Drunken Monkey

it's all a matter of spelling. there are however, some differences in the chinese characters used and they do actualy mean different things. still pronounced the same though... (kinda somewhere inbetween 'wing chun' and 'wing choon' and 'wing churn') the funny thing is, you'll find that the only people who choose to use a different spelling are some guys from yip man's line. everyone else just sticks to 'wing chun' and possibly a little note to say who is the recognised 'head'. i.e yip man wing chun, yuen kay shan wing chun, pan nam wing chun, hung suen wing chun etc etc. often , these days, it's also quite common to mention the student of the guys emntioned above instead (because of differences after yip man) so you have yip chun wing chun, yip ching wing chun, wong shun leung wing chun etc etc. in the past, it wasn't comon practice to say what style you are leaning, only that you are learning kung fu. y'know, you don't say you are learning wing chun, you say you are leaning kung fu. then when they ask who your sifu was, the style should be obvious (hence, not important in conversation)

another nice little site with a comprehensive range of information regarding the various lines and masters of wing chun in the past and some in the not so past.... as well as a few nice articles. http://www.wingchunkuen.com/ anyways. it's kinda hard to give you a proper chinese name for training hall. traditionally it is a 'kwoon' but that kinda just means 'training hall' really (and should be 'mo-kwoon' for 'martial training hall') again, i should point out that i'm giving cantonese pronunciations so any non hk kung fu guys who use mandarin out there, sorry.... i don't actually like the use of 'studio' for this kinda thing. it's too.. um... american... and gym isn't quite right either. i think most people do use 'kwoon' to describe the place. i've always just said that i was 'going kung fu' or 'going training' as opposed to 'going to the kwoon'. anyway. happy punching. monkeyP.

see the thing is, there are many many little holes in that little story. firstly, leung ting's studies with yip man have always been a highly contentious issue. bare in mind, that leung ting was one of the last students who joined class and being of a wealthier background, he could afford the private tutition (whether or not it was 'closed door' as it used to be, no one knows except leung ting now...) bare in mind that there were many other private students. BUT these private students never took part in the famous after school training that the likes of wong shun leung, leung sheung, tsui sheung tin, cheung hok kin, william cheung and bruce lee took part in... as far as i'm aware, leung jan never went to hk and he certainly never had a boat (he a wasn't really a rich man and had no need for a boat...). he spent most of his life in futshan at jan shan tong and when he retired, he moved out if the city and back into his home village. again, i point to their being very little record of leung jan having a son called leung bik. also, leung jan was famous in futshan (as well as his school/medicine shop). for a young man who studies wing chun to not know who leung jan was or what he looked like is a bit , well, silly. also, how yip man entered leung jan's school is a well documented event that has been confirmed by his sons (and it did not involve a boat....) the person who was told to finish yip man's training (because leung jan dies not long after yip man joined) was ng jung so (not leung bik who most probably didn't exsist except in the mysterious meeting story which was made up by yip man's writer friend). the reason yip man had many different ways of teaching was not because he learnt both family and non-family wing chun. it was because he, at his peak, trained with other wing chun sifus/students from different lineages, the most famous being lee shing and jiu wan as well as many meetings with pan nam (and i also believe he regulary crossed hands with yuen kay shan as well, my memory is a bit fuzzy).

yeah but... A sword fight where the two opponents heave two swords each, as in two in each hand read that line again...

well.... depends. petrol is priced and sold in litres but we still go by mpg. we teach metric but still measure people's height in feets and inches. architectural (master)plans are all drawn up in metric but we still refer to land sizes in acres. in fact, i would say tht we are more or less smack bang inbetween metric and imperial, which just makes it even more confusing.

..also quite meaningless seeing as his base was in a chinese style. i mean, at that point in history, if he did have a black belt (in a chinese system) then it would've meant something else entirely....

"ji" is a nexus point or point of conjunction i've heard of this before but i've never 'read' it. what i mean is, the only version of 'chi' i know in cantonese has a similar meaning to 'tai'. there's a term that is roughly 'chi-to' that roughly means 'very very' (usually in the negative manner) again, the 'chi' part being the actual bit that means 'extreme/very' kinda explains why some people translate 'tai chi' into 'grand ultimate'. apart from being quite cool sounding, it is also quite a good, if maybe too literal a translation of the words.

There is only one person who has learned the unadulterated Master Leung Jan-Bik version-That is Grand Master Dr. Leung Ting no offence but this just sounds like you are repeating what you have been told by those in your organisation. two things. i) historically, there is no record of leung jan having a son called leung bik. ii) the yip man/leung bik story also has no basis and it is said that yip man admitted that it was made up by a reporter friend of his to 'spice things up' (put it this way, yip chun said the story is bunk) also, there is no 'pure' leung jan version. leung jan himself taught many different version of wing chun, depending on the student and depending on the period of his life. fact is, yip man wing chun is just one branch of wing chun. there are many others that stemmed off from two generations before leung jan. as i have (almost) said before, any wing chun from after the leung jan period can't really be called traditional because there was, two generations before, ONE (traditional) system before it began its spreading out and modifications began. there is however, one line of wing chun that claims to be unbroken from the original style, passing on to family strictly, one generation after the other.

hey... i can't for the life of me figure out what MST3K is and er... what's culvers?

As far as I'm concerned..I'm done with this...... really? so that's why you went as far as finding and linking the page you quoted from (without referencing in the first place i might add). anyway. i could've sworn i was just pointing out bad translating. which i might add, was a result of your posting of an excerpt from an article that expalins itself earlier on (regarding what 'fist' means in chinese terminlogy). here we have the perfect example of what happens when you quote from an article without any sense of context. the beginning of the article nicely explains the confusion to the different spellings of tai chi. it then goes to explain what 'chaun' means and what it actually means (as in being a short form of 'chuan fa' or 'fist art') which is another reference term for 'kung fu' in general. which is how the article points to tai chi chuan to mean tai chi kung fu (which is still 'grammatically' wrong i should add). what it should really say is that tai chi is a form of kung fu in the same vein as hung gar is kung fu and wing chun is kung fu. if you know the language like i do, or if you actually know of the chinese martial arts like i do, you will know what i am talking about.

.....ok joking aside. regulation is bad. i mean, look at the current state of affairs with the governing bodies of martial arts we have today. it can be argued that they are the reason for the proliferation of mcdojos (or perhaps better to talk of the mcdojo effect...). the only thing that i can see happening if you have one government approved body to regulate is that power will be greater and held by fewer people. i can't see how that will do anything other than to create government approved mcdojos. another problem is who do you chose to regulate? do you have one representative from each style? how do you choose? who goes up? it'll just present an even bigger power struggle within an already chaotic system. like i said before, i think it is up to us to weed out the bad crop. when i said legalise 'kick door' i wasn't joking. what better deterent than to know that if you aren't legit, you run the risk of every legit hard working sensei/sifu knocking on your door with a nice letter offering a challenge in a public neutral ground? granted that there are going to be issues with this sort of thing going on but it's more appealing to me than to have a 'sanctioned' governing body. the one aspect i think that you can regulate is the cost of things.... but then, the thing we gain from martial arts training isn't something you can measure. how can you say that one black belt is worth x amount of money whilst a black belt form another school is worth y? this is something that, like delta said, we should simply stand up and shout about. we have more power than you think. after all, if all of their students walk out, what an they do then? see, i don't really have an issue with the money thing as long as what is being taught is good. once upon a time (not too long ago i might add), saying you were a martial artist meant something. today, if you said that, you would probably get laughed at. that's what i would like to change. how? like i said, 'kick door' is the way to go....

um, no. the word, 'chuan' as seen in tai-chi chuan, means 'fist' when directly translated into english. it is simply the pinyin/mandarin version of 'kuen' (which is the romanisation of the cantonese). basically, what i'm saying is that in chinese (mandarin or cantonese) it is never refered to as 'tai chi kung fu'. the literal translation of 'tai chi chuan' is quite complex. 'tai' can mean grand (as in tai-gung=grand father) or it can be taken to mean 'extreme/very' (tai-ho=very good) not sure how to translate 'chi'....but it isn't that important with regards to what i'm explaining. 'chaun' means fist. like i said before, it is basically short-hand for 'fist-art'. as in hung gar kuen=hung family fist (art/style) therefore, tai chi chuan='tai chi' fist art. am i wrong? please, tell me if i am. i mean, what have i said that is incorrect? for someone who doesn't like to argue, you sure are offensive and aggressive...

...i once had a semi-amusing encounter with a guy who was 'doing tai-chi' in a park. he was rather horrified when i told him, and showed him that the movement i saw him doing, was traditionally used to intercept and then break an arm/limb/joint....

dang.... and there i though it meant ' god of lightening tuberculosis'...

.....shall we call it 'michael schumacher syndrome'?

...you don't have to like him to like his films... and yeah. i have no idea why but we're getting special treatment over here for kill bill. maybe it's cos we didn't slate him, then crown him king AFTER the rest of the world said reservoir dogs was good (ahem, unlike the u.s media...) just to point out. the u.k film critics were among the first to say, 'people, go watch this film'. we like him. he likes us. y'know what's the scariest/creepiest thing? i can see a bit of myself in him, especially when he gets all hyper and excited during his interviews.... but then i guess all people who have a deep passion for certain things are like that. right? please? i am normal, right? ... yeah?

...just to clarify. what i was originally trying to say was; how do you know that your '60 press-ups were as good as their '20'?

oi! the films chinese in origin..... it should be larp sap kung fu and fay kuen. dammit. no one's gonna know what they mean apart from me...

...so can you force an orifice onto an opponents fingers?

...actually, 'chuan' means fist (itself an abreviation of 'fist-art'). sorry for picking....

i say... self regulate. if you want the government to do one thing fr martial arts, then i say we all petition for the legalisation of fighting under old chinese 'kick door' rules. who says 'traditional' is bad?

just my opinion but the best thing about kill bill is that tarantino doesn't pretend to be doing anything special. y'know, he copies copiously from films past and present and he's not ashamed about it. in fact, you can tell he's just having fun doing something he loves. i don't think that it really counts as a 'hollywood' film.

...so who told you that karate doesn't work in real life? how long have you been training in shorin ryu? why do you want to muay thai, sayockali, bjj or combat ju jitsu? (why them specifically?) and if you don't mind me asking, how old are you?

well, it kinda works in american beauty cos it was just his life doing the 'flashing before his eyes' thing. it wouldn't have worked in the last samurai cos if he was telling his story from the grave, he wouldn't have been present for the emperor's 'stand'. anyway, as i said before, i never thought that tom cruise's character was the last samurai. rather he was just some (lucky) guy who got to spend time with the last of the samurai (the guys from that village), which you must remember, is a social class which algren does not and could belong to (hence, he is not the last samurai) he might've been recognised as a kindred spirit but that does not make him 'one of them'. he was telling their story.

but.... he was the 'narrater'... he was the one telling the story of the last of the samurai. he can't die for that reason. it would've ruined the story-telling mechanism. (despite it being flawed in the first place...) or am i being too pedantic here...