For over two millennia, the Sinosphere was united by a written language completely divorced from spoken speech—a "Latin of the…
Japanese scholars spent centuries using Classical Chinese as their formal written language, despite the two languages having completely incompatible grammar…
In Mandarin Chinese, you cannot simply say "three books"—grammatical rules force speakers to categorize the world through specific classifiers based…
Unlike its southern relatives such as Cantonese, standard Mandarin has completely lost the "entering tone" and the clipped final stops…
Mandarin chengyu (four-character idioms) act as "cultural zip files", compressing complex historical tales into compact phrases like "to draw a…
Confused why "Peking" became "Beijing", or why "Quran" is sometimes spelled "Koran"? It all comes down to the linguistic battle…
While Western dyslexia is primarily a phonological challenge involving sound-letter mapping, research shows that dyslexia in Chinese functions differently, impacting…
Ever wondered why you can't say "one rice" in English or "one bread" in Chinese? This post dives into the…
Is Chinese a language of "idea-pictures"? Not quite. This common misconception confuses ideograms, which are language-independent symbols for concepts, with…
While most of China uses Chinese characters, the Yi people of the southwest have their own unique writing system with…
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