Learning Mandarin with Greg

I’m following up on the promise I made in the my last Learning Mandarin post about the Qixi Festival. I said I’d talk about the legend behind it, and that’s the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl. (Awesome main image from qixifestival.com)

The Legend

Niulang was young and poor but he was kind-hearted. His biggest possession was an old ox. He’s the one referred to as the cowherd. (I always hear them say cowherd but that sounds odd to me. I think they should say cowherder. He’s not a herd !)

2020-05-01

After I posted recently about boyfriends (男朋友们 Nán péngyǒumen) and girlfriends (女朋友们 Nǚ péngyǒumen), someone asked me about Valentine’s Day in China.

It’s not a simple question to answer. More and more young Chinese do get involved with the Western Valentine’s Day (February 14th). Other Western festivals are also being adopted. Even though Chinese New Year is still the most important, many Chinese now celebrate Christmas (圣诞节 Shèngdàn jié).

Qīxì Festival

Traditionally, the equivalent of Valentine’s Day is 七夕节 (Qīxì jié) or the “Qīxì Festival”. It means “Evening of Sevens”.

2020-04-24

I mentioned in my last Mandarin post that over the years, I’ve found that you can learn a lot about a culture, based on which things the people in that culture think matter. I had a quiet chuckle when I saw the quiz in the main image above. In the previous post on this quiz, I covered the first four columns. If you didn’t read it, you can find it here. In today’s post, I’m covering the last two columns.

2020-04-17

I’ve found over the years that you can learn a lot about a culture, based on which things the people in that culture think matter. I had a quiet chuckle when I saw the quiz in the main image above.

The heading says:

你理想中的男／女朋友是什么样的？为什么？ (Nǐ lǐxiǎng zhōng de nán/nǚ péngyǒu shì shénme yàng de? Wèishéme?) which means “What is your ideal type of boy/girlfriend? Why?”

First Column (Easy)

The first column is likely obvious:

2020-04-10

I’ve found that one of the real challenges in learning Mandarin is understanding idioms. If you aren’t familiar with the term “idiom”, one dictionary defines it as “a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words”. In Mandarin, the word is 成语 (Chéngyǔ) which is literally “become” or “make”, then “language”. The term also applies to proverbs in some contexts.

2020-04-02

One of the things that really surprised me when I started learning Mandarin was that the punctuation currently used in Chinese was so familiar. I was wondering how long they’d used the punctuation.

By the way, the word for punctuation is 标点符号 (Biāodiǎn fúhào) which is literally pretty close to “mark, point, symbol, number”.

I spent 5 years learning Japanese many years ago and at the time, we learned to write it vertically, and of course that was from the Chinese doing the same. If you look at the following old writing though, you can see some punctuation:

2020-03-27

I recently wrote a short series on pinyin, starting with this previous post, and today I want to just mention one of the common exceptions, and that’s the silent letter i.

In the following words, the i sound is pretty much silent:

吃 (Chī) which means to eat 次 (Cì) which means a number of times or an order/sequence 日 (Rì) which means day 是 (Shì) which means is or yes 四 (Sì) which is the number four 字 (Zì) which means a word 只 (Zhǐ) which means only

2020-03-20

In a previous post, I described the basics of Pinyin, and mentioned that words are made up of Initials (starts of words) and Finals. There are only a predefined set of each. Then in my most recent Learning Mandarin post, I described the Initials (or starts of words). In today’s post, I want to look at Finals (or the ends of words).

a sounds like the a in mama ai sounds like eye an sounds like arn ang sounds like ung ao sounds like oww

2020-03-13

In a previous post, I described the basics of Pinyin, and mentioned that words are made up of Initials (starts of words) and Finals. There are only a predefined set of each.

What confuses many new learners is that while these look like our characters, they are often pronounced differently.

The character initials that are pretty much the same as ours are:

p, m, f, t, n, l, k, h, j, s, zh, sh, r

2020-03-06

When first learning Mandarin, there are two significant challenges. First is obviously learning a whole range of new words, but the second is learning to understand the large number of characters. Unlike English, where we basically use 26 letters from our alphabet, Chinese is estimated to have anywhere up to about 30,000 characters. Fortunately, only about 2,500 of those are in common daily use.

To avoid the challenge of learning both a new set of words, and a new set of writing at the same time, a common starting point is to use what’s called 拼音 (Pīnyīn). The first character basically means to spell, and the second character refers to sound.

2020-02-28