A Gap year in China will surely get you closer to fluency in Chinese mandarin History of Chinese Characters: To understand the question “how many Chinese characters are there”, you need to study the history behind the evolution of the Mandarin Language. The Chinese language is considered as ...
Some of the most famous proverbs you know are probably rooted in Chinese origin, you never know! Did you know that some Chinese characters — usually the older ones from thousands of years ago — are pictograms? This means that the character is modelled after the object it describes. 水...
The earlier spelling of Mao's name was a form oftransliterationcalledWade-Giles, which takes Chinese characters and converts them into classic Roman script based on the letters of the Latin alphabet. It comes out like this:Mao Tse-tung. You'll see that in many older books and research. Th...
If Chinese were written in an alphabet, would this kind of expression survive? Theoretically, every character that has ever been recorded in the Chinese tradition can be used in modern Chinese. Of course, many old characters are long-dead variants of current characters and are unlikely to be...
While there are many speakers of Min, the history of its development made it difficult to find the right Chinese characters for the dialect, since most of the characters were created for the Mandarin language. Thus, written Min uses some Roman characters in place of the unavailable Mandarin cha...
This is a system for transliterating Chinese ideograms (characters) into the Roman alphabet. [Chinese (Mandarin) pn yn, to combine sounds into syllables : pn, to combine + yn, sound.] Pinyinliterally means "join (together) sounds" (a less literal translation being "phoneticize", "spell"...
If you really want to learn both, I would advise you to just learn to read and recognise both and not to try to write both simplified and traditional Chinese, because writing characters is much more difficult than recognising them. What type of Chinese should I be learning, Mandarin or Cant...
about how Chinese people typeChinese characterson their cellphones or computers. Chinese, after all, is not composed of letters like the English or Spanish alphabet; it is constructed of pictographs made up ofmany strokes. Do the Chinese people even use the same keyboard as in other countries...
When researching resources to help you learn Chinese, consider your learning style, how fast you want to learn and your budget. A go-to resource should be a tutor, either in-person or online, Wiebe says. Find Chinese tutors on websites likeTutorMandarinoreChineseLearning, or sign up for ...
If you were studying English, this would be the alphabet. Since you’re studying Chinese, it’s pinyin. Pinyin is the romanization of Chinese characters based on their pronunciation. This is the first step in learning Chinese. Chinese children learn pinyin before learning characters, and so shou...