What does 沉鱼落雁 mean?
“沉鱼落雁” is a Chinese idiom that describes a woman’s extremely beautiful appearance. In fact, “沉鱼落雁” is a highly poetic and expressive idiom in Chinese, used …
It’s true that the Mandarin language is very hard to learn. Do all Chinese people speak Mandarin perfectly?
It is extremely difficult, its not a matter of just what you put into it like with other languages. Somewhere, I read an article from …
How can you easily remember the differences between the Chinese characters “未 (Wèi)” and “末 (Mò)” since they look so much alike?
My English teacher, was an American from Oregon, named Susan Grant. She was a retired lawyer who likes to hike. She taught me that when …
Why Chinese characters don’t look like what they mean?
Three thousand years ago, a lot of characters looked like what they mean, but over the course of three thousand years, some things are bound …
Why are there so many homophones in the Chinese language?
The reason is that sound changes reduces the complex consonant clusters of Old Chinese and deleted final consonants over time. Old Chinese typically had short …
What does 依老偕老 mean?
Actually I’ve never seen this phrase before, and a little googling gave no result either. I guess it’s a confusion of two unrelated phrase/idioms: 倚老卖老： …
How do Chinese people memorize thousands of Chinese characters?
That’s another ‘China Myth’, right? But the truth is: a Chinese character is not an English/Latin letter, but it is a word, or even a …
Why does the Chinese character for black, 黑 have a fire radical in it?
Because it is a fire related one, in China, this explanation is widely accepted. And if you search it on Google, you’ll likely find that …
How many characters do you have to know to be fluent in Chinese?
There are over 50,000 Chinese characters and it would be an absolute superhuman feat to remember anything even remotely close to that 1,500 to 2,000 …
Do Chinese people’s names really have a meaning?
Okay, here’s the thing: Every Chinese name, when translated literally into English, often has a meaning similar to the style of names in World of Warcraft, …