中文挑战

Great puzzle. I tried it without checking any dictionary or using my Chinese input tool. I just cut and pasted what you had. Have not checked my answers (I'm sure I missed a few). Here's what I got:

blog 博客

calorie 卡路里

chocolate 巧克力

engine 引擎

romance 羅曼史

tank 坦克

vitamin 維他命

PERFECT! Good job, jkhsu. Was it too easy? If you like the format, I can try to make a harder one.

Thanks! It wasn't too easy. I think the difficulty of this puzzle will depend on one's exposure to native Chinese saying these words in Chinese. The hardest part for me was figuring out the last character of calorie and chocolate.

Here's my suggestions for future 挑战s (hopefully feihong and gleaves are reading this as well). You can set up different levels with spoilers for each level. For example for this particular one, you can do this:

1. Advanced Level - Don't provide any characters, just provide the number of characters needed for each word.

2. High Intermediate - Provide only the characters without the beginning consonant sounds.

3. Intermediate - Provide what you have done here with characters and beginning consonant sounds.

4. Beginner - Provide the actual pinyin to go along with the characters.

If you were to have done it this way, I would probably fall between #2 and #3. And maybe the imron's of the world can take a stab at advanced levels.

@jbradfor: Congrats on publishing your first challenge! Although, why is this on Signese? Anyway, I'd love to get a tougher puzzle, but I'm not sure how much tougher a loanword puzzle can be.

@jkhsu: I get what you're saying but I don't have any plans to make challenges that are way below my level.

@jbradfor: I went ahead and made a dummy entry on the 中文挑战 blog that links to this post. I don't think we should move it because then we'd lose all the comments. Well maybe roddy could help us move it but I don't think it's that big a deal.

I've moved it across, partially just to see if I could. Seemed to work . . . Feihong, deleted your dummy post.

why is this on Signese?

AGAIN!?!? You would think that after I did this once, I would be more careful....

In my defense, I blame roddy. When I click on "Add Entry", it defaults to signese. I'm 99% sure I changed it, but the change didn't take. Hence, roddy's fault. Let's all ignore that last 1%.

I get what you're saying but I don't have any plans to make challenges that are way below my level.

I get what you're saying, but I think what jkhsu is asking is to make puzzles just how you have been, but for the ones in which you can, add more information in spoiler tags as hints, which would allow one puzzle to cover multiple levels.

To some extent you've been doing this for the 聽力 puzzles, by adding the transcript in a spoiler tag.

Good work, jbradfor. And thanks for the suggestions, jkhsu.

Hang tight, I'm thinking of a crazy 挑战 next.

Edit: Coming up with a 挑战 is harder than I thought. It's back to the drawing board for me.