Learning Mandarin with Greg

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.  But Jack Ma from Alibaba really made this fly. He promoted it as a form of anti-Valentines Day. China has many unmarried singles who now have significant disposable incomes, and Singles Day is a day that celebrates their pride in being single. The date chosen was 11/11 (November 11 or as many Chinese say about this event “double one double one” or “four singles”).

2018-11-15

A few days ago, my wife and I visited a local restaurant that we quite like. It’s called 秋月亮 (Qiū yuèliàng) or Autumn Moon. The lady who runs it has been very friendly to us. Before our meal, she asked if we wanted anything to drink. My wife asked for water but I asked for water and some tea (green tea). I wanted some water first, then I was going to change to drinking tea.

2018-11-09

In my last post on learning Mandarin, I talked about how long it takes to learn the language. I discussed that like learning English, there is no real end point to the learning, only stages of achievement. So how can you assess where you’re at? The answer is the HSK and HSKK exams. So what are they, and how do they match other definitions?

US State Department Proficiency Levels

The US State Department offers a definition of language proficiency here. It defines these levels:

2018-11-02

If I’ve convinced you that learning Mandarin is worthwhile (that’s how 1 in 7 people communicate world-wide), the next question I often get from people is about how long it takes to learn. Now if someone asked you that about English, what would you say? There’s really no end point to the learning.

It’s the same even just with words. While it’s easy enough to learn the English alphabet, knowing the 26 letters doesn’t actually give you an ability to understand a particular word. If I wrote Brobdingnagian, you might be able to guess how it’s pronounced (because you’ve learned pronunciation rules over the years) but I’m guessing you probably don’t know what it means.

2018-10-26

In an earlier post, I discussed how many Chinese characters are in fact made up of several other simpler characters, called radicals. In Mandarin, these radicals are called bù shǒu (部首).

For example, in the word Hǎo (good):

The character on the left is the radical form of the character Nǚ (woman or female):

And the character on the right is the radical form of the character Zi and means “child”:

2018-10-19

You may well have noticed that many Chinese characters are made up of several other smaller characters. A simple example is this word:

This is the character  Hǎo and it comprises two other basic characters:

The first character is Nǚ and means “woman”. The second character is Zi and means “child”. The combination of the two characters “woman and child” is Hǎo and means “good”. I think that’s quite delightful.

2018-10-12

The biggest holiday for most Chinese is Chinese New Year. It’s similar in stature to how Christmas is treated in most western countries. But the second most important is Golden Week.

This post could also be entitled:

Where did everyone in China disappear to this week?

Curiously Golden Week actually happens twice per year. Once is attached to Chinese New Year. The other one is associated with the National Day and that occurs on the 1st of October 1st. Up until 2007, there was a third Golden Week but that is now gone. It was replaced by an extra three public holidays at other times.

2018-10-05

Before learning a language like Mandarin, people might have heard that Chinese is a tonal language. But what does that mean exactly?

In Mandarin (as in many other languages), the way that a syllable is pronounced determines its meaning. Mandarin is typically regarded as having four tones, plus an additional neutral tone. The tones are numbered from 1 to 4. The first tone is a flat tone. The second tone is a rising. The third tone is a fall and a rise. The fourth tone is a fairly sharp drop.

2018-09-29

中秋节 (or Zhōng Qiū Jié) is the mid-autumn festival and it’s this weekend. (Mid-autumn in China -> Northern Hemisphere).

It’s also called the Moon Festival. In fact, it’s celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month. Similar to the way that the date for Easter moves around, the mid-autumn festival will normally end up some time in September or October each year.

For many Chinese, this is a time for family reunions. The round shape of the full moon symbolizes this.

2018-09-21

In earlier posts, I’ve talked about how many characters the Chinese written language has. Whether you are using simplified or traditional characters, you need to know about 2500 characters to be basically literate, yet there are tens of thousands of characters in total. So, given your keyboard doesn’t have that many characters (and you couldn’t navigate it if it did), how on earth do you enter thousands of different characters on a standard keyboard?

2018-09-15