Over the years, I’ve enjoyed attending trivia nights at local pubs and schools. It’s fun to try to stretch your thinking, and of course, fun to meet up with lots of interesting people. I can’t tell you how many times though, I’ve been asked about collective nouns for words in English. “Group” is a common enough word, but if you use it all the time, you won’t be considered very literate.

2019-01-18

I mentioned in an earlier post that Mandarin was a tonal language and I described the four tones and the neutral tone. Well, while that’s all true, things aren’t quite a simple as that. There are also tone rules that can change the pronounced tone for a word. Let me show you: One rule says that if you have two third tones in a row, the first character changes to second tone.

2019-01-11

I mentioned in an earlier post that Chinese dialects are tonal. As well as words being different in different dialects (but often still the same characters), the tones are also different for different dialects. Mandarin is generally considered to have four tones or 声调 (Shēngdiào) plus a neutral tone. So, some would describe that as a total of five tones. The first tone or 第一声 (Dì yī shēng) is often drawn as level but it’s actually both high and level.

2019-01-04

One of the challenges for newcomers learning any Chinese dialect (including Mandarin), is that the languages are tonal languages. In English, we tend to use tone for emphasis but it’s not really used to change to a different word. For example, if I said “he really wants to go”, if I draw out and more heavily the word “really”, I can make it sound emphatic rather than casual. The exceptions to this would be homophones, where we have words that are spelled the same but entirely different meanings.

2018-12-28

I’ve mentioned before that the Chinese language uses tens of thousands of characters. It’s the same for either simplified or traditional Chinese. That can make it hard for someone learning the language, as there seems to be an endless list of characters to learn. You also might not have thought about it, but how do you type all those characters on a standard computer keyboard? The answer to both those questions is Pīnyīn (拼音).

2018-12-21

In Mandarin, the word for word is 词 (Cí). It’s pronounced somewhat like “tser”. An example of its use is in the word 词典 (Cídiǎn) which is the word for a dictionary. Individual characters are called 字 (Zì) but that can also be used for a word. Mandarin characters would be 汉字 (Hànzì) where **汉 (**Hàn) represents the Han people ie: most of the Chinese. Most of the parts of English speech have fairly direct equivalents.

2018-12-14

In English, we often “borrow” words from other languages. The Chinese call these “loan words”. For example, we might talk about a feeling of Déjà vu. Now we’ll often write it without the original accents on the “e” and the “a” but we’ll happily just use the French word in conversation. Ironically, the French tend to do the opposite. They keep inventing words to fill in the gaps in their language.

2018-12-07

In Mandarin, the word for compass directions are: East is 东 (Dōng) West is 西 (Xī) North is 北 (Běi) South is 南 (Nán) Curiously though, the Chinese don’t say North, South, East, and West for compass directions like we do. Instead they say 东(Dōng), 南 (Nán), 西 (Xī), 北 (Běi) ie: they do them clockwise which is probably more sensible than us. These directions are often combined with 边 (Biān) which roughly means side.

2018-11-30

The Chinese have a very long history as a civilization. I’m frequently told: 中国已有五千多年的历史。 (Zhōngguó yǐ yǒu wǔqiān duō nián de lìshǐ.) or China has more than 5000 years of history. It’s something the country is very proud of. During that time, they’ve developed a form of medicine somewhat parallel to Western medicine. Before I really started looking into it, I passed it off as almost non-scientific nonsense. There are many parts of it where I still think the same, but nothing is ever black and white.

2018-11-23

What’s the biggest retail event in the world now? Black Friday? Christmas? If you didn’t answer Singles’ Day, read on. One thing that learning Mandarin has done for me, has been to open my eyes to many aspects of Chinese culture, but it’s also made details of Chinese technology and business much more approachable. One curious business phenomena is Singles’ Day. Chinese Singles’ Day was also called Bachelors’ Day and had its origins back in 1993 at Nanjing University.

2018-11-15