Tag: Pronunciation

Chinese Kung Fu 中国功夫 – Chinese Qigong

On a very elemental level, qigong is a form of meditation. The most disciplined masters of qigong stress its meditational aspect more than the exercise and breathing components that are usually associated with it. As a form of meditation, qigong is focused on harnessing the primordial force of qi (chi), which, it is claimed, every normally-functioning human being is capable of communicating with. "Qigong" is composed of two characters: "qi" (sometimes written as "chi" as an aid to pronunciation, but think instead of "chee" as in "cheese") and "gong" (sometimes written as "kung" as an aid to pronunciation, but "gung" so it rhymes with "jung" – as in Carl Jung the psychiatrist and contemporary of Sigmund Freud – i.e., with more of a "g" sound than a "k" sound, is probably easier for Westerners to get their sound pipes around). "Qi" means air, or breath, but it is more like the breath that God "breathed" into Adam than the air one draws in and exhales, i.e., a life-giving force, or "energy". "Gong" means effort applied in a disciplined manner, or "work", so "qigong" means "energy work".

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Classification of Chinese Dialects

Chinese consists of a number of dialect continuums. Variations in speech usually become far more pronounced as distances boost, with handful of radical breaks. Nonetheless, the degree of change in intelligibility varies immensely based on region. For instance, the varieties of Mandarin spoken in all three northeastern Chinese provinces are mutually intelligible, but in the province of Fujian, wher the use of the Min range is dominant, the same selecion has to become divided into no less than five distinct subdivisions because the subdivisions are all mutually unintelligible to one anther.
In the book, "The Middle kingdom: a survey of the … Chinese empire and its inhabitants …", published in 1848, the different varieties of Chinese had been described as "dialects", the book acknowledged that they were mutually unintelligible as well as the term "dialect" was utilized in a distinct sense than the western term, in which a dialect was merely indicative of a little distinction in pronunciation, while in China, the entire grammar and idiom had been distinct, the written language was what united the different Chinese dialects. The distinction between Mandarin and other Chinese "dialects" is simply comparable to that between English and its Germanic cousin languages (German, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, and so on.)
Mandarin (Common Chinese) is the dominant selection, far more widely studied than the rest. Outdoors of China, the only two varieties generally presented in formal courses are Mandarin and Cantonese. In China, second-language acquisition is normally achieved by means of immersion in the neighborhood language.

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