“Should I learn to speak Mandarin or Chinese?” You may ask. Well, this depends on how you define the Chinese language. If you are talking about learning the official spoken Chinese, then you should learn Mandarin. In this case, Mandarin IS Chinese.
It is clearly black and white in Chinese.
I am talking about the Chinese characters here. Look at the two characters below, which do you think means black, and which means white?
白 黑
It is difficult to get confused. The character on the left means white, and the one on the right means black.
This shows how [...]
Learn to appreciate Chinese characters like pictures, and you’ll get to learn the language quicker. Although you cannot guess the sound of a Chinese word by looking at its character, you can often guess the meaning.
Look at the Chinese character below, and guess what it means.
Well, do the two pairs of dots look like rain drops — outside the window?
Indeed, this is the Chinese character for rain.
By seeing Chinese characters as pictures, you will learn many of them fast.
A secret to speed up your learning of Chinese is to find out the sounds that are uniquely Chinese.
The phonetic system of the Chinese language is very different from that of English. For example, the pinyin (Chinese phonetic symbols) ‘women’ is not pronounced as the way we pronounce ‘women’ in English. You can hear the [...]