Fans of Chinese and Mandarin
chinesespeaking 
Let me pour a giant bucket of cold water on this. [[ As a normal adult, you will never learn enough Chinese characters to be read a book, newspaper or website ]] I am sorry, but that’s just the truth of the matter. The “common wisdom” according to Dr. Google is that you need to … Read more
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. “dòng”, “yaō”, “liǎng” are special pronunciation in Chinese systems such as the Chinese military, police, firefighting, railway, and aviation. They use the radio communication numeric pronunciation avoid confusion and improve clarity, … Read more
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) which contains these four equates to: The Four Beauties or Four Great Beauties are four Chinese women who were renowned for their beauty. The four are usually identified as Xi … Read more
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 by a Chinese physicist Húgāngfù in 1923. In Japan, we simply use the transliteration “エントロピー(pronounced entoropi-)” for the word, but I think it’s way cooler to write with one character. … Read more
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 羅馬 (written 羅瑪) was probably introduced by Matteo Ricci and his Jesuit colleagues: Matteo Ricci – Wikipedia (1) Latin/Italian Pronunciation: Standard Mandarin’s r- and -ou sound quite different from the Italian or Latin forms of r- or -o (to put … Read more
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 Chinese. I’m directly referencing this image. However, there’s one difference: the character “兆” (zhào) in Chinese culture can mean 10^6, 10^12, or 10^16, depending on the context. In modern mainland … Read more
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 divination. The second one was written on bronze ware. The third one was written in a scroll made with silk production in the state of Chu. To the left of … Read more
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 are more than 50,000 characters, but hardly anyone knows all of them, And in fact, most of them are obsolete. A typical educated person knows about 8000 characters. Only about … Read more
Context is needed for differentiation. There is no difference between “下次見“ and ”下次見“ unless you say it out。If you space the three words (spoken words) evenly as in (xia⁴ci⁴jian⁴) it means “see you next time”, 見 is see “下次” is next time. 下 alone means “down” or a command for action or to execute an … Read more
Well, this title wenkui, or 文魁 in Chinese, was conferred on people who passed tests in the Provincial Examination and ranked the 7th or below it. Provincial Examination, or 乡试 in Chinese, belonged to Imperial Examination System. This title 文魁 was mentioned in a book 清代科举考试述录及有关著作, which could be translated into English as Narration and … Read more