Fans of Chinese and Mandarin
I am not a scholar, but on this question I am 100% certain that I am correct. First of all, I am Chinese, deeply familiar with Chinese characters. Secondly, I am also a calligraphy enthusiast—I have truly written tens of thousands of characters with a brush. Before the invention of paper, and after the oracle … Read more
When someone asks what language Chinese people speak? The locals will answer: I speak Beijing (Mandarin_Jurzhen) or Cantonese-Cantonese, Hakka (Hakka-He), Hokkien (Fujian)… Give them a newspaper, everyone can understand the content, but when read aloud, no one can understand each other. When talking to each other, no one can understand each other. But when given … Read more
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 expect to ever fully understand Chinese culture.” Not because they are so hard to understand, but because that thing we call China is a huge place, with a long history, … Read more
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 that has their own meanings (instead of just representing sounds like alphabets), it’s definitely not needed. Native Chinese speakers definitely don’t have issues reading without spaces. If spaces were introduced, … Read more
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 endings and all sorts of things. In Chinese, a word is a word is a word. To learn Chinese, you need to learn radically different vocabulary and a very different … Read more
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 connections to English words. “Bibliotecha” sounds like it has to do with books, so it’s easy to remember that it means library. I didn’t need to rote memorize much to … Read more
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” (person), “工” (work), and “石” (stone), symbolizing “man-made stone.” Another example is “瓩,” which combines the number 千 (1000) and 瓦(watt), clearly meaning “kilowatt.” There’s also “猹,” a small animal … Read more
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 a language of Yin and Yang, a language rooted in the Bagua (Eight Trigrams). Pronunciation can be understood as a combination of Yin and Yang, and then we have the four tones. In fact, the four … Read more
The easiest Chinese character would be numbers, one → “一“ two → “二” three → “三“ （No, four is not four straight lines.) the hardest Chinese character, I assume you mean the Chinese character with the most strokes. There’s some debate on that. So there are over 85 thousand Chinese characters. But you only need … Read more
Let me pour a giant bucket of cold water on this. [[ As a normal adult, you will never learn enough Chinese characters to be read a book, newspaper or website ]] I am sorry, but that’s just the truth of the matter. The “common wisdom” according to Dr. Google is that you need to … Read more