Category: Chinese (中文)

How many speak Mandarin?

By Simon

Whenever Mandarin or Chinese are mentioned in the news reports and other articles – something that seems to be happening frequently recently – the number of speakers is often mentioned and is usually given as over one billion. The assumption that the vast majority of people in China speak Mandarin is very common both outside and inside China.

According to a survey undertaken by the Xinhua news agency however, ‘only’ half of the population of China, some 690 million people, actually do speak Mandarin. Urban dwellers are more likely to be Mandarin speakers than those who live in rural areas, and while approximately three quarters of those under 30 speak the language, only a third of those over 60 do.

Other varieties of Chinese (dialects/regionalects/topolects/Sinitic languages) are spoken by 86% of the population, which suggests that many people are bilingual in their local ‘dialect(s)’ and Mandarin. Non-Chinese languages are spoken by about 5% of population who belong to China’s 55 officially recognised ‘National Minorities’.

The other main concentrations of Mandarin speakers are in Taiwan, where about 20 million – the majority of the population – speak the language, and in Singapore, where about 1.5 million speak Mandarin, and the government is attempting to encourage more to do so. There’s another million or so speakers of Mandarin in Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Thailand and Mongolia, according to Ethnologue, and about 175,00 in the USA, according to the MLA.

That gives us a total of 712,675,000 speakers of Mandarin. A huge number, but not quite a billion.

Fluenz

By Simon

The other day I stumbled on an interesting new language course called Fluenz. At the moment it’s only available for Mandarin Chinese, but a Spanish version is planned.

The course comes on a DVD-ROM and consists about 110 hours of interactive and video instruction. An American instructor, who studied Mandarin in China, explains everything in English on the videos. There are many different exercises, a glossary, and online live support is available.

The emphasis is on teaching you to communicate in Mandarin, so everyday, immediately useful language is used, and words are all written in pinyin romanization. Also included is an audio CD containing audio exercises that compliment the DVD lessons, and a booklet with all the phrases used in English, pinyin and Chinese characters.

A free demo of the course (quite a large file) is available for download on the Fluenz website

Web resources

By Simon

Here are a few online language-related resources that I came across recently:

– A series of videos on YouTube showing how Chinese characters have developed from the original pictures:

– esPodkasto – la podkasto en esperanto (Esperanto podcast)

– Lojban Radio – an introduction to this logical language (in Lojban and English)

– Hour of Babble – podcasts about constructed languages (conlangs)

– Eddie Izzard on learning French

Linguistic adventures in Cuba

By Simon

My linguistic adventures started on the flight out to Cuba, during which I was sitting next to an electrician from Germany. I tried speaking a bit of German with him, but he seemed to prefer using English, which he spoke very well. I also tried out my Spanish on the cabin staff and did my best to understand the announcements in Spanish.

When in Cuba I used my Spanish as much as possible. Some of the people I encountered didn’t speak English, so I had to speak to them in Spanish and was able to communicate fairly well. Other people spoke English and some preferred to practise their English with me rather than to speak Spanish. One feature of Cuban Spanish I noticed was a tendency to drop esses, particularly at the ends of words. For example, they say buena dia rather than buenas dias, and ecuela rather than escuela.

I met some Germans and Austrians and was able to converse with them in German, though I kept on having to use English words when I couldn’t remember the German ones. Not bad considering I haven’t used my German much since leaving school many years ago.

One member of the group was Chinese and I spoke some Mandarin with her. Another member of the group was an Irish speaker and I spoke some Irish with her, though she found it a little difficult to understand me as I speak Donegal Irish, while she speaks Munster Irish. The differences between these dialects are not huge, but they take some getting used to.

Lusophilia

By Simon

I came across an interesting report in the New York Times today in which they talk about the recent opening of The Museum of the Portuguese Language (Museu da Língua Portuguesa) in São Paulo, Brazil. The objective of the museum is to create a living representation of the Portuguese language, where visitors may be surprised and educated by unusual and unfamiliar aspects of their own native language. The report also mentions that inspite of having more native speakers than French, German, Italian or Japanese, the Portuguese language is often overlooked by the rest of the world.

On a related matter, I’ve noticed that quite a few of the Brazilians I know think their version of Portuguese is inferior to the Portuguese spoken in Portugal. This quite surprised me as I personally prefer the sounds of Brazilian Portuguese, and it was the singing of Astrud Gilberto on a Stan Getz album that first attracted me to the language.

In case you’re wondering, lusophilia is the love of Portugal or the Portuguese language. The Luso- part comes from the Roman province of Lusitania, which occupied the same area as modern Portugal and part of Spain.

Pimsleur – a review

By Simon

I have now listened to all 10 lessons of my Pimsleur Czech course, most of them several times. I’ve a long way to go before I can speak Czech, but I do know quite a few useful words and phrases now, and I am beginning to acquire a feeling for the structure of the language. I also know how to pronounce words, though some of the consonant clusters are tricky. When I listen to Radio Prague or my Czech friends talking, I can get a basic idea of what they’re on about.

Before I started the course, I’d read many reviews of Pimsleur courses, many positive, some negative, so I had an idea of what I was letting myself in for. I now think that Pimsleur courses can give you a good foundation in a language, which you can build on with other courses. They are particularly good for languages unlike any of the ones you already know.

Next week I’m going to start on Colloquial Czech – I had a quick look at it yesterday and found that I could understand quite a lot of the stuff in the first lesson, which is encouraging.

The northern capital

By Simon

Beijing in Chinese

The capital of the People’s Republic of China used to be known as Peking in English and many other languages. Since 1949 it’s been known as Beijing, which is often mispronounced: the J in jing is not pronounced /ʒ/ (/Z/) as in pleasure, but more like jing, as in jingle.

Or if you want to be strictly accurate, Beijing is pronounced /pei˨˩˦ tɕɪŋ˥˥/ (/pei_\_/ ts\iN_H/), the first syllable has a rising tone, and the second has a high level tone. Where the /ʒ/ (/Z/) pronunciation for the J comes from is a mystery to me. Any ideas anyone?

Peking is the Postal System Pinyin version of Beijing. Postal System Pinyin was introduced in Shanghai in 1906 and was based on a romanization system developed by French missionaries 400 years earlier when the Chinese word for capital, 京, was pronounced /kʲiŋ/ (/k’iN/).

The literal meaning of Peking/Beijing is ‘Northern Capital’. There is also a Southern Capital, Nanjing (南京), and an Eastern Capital, Tōkyō (東京), which is Dongjing in Chinese. There is no Xijing (西京) or Eastern Capital though.

Between 1928 and 1949, Beijing was known as Beiping (北平) ‘Northern Peace’ in China because Nanjing was the capital for the Kuomintang government.

Another alternative name for Beijing is Yanjing (燕京), which refers to the State of Yan that existed during the Zhou dynasty (1022 – 256 BC).

Word of the day – 闋 (què)

By Simon

闋 (què) – to close or shut the door after finishing something; to be at rest; to end; the expiry of a period of mourning; a numerical adjunct for songs; empty, blank

In addition to all the above meanings, this character is also used as a measure word (量詞 [量词] liàngcí) for words (詞 [词] cí) and indeed measure words themselves. Measure words or classifiers are used when counting things in Chinese, and also in Japanese, Thai and a number of other languages of East Asia. In English we have a few measure words, such as a box of matches, a sheet of paper, a pint of milk, a can of worms, etc. In Chinese there are about 150 such words and they have to be used when you add a number to a noun.

You can’t just say, for example, two tables, or three letters, instead you have to add a measure word between the number and the noun – for tables the measure word is 張 [张] (zhāng), which means sheet and is used for flat objects (paper, tables, etc.), faces, bows, paintings, tickets and constellations, e.g. 兩張桌子 (liǎng zhāng zhuòzi) – two tables. For letters the measure word is 封 (fēng), e.g. 三封信 (sān fēng xìn) – three letters (the kind you put in an envelope).

Fortunately there is a default measure word 個 [个] (ge) which you can use if you can’t remember the correct one.

Traditional v Simplified Characters (繁體或简体)

By Simon

This morning not long after I switched on my computer two people were wanting to chat to me on MSN messenger, one from China and one from Taiwan. I had to keep on changing from writing in simplified to traditional characters but occasionally forgot, much to their confusion. At the same time I was also writing email in English – multitaskingtastic! (now that’s a bit of a tonguetwister) I use pinyin input for both types of characters, so it’s easy for me switch between them.

This got me thinking about whether those familiar with simplified characters and read traditional characters, and vice versa. My impression is that it’s easier for traditional character users to read simplified characters than the other way round, but I may be wrong.

Which do you prefer, traditional of simplified characters? I can read and write both kinds and prefer the traditional ones. The traditional characters just look more elegant to me and preserve the semantic and phonetic clues that have been lost in many of the simplified characters.

如果你是用简体字的，你会不会看得懂繁体字？你觉得哪一种字比较好看？

如果你使用繁體子的，你會不會看得懂簡體字？你覺得哪一種字比較好看？

Word of the day – 崎 (qí)

By Simon

崎 (qí), noun = the banks of a winding river

This is an example of one of the very specific words in Chinese. I doubt if it’s used very often, but the fact that you pack so much meaning into a single syllable is quite impressive.

Pronounced with the first tone and combined with 嶇 (qū), this character means rugged, uneven or rough, e.g. 這條小徑崎嶇而多泥 (zhè tiáo xiǎojīng qīqū ér duō ní) – This path is rugged and muddy.