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Two people playing jianzi A traditional jianzi A group playing jianzi in Beijing's Temple of Heaven park. Jianzi (Chinese: 毽子; pinyin: jiànzi), [Note 1] is a traditional Chinese sport in which players aim to keep a heavily weighted shuttlecock in the air using their bodies apart from the hands, unlike in similar games such as peteca and indiaca.
Feather shuttlecocks Plastic shuttlecock. A shuttlecock (also called a birdie or shuttle, or ball) is a high-drag projectile used in the sport of badminton. It has an open conical shape formed by feathers or plastic (or a synthetic alternative) embedded into a rounded cork (or rubber) base. The shuttlecock's shape makes it extremely ...
Shuttlecocks also have a high top speed compared to the balls in other racquet sports, making badminton the fastest racquet sport in the world. The flight of the shuttlecock gives the sport its distinctive nature, and in certain languages the sport is named by reference to this feature (e.g., German Federball, literally feather-ball).
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 ...
Words of Chinese origin have entered European languages, including English. Most of these were direct loanwords from various varieties of Chinese.However, Chinese words have also entered indirectly via other languages, particularly Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, that have all used Chinese characters at some point and contain a large number of Chinese loanwords.
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".
Loanwords have entered written and spoken Chinese from many sources, including ancient peoples whose descendants now speak Chinese. In addition to phonetic differences, varieties of Chinese such as Cantonese and Shanghainese often have distinct words and phrases left from their original languages which they continue to use in daily life and sometimes even in Mandarin.
The shuttlecock, called a jianzi in the Chinese game and also known in English as a 'Chinese hacky sack' or 'kinja', typically has four feathers fixed into a rubber sole or plastic discs. Some handmade jianzis make use of a washer or a coin with a hole in the center.