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Lin's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage comprises approximately 8,100 character head entries and 110,000 word and phrase entries. [10] It includes both modern Chinese neologisms such as xǐnǎo 洗腦 "brainwash" and many Chinese loanwords from English such as yáogǔn 搖滾 "rock 'n' roll" and xīpí 嬉皮 "hippie".
tā He 打 dǎ hit 人。 rén person 他 打 人。 tā dǎ rén He hit person He hits someone. Chinese can also be considered a topic-prominent language: there is a strong preference for sentences that begin with the topic, usually "given" or "old" information; and end with the comment, or "new" information. Certain modifications of the basic subject–verb–object order are permissible and ...
In China, letters of the English alphabet are pronounced somewhat differently because they have been adapted to the phonetics (i.e. the syllable structure) of the Chinese language. The knowledge of this spelling may be useful when spelling Western names, especially over the phone, as one may not be understood if the letters are pronounced as ...
The next four columns give pronunciations in Standard (Mandarin) Chinese, using pinyin; Cantonese, in Jyutping and Yale, respectively; and Minnan (Taiwan). The last column gives the classifier's literal meaning (in quotes) and principal uses.
Robert Morrison (1782-1834) is credited with several historical firsts in addition to the first bidirectional Chinese and English dictionary. He was the first Protestant missionary in China, started the first Chinese-language periodical in 1815, [5] collaborated with William Milne to write the first translation of the Bible into Chinese in 1823, helped to found the English-language The Canton ...
English also has some words and phrases that act somewhat like sentence final particles, but primarily only in colloquial speech. However, there are others, called tag questions, which are less colloquial and can be used for any situation. All are generally discourse particles rather than modal particles. For example: "man" in "Don't do it, man."
Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages to learn for people whose native language is English, together with Arabic, Japanese and Korean. [28] According to the Foreign Service Institute, a native English speaker needs over 2,200 hours of intensive study, taking 88 weeks (one year and about 8 months), to learn Mandarin. [29]
Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China; Taiwanese Mandarin, Standard Chinese as spoken in Taiwan; Old Mandarin or Early Mandarin was the speech of northern China during the Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty and the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty (12th to 14th centuries).