More on the new dinosaur book

I didn't want to leave you hanging about "Bopomofo," so here are a few pictures of John's new dinosaur book that might help.  The cover:

It's a book about "longnecks"

...and inside:

Bad day to be a longneck

Chinese with "Bopomofo" phonetics

See how to the right of the each "main" character there are smaller characters?  That's Bopomofo. It's phonetic.  Like I mentioned, they mean little to me.  Supposedly they are pretty easy to learn, but I haven't tried it yet.

The first line before the comma says:

巨型食草恐龍阿根廷龍

In Hanyu Pinyin, this would read:

Jùxíng shí cǎo kǒnglóng āgēntíng lóng


This makes a lot more sense to somebody coming from a non character-based language background.  I mean, when you are supposed to understand how to pronounce something in characters based on another set of characters, it gets a little dicey!  


In English it means, "Giant herbivorous dinosaur and Argentina dinosaur..."  The "Argentina dinosaur" the book refers to is the Noasaurus, which you can read about here.


Thus endeth your Chinese lesson.  :-) 


GJS

Discover the Jurassic Period

That's the name of the dinosaur exhibit John and I checked out today.  John had already been there once when Grandma Mackeprang was here after Lance was born, but neither Barb nor I had been there yet.  Today it was just me and John - Barb took a break and rested at home.

Impressions: it was OK, if a tad expensive.  Adult tickets were NT$330 (US$10.48 at today's exchange rate) and John was free.  We were probably in the exhibit for 15, 20 minutes, tops.  A few pics:

With a "Three Horn"

Giant armored dinosaur

Bones

A scary "chicken"

John enjoyed it, but I think he wasn't as excited about seeing it the second time around.  You can see some representations of the exhibit on the display's website here: http://www.skm.com.tw/event/200912jurassic_period/content.html.  (Sorry, it's only in Chinese; just look at the pictures, it gives you a pretty good idea of what it's all about.)

After we left the exhibit, we picked up a dinosaur book for John.  He had been wanting one since he borrowed one from his school over last weekend and we used it to make some dinosaur drawings.  After we took the book back to his school earlier this week, he still wanted to make some dinosaur drawings, so we looked on his bookshelves to see if he had a dinosaur book.  With the abundance of books the boy has, I thought for sure he owned a dinosaur book.  Turns out I was wrong, so today we decided to correct this.  The book was far cheaper than admission to the display (only NT$90).  Drawback (or plus, I suppose): the book's text is all in Chinese, with "Bopomofo" phonetics (it's a way to learn Mandarin Chinese, but unfortunately, not the Hanyu Pinyin that I cut my teeth on at DLI, therefore not of a lot of use to me in "helping" me read the book.)

GJS

P.S. We found Thomas there: