Culture Shock! China - A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette, 2nd Edition

‘Mandarin Chinese has a reputation for being a diffi cult language—some experts say it takes four times as long to learn as Span ...

Learning the Language 195 THE ORIGINS OF CHINESE Ah, the mysteries of the Orient! For many Westerners through much of history, t ...

196 CultureShock! China True fluency, especially in written Chinese, is rare among people not raised to it. Many have observed t ...

Learning the Language 197 Meanwhile spoken Chinese, especially at a basic survival level, may be far easier to learn than you th ...

198 CultureShock! China in Mandarin, though perhaps with a heavy accent. Still, it is worth being aware that dialects exist so y ...

Learning the Language 199 constitute some 92 per cent of China’s population. Some linguists have argued that some Chinese dialec ...

200 CultureShock! China pair a non-local who otherwise has the skills for the job with a speaker of the local dialect to assist ...

Learning the Language 201 Hanyu Pinyin, often called just Pinyin, is a relatively straightforward system, but like all forms of ...

202 CultureShock! China Pinyin Wade-Giles Equivalent English Phoneme H H ‘h’ as in ‘hot’ I (before ‘n’) I or ih ‘I’ as in ‘pin’ ...

Learning the Language 203 Pinyin Wade-Giles Equivalent English Phoneme Ui Uay or uai ‘way’ as in ‘way’ Uo Aw ‘aw’ as in ‘pshaw’ ...

204 CultureShock! China could wait there: “Keyi zher deng (3rd dipping tone) ma?”. At that point, consider body-language; it wil ...

Learning the Language 205 Chinese-Western relations. Businesspeople do at times find themselves speaking of the need to kowtow t ...

206 CultureShock! China Timing Tuesday li bai er Wednesday li bai san Thursday li bai si Friday li bai wu Saturday li bai liu Su ...

Learning the Language 207 For Further Learning There are many, many resources available today for native English-speakers seekin ...

208 CultureShock! China „ Excellent background readings on Chinese poetry, linguistics, etc. plus one of the best guides we’ve s ...

Learning the Language 209 Written Chinese: A ‘Pictographic’ History Written Chinese is one of the world’s oldest languages, perh ...

210 CultureShock! China and for the army of terra-cotta warriors who accompanied him to his grave). But by that time, characters ...

Learning the Language 211 The Complexity of Chinese Writing—the Learner’s Bane and Joy Eventually, these various sorts of combin ...

212 CultureShock! China existing characters in creative ways. For instance, the most common modern translation for ‘computer’ is ...

Learning the Language 213 called in English the ‘radicals’, form underlying components of most of the 50,000 plus characters in ...