Fans of Chinese and Mandarin
Yes, 江智 is a valid Chinese name. However, The Pinyin version of 江智 is written as Jiāng Zhì. The surname 江 could mean river. There are other people whose surname is Jiang, such as, Jiang Shuying, or 江疏影 in Chinese, an actress from mainland China, and Jiang Yiyan, or 江一燕 in Chinese, an actress from … Read more
Because Chinese is written in ideograms (hanzi) while English is written in phonetic symbols (Latin alphabet). Each Chinese character represents an idea – a noun, an adjective, a verb, a concept, a relation – while each letter represents a sound. The hanzi are basically hieroglyphs – and this is why we can read Egyptian texts from 5000 years … Read more
They are called Latin or Roman characters. It were the Romans who invented the alphabet English uses, and they used it to write Latin. The Chinese type the text phonetically in Pinyin (Chinese in Roman characters). The screen then pops the appropriate hanzi (Chinese characters) which could correspond to the Pinyin text. The user then chooses … Read more
It’s been Latinized Confucius is one of the most influential Chinese philosophers. His philosophy, Confucianism, forms the basis of much of what we think of as East Asian culture. He lived in what is now modern China, between 551 and 479 BC, never having once heard the term China, been told the year, or even … Read more
My pastor and his wife are from Guangdong and immigrated to the US about 10–12 years ago. They speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, and he speaks English. He was doing some research on a missionary who had once gone to China, and as he knows I also have a theology degree, he asked me to … Read more
I studied Russian for three years in high school. By the time I had done that, I could kind of patch together a shaky Russian sentence. I really enjoyed Russian, but I spent all my time memorizing declensions and all that grammar. After high school I studied Viet Namese, and then Mandarin Chinese. What a … Read more
I use Zhuyin and this is part of the keyboard for my PC. As you can see ㄅㄆㄇㄈat the left of the picture where ㄆ shares the same key with Q. There are more than one way to switch between Zhuyin and English input.
No, alphabet based systems aren’t easier to write. It simply shifts the difficulty from one aspect of writing to another. Let’s take English for example. There are 26 Latin letters used in the language, and words are formed by placing one letter next to another, from left to right. But it is extremely difficult to … Read more
The dialects in the North are more closely related to each other because travel was a lot easier. The topography map below shows mountain elevations in China. Circled in purple is the Central Plains, and circled in blue is the Northeastern Plains. The presence of plains allows easy travel, which means people interact with each … Read more
The Han Chinese are a mix of many groups over time, and here are some of the likely groups: A proto-Chinese group in southern China, which likely also became the Vietnamese in current Vietnam; A group of Tibetan-related peoples from current Sichuan and Tibet (the Qin dynasty had its roots among a horse-breeding people in … Read more