Fans of Chinese and Mandarin
chinesespeaking 
I have to disagree with Paul Denlinger. “我” is not a modern word, nor being the pronoun for oneself in 20th century. “我” first appeared in Chinese bone script in Shang dynasty (1600-1046BC). A is the original format of “我”, and F is its modern look. Its original meaning was a execution weapon much like … Read more
鸡你太美 is actually a meme. The original line was 只因你太美（only because you are too beautiful）， which was the first line of a song sang by singer Cai Xukun. 只因 is pronounced zhi-yin, which when you say it really fast, becomes Jin, which is pretty close to the pronounciation of 鸡， Ji, which means chicken. So … Read more
This is actually a reduced form of the original character, 灋. In addition to the three drops of water, the word is made up of 廌 and 去. 廌 chih4/zhi is recorded as being a large, gentle beast that lived by the water. It had one horn (and maybe a recollection of the ancient Elasmotherium, … Read more
This is very difficult to translate, because the cultural connotations are so different. Literally, 緣 means hem, the hem on a garment, which doesn’t help a lot. BTW, it is pronounced yüán. 緣 is a concept that came to China with Buddhism. I believe that it is called paticca in Sanskrit. Anyway, the idea is … Read more
It means working from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week. It started to gain popularity when some Chinese company, predominately tech companies (and game companies) would openly require their workers to work for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, without overtime pay. It is listed on their hiring ads. It … Read more
These are two very different questions. Classical Chinese is a language, it can be written in either traditional Chinese character fonts or any modern Chinese standard character font. The first versions of the Analects of Confucius were written in seal characters. Nobody uses seal characters in daily life now. All the versions printed today are printed with … Read more
Definitely not. I am sure Cantonese isn’t that big in China (everything is bigger in China), so I consulted Wiki for a quick look. According to English Wikipedia citing a 2004 study: Mandarin: 798.6 million (66.2%) Min (“Fujianese”): 75 million (6.2%) — incl. Hainan, Hokkien, Teochew Wu (“Jiangnanese”): 73.8 million (6.1%) Jin (“Shanxinese”): 63 million (5.2%) — … Read more
The argument that the Chinese language isn’t very useful outside of China make some say 2 things: Duh. Like, a billion people speak it there. But Chinese is the third most “spoken at home” language in the US and Canada. Travel to any tourist destination, and what population of tourists are there more of? Go to Thailand, … Read more
I’ve wondered about this myself. I checked Lucas Lee’s source as well, but it was not very detailed, so I looked to other sources. Note that 听 (yǐn, meaning smile) is an entirely separate character, and I won’t discuss it here. 听 comes from a corrupted phono-semantic vulgar variant (俗字) of 聽 — ?. That is ⿰口厅, … Read more
Not the best person to answer this question but since you requested to me, here’s how I memorize Mandarin pronunciation (spelling) of Chinese Characters. For Chinese Characters and their meaning, Visual images effectively help a lot… For Mandarin, Cantonese, and any Chinese dialect pronunciation, If you know the topic of “Syllable Structures”, then here it … Read more