Japanese
• Korean
• Japanese

I'm not sure if there has been a Chinese one, but I think there have been suggestions around here somewhere.

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Has anyone noticed that Chinese who don't play WeiQi also have trouble reading the WeiQi literature? My wife had trouble translating the introduction to one of my books. I wonder why that is.

Because they don't understand the terms?

Could be. I am not for sure. I have two hypothesis. Some of the characters are unfamiliar and more traditional and the characters that are familiar are used in a different manner.

i.e. they don't understand the terms -.-

It's really this simple. They know the characters, they just don't know what they mean in a go context.

Here is a page of Chinese go terms.
http://senseis.xmp.net/?ChineseGoTerms

You can ask me if you have problems in translation.

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Has anyone noticed that Chinese who know nothing about quantum mechanics also have trouble reading quantum mechanics literature?
(even if it's written entirely in Chinese characters, with zero equations.) I wonder why that is.

Ah hem yes terms they don't understand the terms. However the terms in english books are fairly accessible. I may not understand the concepts of the more advanced text, but the basic terms of the game.

I think there is a basic recognition problem. Like they have never seen some of the characters before.

IE "black at one is good for territory". Nothing special there.

Stupid question time: "Can a Chinese who knows nothing about quantum mechanics know that the book he has in his hands is about quantum mechanics? Or he will know it's about mechanics of a kind he doesn't know because he can't read the character for quantum."

Quantum is Liang Zi, both characters are quite commonly used (Zi is son, Liang is quantity). So the reader will know the characters but probably can't understand the meaning of the combined characters.

A Chinese text on quantum mechanics would have been written after the introduction of simplified Chinese. I gather that while modern Go texts are written in simplified Chinese many of the characters are still traditional and the text is written in a more traditional style.

Interesting stuff. Thank you both.

AFAIK (and I own a few Chinese go books, and I can roughly read Chinese) this is not true. The characters are simplified and the text is written in a pretty standard style.

I wonder if this would be a good book:

http://senseis.xmp.net/?ContemporaryGoTerms

It seems that absence of tone marks in pinyin would be a problem for using it.

Indeed, not true at all. There are really no more books in mainland being published in traditional Chinese anymore (and speaking from personal experience, reading traditional actually comes pretty naturally for those who learned simplified because the simplification process preserved the general shapes pretty well in most cases). There's also no "traditional" style of writing unless you are talking about Go books that were written hundreds of years ago.

It must be translating the content then.

Translation is hard when you know the subject well, when you don't know the subject at all it's a very tedious and delicate process prone to difficulties and obstacles.

Thank you. I have those printed out. I wish they were organized by frequency of use. I have a list of general characters organized this way. I think it helps very much.