Fans of Chinese and Mandarin
chinesespeaking 
For adult learners, most languages in the world are harder than Mandarin. The only real challenge when learning Mandarin is tone, and you can get away with getting your tones reasonably right, but not perfect, because most words have more than one syllable and context helps disambuguate. Mandarin only has four tones plus absence of … Read more
Characters are for writing, not speaking. I have an acquaintance who is functionally illiterate in Chinese but, according to the Chinese people I’ve asked, he speaks a very fluent, very sophisticated Mandarin (don’t ask me how he acquired such a high level without being able to read or write!). Apparently, he listens to a lot … Read more
Very very rarely. One big problem of inventing new characters nowadays is you cannot type it easily. Different from new English words, which a just new combinations of letters. For a new Chinese character to be shown or typed, it must be in some Unicode library. If it cannot be typed or shown, it won’t … Read more
The Chaoshan (潮汕) region has its own language, Teochew (or Chiuchow) – which isn’t mutually intelligible with Mandarin or Cantonese, actually I find it closer to Minnan (my dialect) spoken in southern part of Fujian Province with accent variation of course. If you speak Teochew, you can get by easily in Chaozhou, Jieyang and Shantou … Read more
Again, China in your imagination is China retold from western perspective. Even as someone a Chinese diaspora in eastern hemisphere, who has growing up through western education perspective, China in my eyes is quite different from how western mainstream media, pop science, history, literature, let alone politicians portrays it. In early 2000s, when I am … Read more
Chinese writing evolved. It started out as pictures. Sometimes they used images to represent ideas; even in today’s writing, you can see that 大 is someone standing with their legs and arms spread apart, thiiiis big! Sometimes you have to know how to look at them. For example, 車 (che), originally chariot, the | is the axle, … Read more
Because of Zhou Youguang and his team. Chinese, of course, has its own script distinct from the Roman alphabet. And like many languages, it uses sounds which don’t show up in other languages, or appear but are not regarded as distinct in other languages. In order to represent words in one language in a script … Read more
Linguists divide Chinese into about ten varieties that are not mutually intelligible, although some count with fewer and some with many more. They are not “dialects”, they are more comparable to the Romance languages – they have a common origin, but are no more similar than Portuguese and Romanian. Mandarin and Cantonese are the most well-known, but … Read more
Unfortunately, I do not. I’ve had over three years of Mandarin lessons because I assumed it would enable me to better communicate with Chinese people. But what I have found, to my amusement, is that most of the people I know speak Cantonese or Hokkien. This seems to be the case whether they are in … Read more
Well, in my humble opinion, these two Chinese characters don’t sound too old-fashioned. 莲 means lotus and its Pinyin is lián. And in a metaphorical way, it could mean purity. That’s why in a famous essay, Ode to the Lotus, or 爱莲说 in Chinese, by Zhou Dunyi, or 周敦颐 in Chinese, a renowned neo-Confucian philosopher … Read more