Why are there so many homophones in the Chinese language?
The reason is that sound changes reduces the complex consonant clusters of Old Chinese and deleted final consonants over time. Old Chinese typically had short …
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What does 依老偕老 mean?
Actually I’ve never seen this phrase before, and a little googling gave no result either. I guess it’s a confusion of two unrelated phrase/idioms: 倚老卖老： …
How do Chinese people memorize thousands of Chinese characters?
That’s another ‘China Myth’, right? But the truth is: a Chinese character is not an English/Latin letter, but it is a word, or even a …
Why does the Chinese character for black, 黑 have a fire radical in it?
Because it is a fire related one, in China, this explanation is widely accepted. And if you search it on Google, you’ll likely find that …
How many characters do you have to know to be fluent in Chinese?
There are over 50,000 Chinese characters and it would be an absolute superhuman feat to remember anything even remotely close to that 1,500 to 2,000 …
Do Chinese people’s names really have a meaning?
Okay, here’s the thing: Every Chinese name, when translated literally into English, often has a meaning similar to the style of names in World of Warcraft, …
Is Chinese really the hardest language in the world to learn?
I’m Singaporean. In theory, I’m bilingual. In Singapore, many of my daily interactions will be in Chinese. Many people will speak Chinese to me, and …
What is the meaning of “如何51吃瓜北京朝阳群众热心吃瓜”?
You might not have copied the sentence completely. “如何51吃瓜北京朝阳群众热心吃 瓜” Do not know what does that mean. But I’d like to explain a bit. “瓜” …
Why Chinese people dont use different kind of Chinese characters?
we have used “贾湖刻符” at 9000 years ago: we have used “双墩刻符” at 7000 years ago: we have used “半坡陶符” at 6000 years ago: we …
Do Chinese characters look like what they mean?
It depends on which font/script you’re looking at and what the original meaning is. 1# Let’s say nouns. There are many types of nouns, like nouns representing …