Langnuage

Mandarin & Dialects

   Mandarin Finger Alphabet      Mandarin has Beijing pronunciation as its standard pronunciation, northern dialect as its basic dialect, and the typical modern vernacular Chinesea as its grammatical standard. Mandarin offers convenience for communication between people at different areas or of different ethnic groups in China.  　　China has a vast

Irving dual-language students adding Mandarin as a

   Melissa Reyna (center) and Johanna Sanchez are among the Brandenburg Elementary students learning Mandarin. Not content with becoming merely bilingual, some Irving schoolchildren are aiming for trilingual. Students in Brandenburg Elementary School's dual-language program learn half the time in Spanish and half in English. Now some students are also taking free

Beijing, Taipei team up for cultural exchanges

    The Palace Museum in Beijing and the Palace Museum in Taipei have joined hands for cultural exchanges. Recently, the curators of the museum met in Beijing discussing the details.     The curators agreed that both sides will meet for a cultural seminar on an annual basis. They say they will do their best to provide audio and video materials for

Learn Chinese in Bettendorf, U.S. starting Oct. 28

Mandarin Chinese community classes begin week of Oct. 27 The Confucius Institute at the University of Iowa is offering beginning Mandarin Chinese community classes in the Quad Cities and Iowa City. Classes begin in Bettendorf Tuesday, Oct. 28 at Rivermont Collegiate High School, 1821 Sunset Drive. Level one and two classes will meet from 6:30 to 8 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays through Dec.

Chinese is easier to learn than students expect

    Chinese Lecturer Len McClure never thought that he would be teaching Chinese. Beginning as a radio-television-film adjunct, he heard that the foreign languages department was looking for a Chinese teacher. Because he had lived in Asia for 23 years, he applied for the job.     "They put me through a rigorous test with a native speaker, and I passed," McClure

Brockton schools set Chinese curriculum

Brockton schools began teaching Chinese only three years ago, but the growing effort already boasts more students than the district’s longstanding French program. “We have to have a curriculum that reflects the needs of kids in the 21st century,?said superintendent Basan Nembirkow, explaining the emphasis on the language. The new school year brought visiting teachers Hou Tian, Zou Renli and Li

Study mandarin:Chinese language courses having an

At 8 years old, Spartanburg Day School student Sage Kuhens is speaking and writing Chinese. She knows how to introduce herself in Chinese and how to talk about her family, including her dog. She may not understand it all, yet, but after only a year and a half of instruction, Sage is off to a good start. It's a skill her parents believe is crucial if she wants to one day become a business

Exchange Currency

    dì yī kè huàn qián 第一?nbsp; 换钱 Lesson One  Exchange Currency     mài kè: Láo jià, wŏ xiăng bă měi yuán huàn chéng Rénmínbì. 麦克? 劳驾，我想把美元换成人民币? Mike: Excuse me, I’d like to exchange some US dollars for Renminbi.

China issues first Chinese language proficiency

  BEIJING, Dec. 12  -- China's top language promotion institute issued the first Chinese language proficiency benchmarks for foreigners here on Wednesday.     The Chinese Language Proficiency Scales for Speakers of Other Languages is the first reference standard to assess the fluency of foreign learners of Chinese.     The system features

Bilingual education

Bilingual education is now common in Taiwan as a way of reversing the previous neglect of Chinese dialects other than the national language. Although the mainland central government acknowledges the importance of local dialects they are several steps behind bilingual education due to the continuing efforts to establish putonghua as the national language

Putonghua and Guoyu

Differences between Putonghua and Guoyu Obviously, there are some slight deviations between the Mandarin variants spoken in Beijing, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong SAR. These include deviations in grammar, vocabulary, stylistic aspects, and loan words. For example, there is a 23% discrepancy in standard pronunciation between the 3,500 most commonly used characters in the 'Xinhua zidian' of

Phonetic spelling

After several previous attempts to write Chinese using the letters of the roman alphabet, pinyin, a 58-symbol writing system was finally adopted in 1958. Some strange and unnatural sounds for the x's, q's, and zh's reflect the graphic choices of Russian linguists. Its main aims are to facilitate the spread of putonghua, and the learning of Chinese characters. In the 1970s a new map of China was

The national language

The need to establish an official national language was felt as early as the 17th century when the Ch'ing dynasty established a number of "correct pronunciation institutes" to teach standard Peking pronunciation, particularly in the Cantonese and Fukienese-speaking southern provinces. The success of these schools, however, was extremely limited. The concept of a national language coalesced around

Chinese language group members

Chinese has seven major language groups of which the Mandarin language group forms the largest group. The Mandarin group consists of a wide range of dialects in the northern, central, and western regions. The Cantonese dialects are spoken in Hong Kong, Guangdong, Southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, parts of Hainan, Macau, and in many overseas settlements. The Hakka (Kejia) languages are

Language versus dialects

Spoken Chinese comprises many regional variants, generally referred to as dialects. However, the mutual unintelligibility of the subvarieties is the main ground for classifying them as separate languages or dialect groups. Each dialect group consists of a large number of dialects, many of which may themselves be referred to as languages. The boundaries between one so-called language and the next

General linguistic characteristics

Chinese, together with Tibetan and Myanmar (formerly known as Burmese) and the many tribal languages of South and Southeast Asia, belongs to the family of Sino-Tibetan languages. Besides a core vocabulary and sounds, Chinese and most related languages share features that distinguish them from most Western languages: they are monosyllabic, have little inflection, and are tonal. In order to