Fans of Chinese and Mandarin
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 the Qin Dynasty. Among them, the character “世” (shì) is not very easy to write. This is how “世” is written in the original inscription of the Yi Mountain Stele. … Read more
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 the same all over China, apart from the fact that there are traditional and simplified characters and that Cantonese or Hokkein for example have some characters of their own. There … Read more
To be honest? Because you are totally misreading the character. The word lung is, on the left, the radical 肉 meat, flesh, which is used for body parts. You may confuse it with 月, but they are totally different characters. The phonetic on the right is 巿 fú, which is a pictograph of a sort … Read more
Mutual intelligibility. French and English use the same alphabet, but have you ever noticed that as an English speaking person you can’t understand most things written in French despite recognizing the alphabet? Apparently, French people have the same trouble with reading English. However, if you speak any language in the Chinese language group that uses … Read more
As pointed out in the previous answer, this Chinese character“州” in pictographic writing refers to the land in the middle of rivers, representing the basin of a river. The earliest book to use it to divide Chinese land was “Yu Gong” in the Book of Documents（《尚书·禹贡》）, whose name means “The Report of Yu（禹） to the Monarch”. … Read more
红 is red. It is very distinct, you can’t mistaken it. Blood is red and one know what is red when one see red. As a Hokkien we know what is red (ang as in angpow) and we know what is 赤(chiak/qiak)。QiakSek or 赤色 is not red, it is our skin colour。赤裸裸 is when we … Read more
There are many reasons why English is the lingua franca today. It’s widespread around the world. The British Empire was pretty effective at spreading it till the middle of the 20th century, making it official language for a huge part of the world population. Since the fall of the empire an other English speaking country, … Read more
Modern day brides in China make use of red as well as white depending on the ethnicity of the Chinese group. A hundred couples from all over China attended a mass wedding ceremony at Fenghuang ancient town, in Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, central China’s Hunan Province. Red is a common auspicious colour in … Read more
The radicals 部首 are not just Mandarin Chinese, they are for all Chinese characters. They are the bases of the characters. Take, for example, the radical 木 tree/wood, a pictograph (not obvious in modern characters. The limbs and the roots on the trunk). Put two of them together, and you get 林 forest, three are … Read more
It depends. If you wear white on festive days, like the Chinese Spring Festival and a wedding, you will offend all the Chinese people. Well, this is how Sydney celebrated the 2022 Chinese New Year. Of course, I prefer to think that is because of Sydney Council’s ignorance of Chinese tradition. On the other hand, … Read more