This is the second in a series of posts where I’m looking at how the Chinese view numbers, often from a superstitious basis. One The Chinese character for one (Yī) is shown on the right hand side of the main image above. It’s a single line (probably originally a stick). Sometimes when it’s written on bank notes, checks (cheques), etc. it’s often written as a different character: 壹 That’s to avoid fraudulent changes, which you can imagine it would be easy to make for a character that’s just a single line.

2019-07-26

One thing that always fascinates me about Chinese culture, and probably about most Asian cultures, is the endless belief in luck, both good and bad. I have to admit that nowadays I have little time for any form of superstition. I think it’s just a throwback to periods where we just understood far less about the world. I think you make your own luck, again both good and bad. In Chinese culture though, numbers are especially significant.

2019-07-19

If Asian character sets are new to you, you might wonder if Japanese and Chinese characters are the same or similar. Japanese has a number of character sets: Hirogana is the simplest set of characters. There is a single character for each basic sound in the language. For example in the name Hirogana itself, there are 4 characters: Hi, ro, ga, and na. Every word can be made up of these characters.

2019-07-12

In a previous post, I mentioned that radicals (characters within characters) can help you to recognize characters in Chinese. A simple example is that if I type “ma” into my pin-yin editor, I see this: The third character is the word for a horse. (Notice that it now even returns an emoticon for a horse in this editor as the fifth character -> how cute). If you look at the fourth character, you can see the horse on the right, but another symbol on the left.

2019-07-05

I get a lot of questions from people about how anyone ever learns so many Chinese characters. There are about 30,000 of them but, like in English, most people use a much smaller subset of them. I’ve often heard 2,500 mentioned as a good level, and enough to read most newspaper articles, etc. One trick with learning the characters is to learn about radicals. In many cases, recognizing the radicals will help you to recognize the characters.

2019-06-28

In English, we have a number of words that are spelled the same way but sound different and have different meanings. These are called heteronyms. They shouldn’t be confused with homographs which are words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, and homophones that are words that sound alike, have different meanings, and different spellings. A common example of a heteronym is the word lead. I can lead someone to pick up a piece of lead.

2019-06-21

I’ve mentioned lately that I’ve read a few Mandarin Companion books. I’ve just finished another one of these graded readers written in simplified Chinese. It was The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (Author), Renjun Yang (Editor), Cui Yu (Editor), John Pasden (Editor), Jared Turner (Introduction). It’s an adaptation of a classic tale. In this version, a young girl who isn’t happy with her life (her parents don’t seem to care for her), gets up one day to find they and their friends who had been visiting are all dead from a mystery illness.

2019-06-20

There are very few countries in the world now that do not use the metric system. Last I looked it was three: the USA, Liberia, and Myanmar. China is regarded as a metric country. Over the years, they’ve had a number of standards of measurement. Big shakeups occurred in 1915, 1930, and again in 1959. Regarding weight, Chinese do have grams and kilograms. 公克 (Gōngkè) is the formal word for “gram”.

2019-06-14

In a previous post, I mentioned how much I liked the “Mandarin Companion” series of books. They are written in graded levels of Chinese. I’ve recently read another book in this series: The Monkey’s Paw. This is a classic tale that’s based around the concept of “be careful of what you wish for”. It’s the tale of a family (mother and father and their adult son). The son is a factory worker.

2019-06-13

If you’ve heard about Chinese currency at all, you might have also heard it called several different names. That’s not surprising as we do the same with our money. While I might talk about the dollar (Australian, US, or other), and I might say “that’s 10 dollars”, I’m more likely to say “that’s ten bucks”. The same happens with Chinese currency, with the added complication that it has both Chinese names, and names that are used when referring to it in English.

2019-06-07