Fans of Chinese and Mandarin
Chinese has an extremely high frequency of use when it comes to four-character idioms and common sayings. There are several thousand commonly used ones. But most Chinese people probably only master a few hundred. They usually come from historical allusions or fables. I know more than most because when I was a child, China was … Read more
BMW stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke (German pronunciation: [ˈbaɪ̯ʁɪʃə mɔˈtʰɔʁn̩ ˈvɛɐ̯kə]: BMW – Wikipedia When Chinese translate foreign company names, they often try to choose characters which (1) sound similar to the original (Ba + Mo ~ bǎomǎ/baomaa) (2) are semantically related to the original (Horse ~ Car) (3) are auspicious (寶 is often used in Chinese to form compounds meaning “precious” or “treasure”) … Read more
Ok, I’ll try to unpack this as best as I can but please bear in mind that we are talking about 5,000 years of human history here, so this is going to be a very abridged history, or we could be here for weeks, so my apologies if I skip over anything important Firstly, what we think … Read more
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 are more than 50,000 characters, but hardly anyone knows all of them, And in fact, most of them are obsolete. A typical educated person knows about 8000 characters. Only about … Read more