hello guys. how are you? wish everything is going well with you.
In response to Estanis's question about the pronunciation of chinese, i am writhing this to share some more details with you. Chinese has an alphabet similar to english, but the pronunciation of some letters is different. However, these english letters are only used for showing its pronunciation, but not writing.
For example, we write 你好（hello）only, but not "nihao" (你好) because “nihao ” can mean many different chinese characters. "ni"=你拟尼泥妮呢 etc, hao=好号浩耗昊etc. but nihao is so common used that we can recognize it as hello.
here is a copy of my handwriting chinese. i copied an ancient chinese poem, a romantic one written by Li Bai 李白， during the period 701-762 in Tang Dynasty. It described a love story, where a girl and a boy grwp up with each other, fell in love and married each other at about 14. However, the boy was recruited to fight for country so she had to wait for him at home for long long time.
anyway my handwriting is not so pretty, but i do think that ancient poems deserve thousand times of handwriting, but not typing. and if you are interested , reading them can be a great fun and romantic thing. I have also attached a voice file for this poem, and yeah i recorded it, haha. if you are interested , just try and listen to it then tell me how do you fell about that.
thanks for your attention.
长歌行 李白
妾发初覆额，折花门前剧。郎骑竹马来，绕床弄青梅。
同居长干里，两小无嫌猜。十四为君妇，羞颜未尝开。
………………
Replies
Hi friends,
Perhaps my question doesn't relevant to this discussion, but I like to know how long it takes for Chinese students to learn to read and write Chinese, One of my friends who studied Chinese says that Chinese writing is very difficult.
hi, saba. thanks for your comment.
here chinese students begin to learn chinese in kindergarten; besides here everybody speak chinese, though we also speak dialects, it can be said that we have a chinese environment. So mostly students begin to speak chinese fluently at 8-10 years old, that is, it takes 4-5 years for chinese to learn chinese.
as for your friend, does she come to china and learn chinese or not? if yes, things may be easier with chinese spoken environment; if not, it can be much more difficult espcially if she doesn't even have a chinese native speaker as teacher.
have a nice day
Hi all,
I am a Japanese. We too use Chinese characters. But each pronunciation of characters is totally different between Chinese and Japanese.
For example, hao=好号浩耗昊 in Chinese to kou=好浩昊, gou=号, mou=耗 in Japanese.
But the meanings of characters are almost same. So I can understand about half of this Li Bai's poem in some way.
Some characters in the poem are written in simplified Chinese character, which is not used in Japanese. If they are written in traditional Chinese character, I could understand little more:D
ありがとうございました！thank you, Matano.
that is because japanese, korean and chinese share the same origin from ancient china. but korean has totally abolished all the chinese characters and created nowaday korean.
simplified chinese characters are only used in mainland of china, excluding hong kong, macao, and taiwan. they are still using complexformed chinese characters. for that poem in complexformed chinese ,
妾發初覆額，折花門前劇。郎騎竹馬來，繞床弄青梅。同居長幹裡，兩小無嫌猜。十四為君婦，羞顏未嘗開。低頭向暗壁，千喚不一回。十五始展眉，願同塵與灰。常存抱柱信，豈上望夫臺。十六君遠行，瞿塘灩頂堆。五月不可觸，猿聲天上哀。門前遲行跡，一一生綠苔。苔深不能掃，落葉秋風早。八月蝴蝶黃，雙飛西園草。感此傷妾心，坐愁紅顏老。早晚下三巴，預將書報家。相迎不道遠，直至長風沙。
have a nice day/ evening guys.
Thank you for the comlexformed Chinese version!
I just found out a website where the poem was translated to Japanse.
http://blog.livedoor.jp/kanbuniinkai10/archives/66471203.html
thank you very much, Matano.
that site is very interesting and helpful for my japanese study. haha
have a nice day.
That's why I can't distinguish a Japanese and Chinese writing however I think I can do it when they speak.
I reckon is like when I read a Portuguese or Italian writing, I understand about half since bouth languages come from latin.
Hi Estanis,
Thank you for your reply!
As Wing wrote, the Japanese in ancient times (about AD.300) imported Chinese characters from China, and started to use them. After that, the Japanese built their own grammar and characters, namely, Hiragana and Katakana. (I think that Japanese is still changing now as well as other languages.)
To completely understand the poem in Japanese, we have to translate it to this:
妾發初覆額、折花門前劇。 (Chinese)
私の髪がやっと額を覆うようになってきた頃、私は花を摘んで門前のあたりで遊んでいました。 (Japanese)
郎騎竹馬來、繞床弄青梅。 (Chinese)
あなたは竹馬に乗ってやってきて、寝床のまわりを回っては青い梅の実をもてあそびました。 (Japanese)
So, the outstanding difference between a Chinese and Japanese writing is whether it has Hiragana or not. (or it is short or lengthy, hahaha!)
hello, Estanis. Since i am from Guangdong, my mother tongue is Cantonese, whose pronunciation is totally different from madanrin(chinese). So when i started learning chinese in kindergarten, i started with that alphabet (here we call it pinyin) for spelling. And we begin learnoing english at 9 or 10 years old ,so i have been learning it for more than 10 years. >_<
chinese has also changed with time, but not so much after 1912. Can you see this link, a video about the changes of "horse马" in chinese? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDRGPaWufWc
as for my recording, how about this one?can you hear it? but it is pretty low voice. have a nice day.
voice_4653.mp3
Btw, thanks for your interesting link although I can't hear neither your voice but don't worry, there's must be something wrong with my ipad.
I'm enjoying with your group :)
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