Tag: Pronunciation

The Most Strange & Hardest Characters Of All Time

HK Newspaper Mingpao News (明报) found the 23 hardest Chinese characters selected from Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典, the chinese dictionary edited in Qing dynasty). Few Chinese have seen these characters, including pronunciation and meaning. 香港明报报道,网友在网上组织的一个“最难汉字”评选活动中选出20多个长相奇特的汉字,一般人看了,个个都摸不着头脑。

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5 Mistakes I made when I started learning Chinese

I’ve been studying Mandarin at University for about two years and 3 months. The mistakes I made, might not be mine particularly, but perhaps the way our course is structured. However, these mistakes can be applied to anyone starting to learn Mandarin. These “mistakes” are not necessarily bad, but it’s part of  my current shortcomings in Mandarin that I still struggle with. Perhaps you can learn from me and try to fill those gaps earlier on.

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A guide to Pinyin traps and pitfalls: Learn Mandarin pronunciation

Learning to pronounce Chinese properly comes with a number of challenges, some of which all learners of foreign languages encounter. In general, we need to learn two things. First, we have to learn how to pronounce and distinguish sounds that don’t exist in our own language. It is only natural that we find this difficult sometimes. We also need to understand tones and intonation, both being quite different in Chinese and English. With practise and a good teacher, these challenges can be overcome.

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A Brief introduction of Chinese Phonetics

The official name of Chinese phonetic system is Pinyin which means "spelled sound" in Chinese. The Pinyin system transcribe Chinese characters into Latin script with 25 letters(the letter "V" is not used). It was developed in the 1950s and published by the Chinese government in 1958. The system was adopted as the official standard in Taiwan in 2009, where it is generally referred to as the New Phonetic System.

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