Learning Chinese
The Truth – A tale of 3 Characters
Chinese characters have been evolving for thousands of years, and even today there are some big differences in how they are used around the world. Taiwan and Hong Kong both use traditional characters, while Singapore and China are using the simplified versions. Japan adopted the traditional characters a long time back and is now using [...]
Chinese Words – Tone
If you’ve ever talked to someone about learning chinese, or what is difficult about learning chinese is that it’s a tonal language. That is you can say a word and depending on how you stress the begginning, middle or end it will have different meanings. This is indeed a frustrating thing about learning the language, [...]
Chinese Measure Words
So this is one of the first things that you start to learn after getting into chinese – “measure words.” It’s basically a classifier that you should add onto a lot of nouns.
Image courtesy of this article on chinese medicine
Personally, one of the main things I’ve noticed in 8 months of studying is how many [...]
Chinese for Indiana
This is a screen shot of a free chinese dictionary I got for my ipod. This picture shows the chinese translation for Indiana. If you see the pinyin below the characters, you can probably read it to realize it sounds almost the same Indiana does. The 4 characters mean:
Stamp / Seal
Place
Peace
There / That
Clearly no meaning [...]
Why I Study Chinese
Why I Study Chinese – 為什麼我學中文
如果你從英文的國, 學中文學的困難. 英文跟中文真的不一樣. 我是美國人, 我不學習別的文. 我只會說英文. 我學完了, 就做工作. 這年, 我六年做工作.
今天, 又網路又最聰明的電機. 如果你要知道什麼,
就找得到什麼. 所以, 我想介世越來越小. 電腦很好,
很有用. 不過工作越來越用電腦. 人常常上網,
不見面. 我覺得以後, 找到工作常常跟人見面越來越小. 我要跟人見面,
所以我覺得學中文很有用. 聽說以後, 人用中文很多. 也聽說二零五零年大陸的經濟跟美國一樣. 對我來說, 大陸大概有機會得不得了.
Photo credit: X Mei Associates
我決定在台灣學中文. 我選台灣因為台灣有:
1. 說中文
2. 對日本人好
3. 根日本用一樣的字
4. 台灣人喜歡美國人,
對我們好
5. 台灣又便宜又好玩
6. 我喜歡喝茶
Picture of Taiwan Flag. Photo Credit: Taiwan
Kleenex in Taiwan
I understood my first marketing tagline just the other day. Here in Taiwan toilet
paper and Kleenex are one and the same.
You buy big packs of them and you use them for just about everything in
your house. Also, you do not flush
toilet paper in Taiwan, so every
bathroom has a small trash can in it.
This is from [...]
Electronics Industry Terms
I was at the Taiwan TPCA tradeshow last week in Taipei, and started to look at the basic electronics terms. I took a quick picture of the show guide to show the characters as they were written on it.
All of the characters in the first line I’ve had to
learn for class individually, after less than [...]
