Are new Chinese characters still being invented?
Inventing new characters seems to have been still practiced quite commonly through the 20th century. For instance, the character “熵” means entropy, and was coined …
Why is the Chinese word for Rome 罗马 instead of 肉马?
History* provides three reasons. Jesuit priests were the first to introduce the history of Rome and the Roman Catholic church to China, so the word …
How do Mandarin speakers express concepts like “one in a million” using “wan” (万), and what cultural meanings do these expressions carry?
Chinese uses a decimal system. The image below is something I randomly found on Google, from a Japanese website, but that’s fine—it’s almost identical to …
Why does the hanzi for “autumn” (秋) contain the radicals for “grain stalk” (禾) and “fire” (火)?
The first character for autumn represents a cricket, which was carved on the back armor of ancient turtles and the shoulder blades of cows for …
How many alphabets does the Chinese language have?
Most languages have only one alphabet. Chinese has zero. Chinese has no alphabet at all. It uses a system of characters to represent words and ideas. There …
How can one differentiate between “下次見 (xià cì jiàn)” and “下次見 (xiàcìjiàn)”?
Context is needed for differentiation. There is no difference between “下次見“ and ”下次見“ unless you say it out。If you space the three words (spoken words) …
What is the meaning of the title “ 文魁” and how did one obtain it in ancient China?
Well, this title wenkui, or 文魁 in Chinese, was conferred on people who passed tests in the Provincial Examination and ranked the 7th or below …
Do Chinese characters look like what they mean?
Eh… no, not really. At least not anymore lol. Modern Chinese characters are not particularly effective at conveying meaning through visual representation, but ancient Chinese …
What is the original form of the Chinese character “世”?
I must answer this question because the calligraphy work I’ve been recently copying is the 峄山碑，Yi Mountain Stele, which features the standard official script of …
How many characters are in the Chinese Mandarin language?
Mandarin Chinese is the most frequently spoken Chinese language or dialect with more than 900 million native speakers. The Chinese characters are more or less …