The direction words

I mentioned in an earlier post that I find it easier to remember groups of words, rather than trying to remember individual words. An interesting (and very useful) group of words, are the direction words.

The first of these are the compass directions.

In English, we say “north, south, east, and west”. Directly translated, they would be:

北，南，东，西  (Běi, nán, dōng, xī)

Now I don’t know how we ever came to choose that order to say them, and it’s interesting that we go top, bottom, right, left.

Chinese don’t do that. They say “east, south, west, and north”. So, you’ll instead hear:

东，南，西，北   (Dōng, nán, xī, běi)

As well as the basic directions, in English, we also say “northward, southward”, etc. To indicate the “in a northerly direction”, in Mandarin, the word  方 (Fāng) is appended. So:

北方  (Běifāng) is like “northward”.

Another useful suffix word is 边 (Biān) is like “side”. So

北边 (Běibian) is the “north side”.

2019-02-22