Tag: Chinese

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C is for Chinese

C is forChinese is like Arabic in that it is an umbrella term for several mutually unintelligible dialects. If all of these dialects are included, there are over 1 billion speakers of Chinese. The two most well-known dialects to people in the UK are Mandarin and Cantonese. Mandarin is the official language of China, Singapore and Taiwan; Cantonese is the official language of Hong Kong and Macau, although Mandarin is also an influential language here and is taught in schools. Mandarin is the language that people learn when they study Chinese as a foreign language.

The spoken language is tonal (ie the voice has to go up or down). Mandarin has four tones: up, down, up-down and flat. Some of the other dialects have many more tones. This is one of the reasons why Chinese is seen to be one of the more difficult languages to learn, because getting the tone wrong can change the meaning of the word! Most words are monosyllabic but there are some compound words.

There are two writing systems, traditional and simplified, which are written left to right. Traditional, obviously, is the original. Simplified was an attempt to improve literacy and has been around since the 1950s. As with spoken languages, there is a split by country between the traditional and simplified forms. Simplified is used throughout People’s Republic of China and Singapore; traditional is used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau. The writing system is pictorial, but contrary to popular misconception it does have grammatical words as well as nouns and verbs.

Although often perceived as a difficult language there are some elements which make it easier, such as a lack of tenses and plurals.

Related posts: B is for Basque and Bable     D is for Dead Languages

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Qi Xi Festival

hearts and flowers white

The QiXi festival is known by several other names, including the Double Seventh Festival, Qiqiao, Chinese Valentine and the Festival of Young Girls. It is celebrated on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month, which this year is today, 20th August 2015.

It celebrates the legend of Niu Lang and Zhi Nu, and for this reason it has come to be associated with love and romance.

Traditionally the festival was a time when young girls would pray for good skills in needlework which would help them to find a good husband. They have various sewing competitions, such as making things and threading needles as quickly as possible by moonlight or candlelight.

One custom is to drop a needle into water. If it floats the girl is already highly skilled at needlework; if it sinks she needs more practice. Another is for 7 close female friends to make dumplings together. They place a needle, a copper coin and a date into three of the dumplings and then eat them. Whoever finds the needle with be blessed with good needlework skills. The girl who finds the coin will be wealthy, and the one who finds the date will have an early marriage.

In some parts of China, children would hang flowers from the horns of oxen to celebrate the old ox in the legend.

Today the festival is heavily influenced by western traditions and so it is celebrated in the same way as St Valentine’s Day, with flowers and chocolates being exchanged.

Related post: Chinese New Year

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The legend of Niu Lang and Zhi Nu

starsLong, long ago there lived a poor cowherd, named Niu lang. He had no parents and so lived with his older brother and sister-in-law who treated him very badly, until one day they drove him from the house completely.

As he was sitting alone and wondering what to do an old man came by and told him of a sick ox which needed tending. Niu Lang travelled far and wide and over mountains until he came upon the ox. He fed it and looked after it for a whole month until it was healthy again. The ox then began talking to Niu Lang, and said that he wasn’t really and ox, but a god who had been banished from heaven.

In the meantime Zhi Nu, the daughter of a goddess, escaped from heaven where she felt life was boring, and came to earth seeking new adventures. With the help of the ox, Niu Lang and Zhi Nu met and fell in love. They married and had two children, and lived a very happy life together, until one day the King of the Heavens discovered what had happened and ordered Zhi Nu back to heaven.

Niu Lang pined without her, but the ox had a solution. He ordered Niu Lang to kill him and wear his hide as this would enable him to get to heaven to find Zhi Nu again. Crying, Niu Lang did this and took the two children to heaven. Just as he was about to reach Zhi Nu, the Queen of the Heavens appeared, and taking a silver clip from her hair she scratched the sky to form a deep and wide river between the two lovers, separating them forever.

But the story didn’t end there, because all of the magpies on earth took pity on them and they flew to heaven and created a bridge across the river so that the two lovers could meet again. On seeing this, the goddess relented and permitted the couple to meet once a year, on the 7th day of the 7th month.

This legend is now celebrated as the Chinese Qi Xi festival on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month.

As with many legends, they are inspired by the skies. The river that separates the lovers is the Milky Way, and the couple are represented by the stars Altair (Niu Lang) and Vega (Zhi Nu) which appear on either side of the Milky Way. Two smaller stars close to Altair were said to be their children.

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Learning Chinese

As readers of this blog will know, I love learning new things.  Last summer I spotted an advert for a course in Chinese for primary school teachers, and as MFL (modern foreign languages) is my specialist subject, I decided to sign up.  Throwing myself in at the deep end, I promised my new school that I would set up a lunchtime Chinese club, so I had to make sure I really did learn some!

I must confess, I was a bit worried.  I mean – Chinese is really difficult, right?  It’s doesn’t even have an alphabet, just thousands of characters.  But it actually turned out to be a lot easier than I imagined.  Obviously, it takes years to learn to speak a language fluently, so I have only learnt the basics, but this is what I discovered:

–          It’s a subject-verb-object language, so the word order is the same as English.  This already makes it easier than some languages.

–          The verbs don’t conjugate (i.e. there are no different endings depending on who is doing it – like he lives, they live in English, or il habite, ils habitent in French.

–          There are no articles (English has ‘a’ and ‘the’; French has un, une, des, le, la and les; Spanish has un, una, unos, unas, el, la, los and las; Chinese has nothing)

–          There are no tenses.  In Chinese, the verb remains exactly the same and you know whether it’s past, present or future from the context.

This simplicity actually makes it ideal for primary school children to learn.

Like any language, it does have its peculiarities and difficulties, such as the tones (the way your voice goes up or down for certain words) but this is no more challenging than getting children to understand the concept of nouns having genders (Chinese doesn’t have those) or that ‘you are’ might be ‘tu es’ but might be ‘vous êtes’ depending on who and/or how many people you are talking to.

Of course the characters are tricky but the children in my club really enjoy drawing and practising them, and they have the advantage that children are not influenced by how the word is written, so in general their pronunciation is better right from the start.  The fact that the language isn’t written with an English alphabet doesn’t faze them at all.  (In fact, I also run an Ancient Greek club and the children there are also fascinated by the fact that language can be written using different symbols.)  We all enjoy making up little stories to help remember the characters.  On the course I did, we learned a little about how the characters are made up, with radicals giving an indication of meaning and a phonetic element indicating pronunciation.

And there is far more vocabulary in some topic areas.  For example, English has mum, dad, brother, sister, grandma, granddad, while Chinese has different words depending on whether it’s an older or younger brother, a maternal or paternal grandmother etc.  But for the moment the primary aged children I am teaching only need to learn the ones they require for their own family.

The children and I are really enjoying learning together, and although I will never be fluent in Mandarin, you never know – one of the children I am teaching may be inspired to study it further and become fluent in the future.