chinesespeaking

How can one differentiate between “下次見 (xià cì jiàn)” and “下次見 (xiàcìjiàn)”?

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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

What is the meaning of the title “ 文魁” and how did one obtain it in ancient China?

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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

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