The THCA has a specifically labelled instructor or teacher test consisting mostly of hoop flowers (turks head mats) and hollow mystic knots with a few fun cloverleaf and mystic knot variants. The ZGJ set of tests cover perhaps a third of the (admittedly repetitious) content here. The ZGJ advanced test also sprints completely into the wilderness, relatively speaking, with complex and involved projects.

The THCA advanced test knots are exclusively pan chang/mystic knot variants. The compound knot section consist of two (2) more elaborate amphora knot variants.

The easiest way for me to enter Chinese text is by typing English text and getting something to translate it for me. Generally speaking this does 60% of the job. Then there are the characters that are more difficult to translate, so I need to enter them directly. For this task I like to write the characters into a system that does Chinese handwriting recognition. For this job I used the free iTranslate iPhone app and the nciku dictionary. I used the iTranslate app, mostly because I was out, but it had the added advantage of quickly swapping the Chinese and English back and forth from the translate/translated windows for refinement of the desired characters. Also, unlike the other translation apps on my phone, iTranslate allowed me to get the data out (via email in this case). Apparently iTranslate is “powered by Google” and indeed once I got home I also used Google Translate with largely the same results although there is no handwriting recognition involved there.

I’ve discovered the youTube channel of a 60 year old person (int301) in Taiwan which consists entirely of Chinese knotting instructions. The videos are silent, so the only language issue is the titles of the videos themselves. That’s where I can help a bit. 8) The following translations are not formal with canonical knot names, they’re just off the cuff notes I took for myself when I was looking at the videos

Feeling unequal to the task of dealing with my massive backlog of links that I need to post at the time, I decided to fiddle with the blog itself. I put in a blogroll on the side, and a Google gadget to translate the page for people who would like a translation (I didn’t read the source code before I included it, bad, Carol!, I wonder if the readers need enough English to read the “Google Translate” part… 8). I’m going to try it to see if it will translate all the non-English bits that are in this post into English. 8)