Fans of Chinese and Mandarin
chinesespeaking 
First of all, be patient, and let’s clarify some THINGS. This will help us to understand why there are so many categories, names, or branches about Chinese characters ONLINE(or on Quora), making it seems like to understand Chinese characters is much more complicated than to achieve controlled nuclear fusion in engineering. #1. All the Chinese characters … Read more
When I was a kid, I associated Chinese with sounds like bing, tong, ting, ching, chung; a bit like playing golf in a room full of saucepans. I think at that time I may have been exposed mostly to Cantonese, through the staff at Chinese restaurants in Ireland and Hong Kong martial arts films. It’s … Read more
It’s hard, yet it’s very satisfying. My first language is Indonesian, which has no similarity at all with Mandarin Chinese. The easiest part is reading and writing. I can pass the HSK 3 test with a breeze in the reading and writing part. You just need to have the “Pleco” app and your textbook side-by-side, … Read more
Well, I am living in Suzhou. I have traveled to 46 cities in China. Always been a solo wandering soul. I can confirm that your assumption is quite true. I mean life in China without learning Chinese would be very challenging. If you are in a big city, like Shanghai or Beijing, you may still … Read more
Your question is almost impossible to answer. Chinese has a vast number of homophones. So when you say “yuxi,” it could have dozens of meanings. Here’s one of my guesses. First, the “Yuxi” you mentioned refers to 玉溪 (Yuxi), a city in Yunnan Province, China. But in China, when people mention this word, they don’t … Read more
I can’t give you a definitive description, but I can show you some pictures! The “Chinese way of studying” can be summed up by the slogan “只要学不死，就往死里学”, which roughly translates into “As long we don’t die from studying, we’ll study until we’re dead.” . Pictures of a typical Chinese classroom before Gaokao The holiday homework … Read more
The word “東西“ meaning ”things” came from “买東西“ which came from 买東又买西 which is preceded by 买了東又去西买 meaning after shopping from the east, go to the west to shop. Just like modern shopping mall designs with two anchor tenants (JCPenney and Macy) at each end, ancient Chinese shopping malls 街 are similarly designed. One in … Read more
The word ”中国”. As you can see,the ”Zhong” with the first tone and the “Guo” with the second tone in Mandarin combined as a word of “中国” means “China”. If we say the words in different tones in Mandarin,it probably means: There are 3*4=12 possibilities, each of which contains multiple other possibilities represented by different … Read more
It depends on your original native language. I assume you are a native English speaker since the question was in English. If you study full time using an immersion system you can be almost fluent in 12 months if you learn Spanish. To do the same thing with Mandarin will take about 3 to 5 … Read more
There is no doubt that the character “王” (Wang) originated from the pictograph of an axe. This is a large axe from the Shang Dynasty, and I even suspect that the middle part, resembling a human nose, is the origin of the character “王.” Here is the character “王” from the late Shang Dynasty inscriptions; … Read more