Fans of Chinese and Mandarin
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
Why don’t Americans read Shakespeare in contemporary English, or Chaucer in contemporary English? That’s not the way Shakespeare of Chaucer sound. If you have studied phonology (聲韻學）, you should know that there are endless debates about the pronunciation of Middle Chinese, not to mention local accents and so forth. Wang Wei was born in 山西永濟市 … Read more
Just suffer through it. Life is hard, what do you expect? In the literal sense of the question, I took online classes. Five hours of classes per day, five days a week, seven months, not counting the hours put into doing regular homework. The usual holidays and weekends off, of course. Since my country of … Read more