Tag: mandarin chinese

Chinese Pronunciation The Four Tones of Chinese

When talking about the differences between English and Chinese, the four tones of Chinese may be the most distinguish characteristic. The four tones of Mandarin are basic facets of the language for everybody learning the best way to speak Chinese. Mandarin Chinese, like most other Chinese dialects, is a tonal language, Which means that tones, like consonants and vowels, are used to distinguish words from one another. Mastering the tone of each character is challenging for many foreigners learning Chinese, but correct tonal pronunciation is vital for intelligibility because of the huge quantity of words in the language that only differ by tone (i.e. are minimal pairs with respect to tone). The following would be the four tones of Normal Mandarin.

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Chinese Kung Fu 中国功夫 – The Mechanics of Wing Chun Weapons Forms

Weapons Forms (Bingqi Taolu [兵器套路]) are only introduced once the aspiring WCKF fighter is proficient in the other forms, for the obvious reasons. The aspirant is expected to be able to use a weapon as if it were a natural extension of the hand. That is, at all times, the aspiring WCKF fighter must know where the contours of the knife are situated, down to the millimeter, in much the same way that a first-class driver of an automobile knows, down to at least the centimeter, the countours of his automobile (many Europeans make poor drivers in this regard because they first learn to drive as an adult and thus never learn to "feel" the automobile as an extension of the body, whereas American drivers begin at the tender age of 16… the same concept applies to learning almost any sport, from skating to skiing to learning how to ride a bicycle or a motorcycle, and where the "instrument" in question becomes an extension of the body, for good or for worse – for good if one learns at an early age; for worse if one learns it later in life).

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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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