chinesespeaking

Do Chinese characters look like what they mean?

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Eh… no, not really. At least not anymore lol. Modern Chinese characters are not particularly effective at conveying meaning through visual representation, but ancient Chinese characters more closely resembled what they meant, with this resemblance becoming stronger the further back you go. Writing was independently invented only three to four times in human history: in … Read more

What is the original form of the Chinese character “世”?

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I must answer this question because the calligraphy work I’ve been recently copying is the 峄山碑，Yi Mountain Stele, which features the standard official script of the Qin Dynasty. Among them, the character “世” (shì) is not very easy to write. This is how “世” is written in the original inscription of the Yi Mountain Stele. … Read more

How many characters are in the Chinese Mandarin language?

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Mandarin Chinese is the most frequently spoken Chinese language or dialect with more than 900 million native speakers. The Chinese characters are more or less the same all over China, apart from the fact that there are traditional and simplified characters and that Cantonese or Hokkein for example have some characters of their own. There … Read more

Why do Chinese use a character that is a combination of the characters for “moon” and “city” to mean “lung”?

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To be honest? Because you are totally misreading the character. The word lung is, on the left, the radical 肉 meat, flesh, which is used for body parts. You may confuse it with 月, but they are totally different characters. The phonetic on the right is 巿 fú, which is a pictograph of a sort … Read more

What is the reason behind China’s use of a script for their language instead of an alphabet like English or French?

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Mutual intelligibility. French and English use the same alphabet, but have you ever noticed that as an English speaking person you can’t understand most things written in French despite recognizing the alphabet? Apparently, French people have the same trouble with reading English. However, if you speak any language in the Chinese language group that uses … Read more

Why do the names of many cities in China end off with -zhou（州）?

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As pointed out in the previous answer, this Chinese character“州” in pictographic writing refers to the land in the middle of rivers, representing the basin of a river. The earliest book to use it to divide Chinese land was “Yu Gong” in the Book of Documents（《尚书·禹贡》）, whose name means “The Report of Yu（禹） to the Monarch”. … Read more

Why do brides in China wear red instead of white for the wedding dress?

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Modern day brides in China make use of red as well as white depending on the ethnicity of the Chinese group. A hundred couples from all over China attended a mass wedding ceremony at Fenghuang ancient town, in Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, central China’s Hunan Province. Red is a common auspicious colour in … Read more