How does the Pinyin system in Chinese benefit from using a Latin-based alphabet?
In my opinion, it’s useless. Chinese is fundamentally not a phonetic language. What’s called “Hanyu Pinyin,” to me, is a scam. I see Chinese as …
What are some of the easiest and hardest Chinese characters to write?
The easiest Chinese character would be numbers, one → “一“ two → “二” three → “三“ （No, four is not four straight lines.) the hardest …
What is the most effective way to learn Chinese characters?
Let me pour a giant bucket of cold water on this. [[ As a normal adult, you will never learn enough Chinese characters to be …
In Mandarin, when is zero, one and two pronounced as “dòng”, “yaō”, “liǎng” instead of “yī”, “èr”, “sān”?
You kinda got it mixed up. “dòng”, “yaō”, “liǎng” mean 0, 1 and 2, however “yī”, “èr”, “sān” actually stands for 1, 2, and 3. …
Who can help me study the topic “四大美女”?
The second character is for man, the fourth or last is for woman, though I must look it up to see the rest. While (中国古代四大美女) …
Are new Chinese characters still being invented?
Inventing new characters seems to have been still practiced quite commonly through the 20th century. For instance, the character “熵” means entropy, and was coined …
Why is the Chinese word for Rome 罗马 instead of 肉马?
History* provides three reasons. Jesuit priests were the first to introduce the history of Rome and the Roman Catholic church to China, so the word …
How do Mandarin speakers express concepts like “one in a million” using “wan” (万), and what cultural meanings do these expressions carry?
Chinese uses a decimal system. The image below is something I randomly found on Google, from a Japanese website, but that’s fine—it’s almost identical to …
Why does the hanzi for “autumn” (秋) contain the radicals for “grain stalk” (禾) and “fire” (火)?
The first character for autumn represents a cricket, which was carved on the back armor of ancient turtles and the shoulder blades of cows for …
How many alphabets does the Chinese language have?
Most languages have only one alphabet. Chinese has zero. Chinese has no alphabet at all. It uses a system of characters to represent words and ideas. There …