Fans of Chinese and Mandarin
You know what’s funny about this question? Because I’ve heard Chinese native speakers who are not very good at English making the Exact, Same, Comment on English. Something that goes like this: “English is not a very accurate language, for example, there is only one word for “Happy”, we have plenty of expressions in Chinese that … Read more
Sometimes I see people asking translation of words that can easily be found from a dictionary. 自己人is not one of those words to me. You cannot find an exact word with the same meaning in English. It goes a little deeper in Chinese culture. One of the acceptable translations of自己人in English is “one of us”. … Read more
I like to read 武侠小说, a category of Chinese novels that does not have an equivalent counterpart in the West. The closest I can think of are action novels like The Three Musketeers or the Count of Monte Cristo. The character, 武, means martial arts; and the character, 侠, means chivalry. A large part of … Read more
Chinese grammar is similar to English and much easier. Chinese Characters is hard but if u learn Japanese, you also have to learn those Chinese Characters and sentence. the problem is, if you only learn Japanese , you can’t understand the detail meanning of many words. for example, why Japanese yelling “Banzai” when sucide? What … Read more
No, I don’t find it embarrassing or bothersome. I mean, when I look at various ways of romanizations of names of people from the Chinese-speaking world, or from Japan, Korea and Vietnam, I would much more focus on what their own names could be written in Chinese characters, or Hanzi, Kanji, Hanja or Hán tự, … Read more
It’s a different ballgame. You didn’t mention your native language, so I don’t know your starting point. But first, with Chinese, there are no verb conjugations, no plurals, no tenses, and a lot of the things you are probably used to do not exist. A lot of things you are not used to do exist: … Read more
Unfortunately, we don’t have the ” longest” word in China, because all our characters are individual. However, we have the most complex word. This one is “Biang”. It is the name of a kind of noodle. And we still have this one, called “da”. That means a lot of dragons fly together. BTW, I am … Read more
There is a V sound in some Chinese dialects, such as Hakka. If you listen to northern Chinese speak, sometimes they use a V sound. But as to why there is no V sound in Mandarin, first, languages can be pretty arbitrary. English has words beginning with shr, such as shrapnel, shrink, shroud, and others, … Read more
Grammar is useful for Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and other highly structured languages, but isn’t really that necessary for Chinese. There are no verb conjugations. A noun is just as happy to be a verb. There are no tenses. What do you need a rigorous study of grammar for? or rather, Who do you need it … Read more
The character “壹” is how the number 1 is written in financial numerals. The financial numerals are still being used today in both China and Taiwan, so it’s not really ancient. To prevent fraud, all numbers on financial instruments and documents like cheques, currency notes, contracts etc must be written in “Upper Case” characters. These … Read more