Fans of Chinese and Mandarin
Conversational scenarios, expression techniques, and pronunciation correction exercises—focused on practical Chinese speaking skills
Technically speaking, most real African people come from Africa came to China to live in the real life here. By real African people I mean they directly come from African countries, not North American, European and Australia citizens of African descendants. By real life I mean they are here to get educations, to do business … Read more
This is a misunderstanding. 圣母 in Chinese internet slang means “A person with the purest virtues and highest sense of honor, a paragon of mankind”, it’s an absolute praise. The slang you want to ask which means a “hypocrite” is 圣母婊. Or a “Virgin Mary Bitch”. The expression is an abbreviation of “操着圣母的心，做着婊子的事” (“Have a … Read more
When Nissan introduced the Bluebird model in Malaysia, the Chinese name picked for advertisement in Chinese language press was 蓝鸟, which literally means Bluebird. However, the name was quietly put aside soon after as Chinese Malaysian started making fun of the name. The pronunciation of 蓝鸟 in Mandarin is Lan Niao, which is fine. However, … Read more
Just like English or it’s presuccessor, the Latin language system, uses prefix to indentify a word. 肉 means meat and in ancient symbolic characters, it was written like this. It is not 2 horizontal strokes like the letter moon but should be like this ⺼. However, later on most people mix the 2 up and … Read more
TL;DR From an anglophone POV, Traditional Chinese is indeed a backward language! [Pages 16 {right} – 17 {left} of the Chinese version of Holes, by Louis Sachar, translated by my colleague 趙永芬】 Works of fiction and newspapers in traditional Chinese characters (Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau) are usually printed in vertical columns from right to left, … Read more
In the past Chinese has been written on rolls of bamboo sticks which made it easier to write the characters vertically and from left to right. And this is the way how text is arrayed in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan unti now, while Mainland China has adopted the writing from left to right and … Read more
I don’t know about “inferior”, but I would expect that it is harder. When I lived in Hong Kong a lot of my ethnic Chinese friends were tri-lingual – they spoke English, Cantonese and Mandarin. Most of them (but not all) could also read both simplified and traditional Chinese. But fewer of them could write … Read more
Although the first Chinese character in this term, 番, could mean foreign, the term in the question, 番菜馆, referred to restaurants which served Western food. There were renowned examples under this category, for instance, 一品香番菜馆, which literally means First Grade of Fragrance Western Restaurant, and 撷英番菜馆, which literally means Collecting the Outstanding Western Restaurant. The … Read more
Thank you for the request. That’s because Chinese grammar is objectively easier than Korean or Japanese grammar. Now, don’t get me wrong, for an English speaker, learning Chinese to a high level is extremely difficult. The writing systems, as you may know, is a huge challenge because, unlike English, Chinese uses logographs or pictures that … Read more
It’s not offensive, but it’s horribly incorrect. It’s like saying people from France and Albania both speak “European”. I mean, there are a group of languages that all use the same alphabet and that’s the same thing, right? There’s no such SPOKEN language as “Chinese”. However, there is a WRITTEN language called “Chinese” (which the … Read more