How do Chinese people study?

I can’t give you a definitive description, but I can show you some pictures! The “Chinese way of studying” can be summed up by the slogan “只要学不死,就往死里学”, which roughly translates into “As long we don’t die from studying, we’ll study until we’re dead.” . Pictures of a typical Chinese classroom before Gaokao The holiday homework … Read more

Chinese language: Why does 東西 (dongxi) means “things” in Chinese?

The word “東西“ meaning ”things” came from “买東西“ which came from 买東又买西 which is preceded by 买了東又去西买 meaning after shopping from the east, go to the west to shop. Just like modern shopping mall designs with two anchor tenants (JCPenney and Macy) at each end, ancient Chinese shopping malls 街 are similarly designed. One in … Read more

Can you provide some examples of Chinese words that have different meanings when spoken with different tones?

The word ”中国”. As you can see,the ”Zhong” with the first tone and the “Guo” with the second tone in Mandarin combined as a word of “中国” means “China”. If we say the words in different tones in Mandarin,it probably means: There are 3*4=12 possibilities, each of which contains multiple other possibilities represented by different … Read more

What is the meaning of Wang (王) in Chinese? Are there any other meanings beside “king” or “royal”?

There is no doubt that the character “王” (Wang) originated from the pictograph of an axe. This is a large axe from the Shang Dynasty, and I even suspect that the middle part, resembling a human nose, is the origin of the character “王.” Here is the character “王” from the late Shang Dynasty inscriptions; … Read more

I’m learning Chinese but the vocabulary is quite complex, what methods can help me learn them?

To be honest? I think you are making this difficult for yourself. You say the vocabulary is complex. In what way? I don’t know what your native language is. My native language is English, so for me, French and Russian vocabulary were easier to pick up because the languages are related. Automobile, automobile, автомобиль; theater, … Read more

What do Chinese people write when they can’t remember Chinese characters?

It is easy and very flexible. There are many ways to avoid such bad situation. I just take 2 usual solutions. 1st, use other words to instead. Different from English, Chinese character/hanzi have lots of similar words to instead. For example, if we say agree with your idea , we can say : 对,好,善,理当如此,甚妥,当然,妙,可以,有道理,etc. When … Read more

What’s the importance of writing Chinese characters in the right order?

I thought the order of the strokes of Chinese characters were easy- A horizontal stroke before a vertical one; A left-falling one before a right-falling one: Top-down; Left-right; out-in… You know, elementary school stuff. Until one day my elementary-schooler daughter gave me a test which her teacher gave her class. Something like this: My score … Read more