Is there a “Chinese alphabet”? No. Chinese is written with characters (ζ±ε hΓ nzΓ¬), where each character stands for a syllable and a meaning, not a single sound. There are tens of thousands of them, and about 2,500 cover most everyday reading. What learners call the “Chinese alphabet” is usually pinyin: a system that spells Mandarin … Read more
How do we say βto beβ in Chinese? Without this most basic verb, we cannot really communicate: it is usually the very first verb we get to know when learning a new language. As it usually happens, there are many ways to express presence in Chinese, because it is an old language, very rich in … Read more
βWhyβ seems to be a very simple word, yet Chinese is such a complex language that it has many ways of saying it. The biggest difference here is between spoken and written Chinese. Since you have already started learning this language, you might have heard about it already: Chinese has a very rich formal language … Read more
When you have a conversation with Chinese people, you may find that the structures of the sentences they use are quite flexible. There are many kinds of structural relationships in modern Chinese sentences. A single word can form a sentence, in addition to the sentence composed of a single word, a specific sentence is always … Read more
