Fans of Chinese and Mandarin
As I understand it, Buddha 佛陀 means 覺者 the enlightened. As far as I know, the Indo-European root is *bheudh, and means to be aware, or to make aware. It is etymologically related to the English forbid or forboding, and the Lithuanian budėti to be awake. In all the decades I have followed the Buddha, I have … Read more
No, it is not. Tsang is the Cantonese romanization of the surname 曾, whose Pinyin version is Zeng. When Zang is seen as a surname in mainland China, it refers to another Chinese character, which is 臧, whose Wade-Giles version is Tsang. So, you could see that this surname 臧 is written as Tsang in … Read more
Instead of frightening readers with implacable monsters, Chinese ghost stories tend to use the spirit world (the very concept of “ghost” is rather fluid) to warn of the consequences of unethical behavior. 鬼故事 guǐ gùshì / goei guhshyh is a very common equivalent for “ghost stories”, but the word 鬼 refers to all sorts of spirits, … Read more
Friends who know me well are aware that I have a bee in my bonnet over a large number of Simplified Chinese Characters that have been made standard, most of them falling under one of the following two (2) categories: Merging of two (2) distinct characters into one (1), largely on the basis of them … Read more
If this is the kind of slum you are talking about, unfortunately, there are none in China. What is associated with slums in China are “urban villages”, or old urban areas that are now dilapidated. The “urban villages” are only densely built up, but there is no problem with running water, sewerage, electricity, etc. Some … Read more
No, English is not necessarily easier to read and write. It only feels that way because you can only read and write English. If you can only read and write English, well, it’s no wonder that you feel it’s easier to read and write in English! Kind of a no-brainer, no? The below picture is … Read more
A typo is called 错别字 (cuò bié zì) in Chinese. 错 means “incorrect; wrong” and 别 means “another”. So putting together, a typo in Chinese refers to a character that is written wrongly or a situation where another character is written instead of the one that is supposed to be used. For instances: (This shows an example … Read more
For adult learners, most languages in the world are harder than Mandarin. The only real challenge when learning Mandarin is tone, and you can get away with getting your tones reasonably right, but not perfect, because most words have more than one syllable and context helps disambuguate. Mandarin only has four tones plus absence of … Read more
Characters are for writing, not speaking. I have an acquaintance who is functionally illiterate in Chinese but, according to the Chinese people I’ve asked, he speaks a very fluent, very sophisticated Mandarin (don’t ask me how he acquired such a high level without being able to read or write!). Apparently, he listens to a lot … Read more
Very very rarely. One big problem of inventing new characters nowadays is you cannot type it easily. Different from new English words, which a just new combinations of letters. For a new Chinese character to be shown or typed, it must be in some Unicode library. If it cannot be typed or shown, it won’t … Read more