I very much agree with that idea. My suggestion would be to not only ask students to use it less, but also to enrich their vocabulary with the word “tasty”. It seems like a more, let’s say, relaxed option.

But what I also found interesting was that by pointing out and correcting particular common overuses in learner groups, overall language fluency can be greatly enhanced, couldn’t it? This should work universally for all languages, hence also Chinese. So I started wondering, what are common overuse mistakes that Laowai make?

A Chinese friend of mine pointed out that foreigners tend to add a 真 or 真的 to their sentences way too often. “We do use it often,” she admitted, “but not that often. Only foreigners do that.” I think this kind of critique – only foreigners do that – speaks for itself. There are certain speech patterns (but could also be overuses) that make someone sound foreign. That implication must come from a social aspect of our mind, where we much rather accept a native, familiar sounding individual into our circle of trust than someone whose speech subconsciously creates social distance within ourselves. Pragmatic mistakes interfere with successful communication. So let’s point them out and learn how to sound more 地道!

I am not exactly sure about English native speakers, but in Germany the word 当然 – “of course” – is overused commonly by native learners. Perhaps it’s an attempt to compensate language insecurity with very determined vocabulary. Matter of fact is, it makes our Chinese friends feel passive-aggressively yelled at when a Laowai says “我当然要去你那儿”. Have you ever experienced a situation like that?

Another thing that popped into my mind was the way Laowai use 看起来 – “looks like”. What occured to me many times before is that western languages are gramatically a lot more indirect or passive. For example does the question “Could you tell me where the train station is?” not ask where the train station is but simply if the person asked is capable of telling us. In Chinese, a more direct phrase like “请问，火车站在哪儿?” (“Please let me ask, where is the train station?”) seems appropriate. In that manner foreigners often try to add that more neutral tone to their Chinese by adding 看起来 (“looks like”) too often. When I said “他看起来很累” (“He looks tired”) or similar uses of this structure, I often felt I sounded weird. A Chinese buddy of mine pointed out that a “他很累吧” (“He’s tired, huh”) would have done the job better. Again, a little more direct, don’t you think?

So if you are learning mandarin – have you experienced reoccuring pragmatic mistakes like these from yourself or foreign friends? I’d love to hear your view.

I also figured there was no really good and neatly arranged (non-Chinese) website that covers the topic to an extent that I am happy with, so I decided to come up with one: Everyone feel free to visit my new website chinese-chengyu.com!

But you really use it in contexts with a deeper meaning, like 保全面子 bǎoquánmiànzi – pretty literally “to save face” – meaning you are protecting your reputation, or avoiding 丢面子 diūmiànzi – pretty literally losing face.

有话说就把它说出来，别怕丢面子。
yǒuhuàshuō jiùbǎtāshuōchūlai, biépàdiūmiànzi.
If you have something to say, say it, don’t be afraid to lose face.

So far pretty straightforward. But here’s a good one with 面子: If you defer to someones wishes or do something for some one’s sake, you buy their face. I found this one particularly unusual:

他很买面子，答应给我帮忙。
tā hěn mǎimiànzi, dāyīng gěi wǒ bāngmáng.
He was really considerate and agreed to help me.

Oh and another thing that confused me: Some of you may have been wondering, why this (sur)face-related character is found in so many words linked to wheat-based noodles. That’s actually the result of the simplification of Chinese characters. The noodle-面 used to look like this: 麵.

And as for the physical face, that’s the 脸. You can see the “meat” radical on the left, and a phonetic on the right that is usually pronounced jian, yan or something like that. Apparently, lian is phonetically related. Oh well. Aside from the regular use, here’s two cool ones:

我脸红了。
Wǒ liǎnhóng le.
I blushed.

你这个小白脸儿！
nǐ zhège xiǎobáiliǎnr!
You’re such a baby face!

Latter refers to really cute boys and their “white faces”. Also used to describe metrosexuals. In my opinion mostly used as a compliment.

Any stories where you lost face by using the wrong face?

Me and four of my college buddies recently went to a meet-up for all those, who were lucky enough to recieve a one-year scholarship by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) this year. The DAAD really takes care of it’s scholarship holders, and while the event focused on discussing such topics as insurance, how to submit our documents to the Chinese Scholarship Council and why we need to print them on light green paper, they also inconspiciously slipped us a little book called “Abenteuer China – DAAD-Alumni aus vier Jahrzehnten erinnern sich” (Adventure China – four decades of DAAD-alumni think back).

A few days later I was on the plane to China and decided to take a look at said book. It turned out to be a little treasure. Just like the title suggests, it’s basically a collection of retrospects by former German scholarship holders, starting in the mid-70s. All the more recent ones, from the past 5-10 years or so, are nice to read and made me smile a little, because they mentioned those situations that any laowai in China experienced himself at some point.

But what really made the book unique were the older reports. Some alumni actually didn’t write a recap but instead published a letter (yep, a real old school letter) they sent home back then or a page from their diary. The first west German students came to Beijing in 1973 – due to political reasons that was even before the first Americans arrived. And as much as I was taught about the different times in China, to read how the very streets I have been walking on the past few days used to be nothing but piles of cabbage and a few dudes on mules from people who experienced all those things first hand was actually pretty fascinating.

I feel like there is such a big difference between simply knowing that most areas in China used to be inaccessible by foreigners 30-40 years ago and hearing about it from people who  got arrested by the police multiple times because some dopey Chinese bus driver accidentally drove them into closed areas.

So I started wondering, weren’t those times in some crazy way more charming, more interesting than today’s China?

I don’t think they were.

In spite of all the old school socialist Chineseness that got lost on China’s journey to a modern society, I think there is hardly anything that can compete with the drive, the dynamics China’s modernized spots like Beijing can offer. They form a totally new kind of intercultural point of contact, where expat communities are built by “First World Westerners” instead of Asians, East Europeans or Africans. (And as for the other parts of China… I believe in 让一部分人先富起来.)

And now I am really curious what someone who reads a little book just like the on I got in another 40 years will think.

What’s your Chinese Zodiac Sign? Mine’s rabbit. But when I grew up in the Soviet Union, I was told I was a cat. What’s the confusion about? Where does the Chinese Horoscope derive from? This is what I found.

The Earthly Branches

The concept of the Chinese calendar is based on the idea of 12 Earthly Branches. Wikipedia offers the following explanation:

The Earthly Branches (Chinese: 地支; pinyin: dìzhī; or Chinese: 十二支; pinyin: shíèrzhī; literally “twelve branches”) provide one Chinese system for reckoning time.

It’s a clue. But in order to fully understand it, we need to dig another step further and find out where this “system for reckoning time” has it’s roots.

The system of the Earthly Branches was built from observations of the Jupiter orbit. Chinese Astronomers rounded it to 12 years and accordingly divided it into 12 parts. Each one of these parts was named and assigned an animal.

In Chinese analogy, the 12 years of the Jupiter cycle identified many things, such as the 12 months of the year, directions, season and even the Chinese hour, that was 120 instead of 60 minutes long.

For example: 午 could stand for 180°, 12 PM (give or take one hour), the 7th month of a year, summer or south. Mandarin learners will recognize the character wǔ 午 and now understand the origin of it’s contemporary meaning: noon.

Even though Chinese has it’s own words for cardinal directions (běi, dōng, nán and xī – 北, 东, 南 and 西) – Chinese sailors preferred using the twelve directions of the Earthly Branches. This may sound familiar to you: Modern-day communication frequently uses o’clock to specify directions.

The Chinese Zodiac

Following the principle of the 12 Earthly branches, each of the 12 years of the Jupiter cycle had a symbolic relationship with an animal, and that’s where the zodiac signs come from. In fact, there are also animal signs assigned by month (inner animals) and hours of the day (secret animals), which is an often-overlooked fact in the west.

The Chinese horoscope has also been adapted by several of China’s neighboring countries, which has led to irregularities:

1. Rat (Yang, 1st Trine, Fixed Element Water)
2. Ox: Water buffalo in Vietnam (Yin, 2nd Trine, Fixed Element Water)
3. Tiger (Yang, 3rd Trine, Fixed Element Wood)
4. Rabbit: Cat in Vietnam (Yin, 4th Trine, Fixed Element Wood)
5. Dragon (Yang, 1st Trine, Fixed Element Wood)
6. Snake (Yin, 2nd Trine, Fixed Element Fire)
7. Horse (Yang, 3rd Trine, Fixed Element Fire)
8. Goat, or Sheep or Ram (Yin, 4th Trine, Fixed Element Fire)
9. Monkey (Yang, 1st Trine, Fixed Element Metal)
10. Rooster (Yin, 2nd Trine, Fixed Element Metal)
11. Dog (Yang, 3rd Trine, Fixed Element Metal)
12. Pig: Wild boar in Japan and Elephant in Northern Thailand (Yin, 4th Trine, Fixed Element Water)

This also explains why some people mistakenly confuse animal symbols.

To find out what your Chinese Zodiac is, you may go to this rather ugly but useful website.

Hopefully this information was helpful to you – Let’s talk about new questions in the comments!

Around 63% of the market share is still owned by Chinese search giant Baidu.com, another 32% by Google. They total about 95% of the Chinese search market.

After hackers attacked Google’s servers in January, the company furiously disabled their search filters and threatened to possibly pull out of China. The case was huge in western as well as Chinese media. Oddly enough, after Google turned it’s filters back on without any explanation, there was basically no media coverage.

According to the New York Times, the attacks came from two Chinese elite schools: Shanghai Jiaotong University and Lanxiang Vocational School. While US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held a major speach where she drew analogies to the Berlin Wall and the unfree Internet, the Chinese government denied any involvement and critisized it’s US counterpart for turning Google’s economy-related issue into a political one.

Baidu proactively censors search results in line with the governments media censorship regulations.

While Windows 7 already includes Chinese Language support, many Windows XP users still need to enable it manually. This is a step-by-step guide on how to activate Chinese Pinyin Input on your Windows XP Computer.

1. Open the Windows Control Panel.
2. Click on “Date, Time, Language and Regional options” (Your Control Panel needs to be in “Category view”). Now click the “Regional and Language Options” icon.
3. Choose the “Languages” tab, and check the “Install files for East Asian languages” box:
4. Click Apply. You may be asked to insert your Windows XP CD at this point. My version was preinstalled on my computer, so I had no physical copy. I borrowed a friend’s CD, it worked for me!
5. Click the “Details” button, it should open the “Text services and input languages” window.
6. Click on “Add” next to the installed languages box.
7. In the “Input Language” list, pick “Chinese (PRC)”. The “Keyboard Layout” should automatically be “Chinese (Simplified) – Microsoft Pinyin IME 3.0″. Click “OK” twice.
8. You should see a language bar in the bottom right corner of your screen. Click on “EN” and select “CN” from the list. You can now type in Chinese Pinyin.

Congratulations! Switch back to English by choosing it from the Language bar or alternatively pressing Alt + Shift.

If you prefer a prettier look, try downloading the Sogou Pinyin Input Software.

Chengyu are four-character idioms in Chinese language. They originate from ancient stories but mostly have a morale that can still be applied to modern-day situations. Using them shows great proficience in the language and will impress your Chinese friends!

Today I will introduce you to two Chengyu that have a simple yet very useful structure.

The first one is yìxīnyíyì 一心一意; One heart, one mind. As you can guess by the posts headline, this Chengyu expresses determination and focus.

You can use it in different ways, for example:

• 你工作上要一心一意的。
  Nǐ gōngzuòshàng yào yíxīnyíyì de.
  You have to devote yourself to work.
• 他一心一意地做作业。
  Tā yíxīnyíyì de zuò zuòyè
  He does his homework wholeheartedly.

Conveniently, to get the opposite meaning of 一心一意 all you have to do is change the numbers: sānxīnèryì 三心二意; Three hearts, two minds. Aside from meaning someone is doing things half-heartedly, 三心二意 can also imply inconclusiveness, being shilly-shally.

• 王先生工作三心二意的。
  Wáng xiānshēng gōngzuò sānxīnèryì de.
  Mr. Wang’s work is healf-hearted.
• 别三心二意了！
  Bié sānxīnèryì le!
  Stop being shilly-shally!
• 我从来不三心二意。
  Wǒ cónglái bù sānxīnèryì.
  I am never healf-hearted.

These two Chengyu are easy to remember and very useful. Try them out on your Chinese friends, it’s fun!

The picture to this post is taken from Flickr Creative Commons, (c) by Augenapfel.

“The US act grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs, gravely hurt the Chinese people’s national sentiments and seriously damaged the Sino-US ties.”

- Ma Zhaoxu, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met respectively with the Dalai Lama in Washington on Thursday. This event comes only a few weeks after the US government has closed a major arms deal with Taiwan. China had repeatedly and strongly denounced the meeting and called for the US government to cancel the arrangements. The warnings could not have been clearer:

We urge the US to fully grasp the high sensitivity of Tibet-related issues, to prudently and appropriately deal with related matters, and avoid bringing further damage to China-US relations.

- Ma Zhaoxu on February 4th

It may therefore not come as a big surprise that now Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai has summoned the US ambassador to talks regarding the issue. This has the potential to become a very major setback, the aftertaste of which may last for quite a while.

I generally agree that countries should be able to recieve whichever guests they like. In this case however, I question the purpose of the meeting. Does Obama really need to meet the Dalai Lama that badly and thereby directly provoke the Chinese government?

Considering the United States’ dependence to Sino-American trade, I see a very thin line between what appears to be pridefully standing up for liberal American values and mere recklessness. The US may be gambling with the fact that said dependence works both ways – but why take the risk? Perhaps it is not too farfetched to believe that Obama is trying to divert attention from recent events that have put him in the light of not following the ideals that he is suddenly pursuing so ambitiously?