For example, 小人 means “child” in Japanese but “villain” in Chinese! In short…Īs our world becomes increasingly globalized, intralinguistic influence continues on and some languages are exerting greater and greater influences on others. In fact, lots of Chinese characters are similar to Japanese Kanji, but the meanings are not always interchangeable. When it comes to pronunciation, though, in Chinese it’s ‘ri’ and in Japanese it’s ‘nichi.’ Same for quite a few characters: same meaning but different pronunciation. For example, 日 means ‘day’ in both Chinese and Japanese. We might not teach hiragana or katakana, but Kanji is very similar to written Chinese. But you will have to supplement your character ‘word bank’ with other characters which are not commonly used in Mandarin yet are frequently used in Cantonese. Sometimes, people ask us if they can use Chineasy to learn Cantonese, and the answer is yes, because all the characters we teach (for Mandarin) are also used in Cantonese. However, we only teach Mandarin pronunciation. And, happily, since the characters are the same across dialects, you can apply a lot of what you learn with Chineasy–especially your knowledge of Chinese characters–to all Chinese dialects. Can I use Chineasy to learn Cantonese?Īt Chineasy, we want to help you develop a deeper understanding of Chinese. For example, the top ten most frequently used Chinese characters are identical in their simplified and traditional forms. It’s good to understand that these two written forms overlap to a considerable extent. In People’s Republic of China and Singapore, the official written system is simplified Chinese while in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, the traditional Chinese characters are mainly used. For your convenience, Chineasy teaches both! One of the tricky aspects is the characters, for which there are actually two different forms: traditional and simplified. Here at Chineasy, we mainly teach Mandarin Chinese. At its root, Chinese is, of course, a tonal language, but its dialects have different numbers of tones! For example, Mandarin has four and Cantonese has six, but Taiwanese has seven! Each dialect also has its own sentence structure. One big difference between dialects is tones. The most populous dialects is Mandarin (800 millions speakers), Min (75 millions), Wu (74 million and Shanghainese for example) and Yue (68 million and Cantonese for instance.) Chinese dialects, on the other hand, aren’t mutually intelligible. If you speak French or Italian…or even Spanish or Portuguese… you can probably understand a little bit of the others. Well, they’re very different! They’re not like the Romance Languages. How different is one Chinese dialect from another? Since there are more than 1.3 billion people in the world WHO speak ‘Chinese’, even a small Chinese dialect could have millions of speakers. The two best-known and most WIDELY spoken (ones) are Mandarin and Cantonese. There are more than two hundred variants of spoken Chinese, or simply, 200 Chinese dialects. Chinese is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan Language Family, together with Burmese, Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif. ‘Chinese’ is a collection of languages, some people call them dialects.
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