Archive for May 2nd, 2008

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Children Chinese – Look for a friend

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

I search around
I find a friend
Let’s greet to each other
Let’s shake hands together
You are my good friend
Good-bye

 Topic: Greetings, Relationship

          GREETINGS

你好 nǐ hǎo Hello, how are you
再见 zài jiàn Good bye

Relationship
朋友 péng yǒu friend
好朋友 hǎo péng yǒu good friend
找朋友 zhǎo péng yǒu look for friend

 (Source: www.chinese4kids.net) 

Posted in Children Chinese, learn Chinese | No Comments »

China Travel – Haibao Tower

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

The Haibao Tower is located in the northwest of Yinchuan City — the capital city of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

 

 

The Haibao Tower is also called Hebao Tower, Heibao Tower or Northern Tower. It is said that the tower was rebuilt by the king of of Xixia Kingdom in the early fifth century, but the date when it was first built is unknown. Due to the damages resulted from earthquakes in the 51st year (1712) of the Kangxi reign and the 43rd year (1778) of the Qianlong reign in the Qing Dynasty, the tower had been repaired twice.

 

The Haibao Tower was built on a square brick base of 5.7 meters high, 19.2 meters wide and long respectively and surrounded by brick handrails. The main part of the tower is a storied building. Its brick base is square, 4.2 meters high and 14.4 meters wide. As for the walls, an entrance is located in the facade while false arch niches are in other three sides. The nine-storeyed tower is 44 meters high, including the tower top. The tower was built completely of bricks, and was bit by bit from lower storeys to higher ones. On the corners of each story there are iron bells. On each of the four sides of the storey there are doors with two false niches on both sides. Above the door and the false niches there is a 3-storeyed rhombus building. The structure of the tower features distinct gradation, strong and sharp edges and an unconventional style.

 

The tower top is a square spire in the shape of a peach. The spire is only glazed with green color and has no other appendages. Therefore, it looks unconventional. The inner part takes the shape of a cross, formed by connecting four brick objects in symmetry with four arches. The center of the cross is an empty square, contracting 15 to 20 centimeters upon each storey. The square is separated by the roughstring. The spiral stairs lead to the top of the stair.

 

(Source: chinaculture.org)

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Chinese Pinyin – Chinese Pinyin

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Pinyin, short for Hanyu Pinyin, which means “phonetic notation” or “phonetic symbols” while Pin means “spell(ing)” and Yin means “sound(s)”), is a system of romanization (phonemic notation and transcription to Roman script) for Standard Mandarin. Pinyin was approved in 1958 and adopted in 1979 by the government in the People’s Republic of China. It superseded older romanization systems such as Wade-Giles (1859; modified 1912) and Postal System Pinyin, and replaced zhuyin as the method of Chinese phonetic instruction in mainland China.

Since then, Pinyin has been accepted by the Government of Singapore, the Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and most international institutions as the preferred transcription system for Mandarin. In 1979 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted pinyin as the standard romanization for modern Chinese (ISO-7098:1991).

Pinyin is a romanization and not an anglicization; that is, it uses Roman letters to represent sounds in Standard Mandarin Chinese. The way these letters represent sounds in Standard Mandarin Chinese will differ from how other languages that use the Roman alphabet represent sound. For example, the sounds indicated in Pinyin by b and p are distinguished from each other (by aspiration) in a manner different from that of both English (which has voicing and aspiration) and of French (which has voicing alone). Other letters, like j, q, x or zh indicate sounds that do not correspond to any exact sound in English. Some of the transcriptions in Pinyin such as the ang ending, do not correspond to English pronunciations, either. Pinyin has also become a useful tool for entering Chinese language text into computers.

When learning Chinese Pinyin, you shall be aware of certain limitations:

  1.  
    1. Pinyin does not represent English pronunciation and should not be pronounced according to English conventions. You are advised to learn Pinyin phonetic conventions, bearing in mind that many sounds have no equivalents in Englishss.
    2. Since Pinyin is based only on the sounds of Mandarin Chinese, Pinyin is unsuitable for use for speakers of some other Chinese spoken dialects, because the sounds do not correspond to their speech.
    3. The phonotactics of spoken Mandarin Chinese dictate a relatively small set of possible syllables and there is a potential for homonyms. Because of this, Pinyin can be ambiguous, especially when transcribing Standard Written Chinese, which uses formal constructions not often found in speech. However, this should not be an issue in the transcription of normal spoken Mandarin conversation since speakers would not use such ambiguous constructions in speech.

 

               (Source: www.chineselearner.com)

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