Mandarin
Colloquial designations of Kangxi radicals
Sorting and indexing English words or those of other languages with roman alphabet is pretty easy, as letters are ordered from A to Z. Chinese characters are much more difficult to handle, as setting up a distinct order for each and every character fails due to the sheer number of characters - there's even no distinguishable upper limit.
Bo, po and duo, tuo
Submitted by Christoph on 24 July, 2009 - 09:09Pinyin doesn't always specify finals in a straightforward way. For example it is difficult to see that wei and dui have the same final -uei, the former substituting u for semi-vowel w, the latter omitting the e. In Views on initials and finals of Mandarin in Pinyin I've tried to show those peculiarities by grouping forms under their actual final, not just their spelling. What I didn't do was merging columns -o (bo, po, mo, fo) and -uo (duo, tuo, ...).
A survey on German learners of Chinese
Submitted by Christoph on 17 July, 2009 - 16:18We did a short survey on German beginners of Mandarin where we asked 30 people what problems they face, what they use for learning, and what they think is missing. Most of the 30 people are students and none of them have a family background in China. On average they already studied 7 months of Chinese while learning 1.8 days a week.
Tones in Chinese songs
Submitted by Christoph on 16 October, 2008 - 13:21Are tones used in songs of Mandarin and Cantonese?
Both are tonal languages which means that the meaning of a single syllable/word depends on the pitch it is spoken with.
Non-standard Mandarin (Taipei)
Submitted by Christoph on 10 October, 2008 - 11:53Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) is spoken by many people and in fact is the language with the most native speakers. There are then many people who acquire it as a second language increasing the number of speakers further. In a lot of places people will furthermore speak a local variant of Mandarin (e.g. in Sichuan).
