How do I understand Chinese culture?
Fascinating question. Having lived in China for several years, and being married to a Chinese wife, I think my first impulse is to say, “don’t …
Why did the Chinese never adopt word spacing?
Because there is no reason to. Believe it or not, youcanactuallyreadEnglishsentenceswithoutspacesaswell. Ittakessomepractice, butyoushouldbeabletoreadthesesentenceswithoutmuchfussatall. Spaces are not strictly necessary even for alphabet-based languages – for logographic characters …
Why do people claim that the Chinese grammar is easy?
Because it is? I studied Russian for three years in high school (Pasadena High, CA), and spent all my time learning declensions and conjugations and …
What is the most difficult part of learning Mandarin Chinese as an adult beginner from scratch, and what can be done about it?
Coming from speaking English, it’s tough that there’s almost no vocabulary overlap. When I learned Spanish as a teenager, most of my vocabulary learning was via making …
Do the Chinese still make new characters today?
As far as I know, very few. But they do exist. For example, the character “砼” refers to concrete. It consists of the parts “人” …
How does the Pinyin system in Chinese benefit from using a Latin-based alphabet?
In my opinion, it’s useless. Chinese is fundamentally not a phonetic language. What’s called “Hanyu Pinyin,” to me, is a scam. I see Chinese as …
What are some of the easiest and hardest Chinese characters to write?
The easiest Chinese character would be numbers, one → “一“ two → “二” three → “三“ （No, four is not four straight lines.) the hardest …
What is the most effective way to learn Chinese characters?
Let me pour a giant bucket of cold water on this. [[ As a normal adult, you will never learn enough Chinese characters to be …
In Mandarin, when is zero, one and two pronounced as “dòng”, “yaō”, “liǎng” instead of “yī”, “èr”, “sān”?
You kinda got it mixed up. “dòng”, “yaō”, “liǎng” mean 0, 1 and 2, however “yī”, “èr”, “sān” actually stands for 1, 2, and 3. …
Who can help me study the topic “四大美女”?
The second character is for man, the fourth or last is for woman, though I must look it up to see the rest. While (中国古代四大美女) …