Mandarin Characters of the week

good stuff ChineseSpeaker...

i'm liking this a lot chinese speaker - keep up the good work!

nij wrote: »

Is the 'ni' in nihao not the rising tone?

Ni (you) and Wo (I) are both the 3rd tone... You have to fall a little before rising your tone.

When speaking two 3rd tones in a row, the first one generally sounds like the 2nd tone.

厕所 [cè suǒ] - toilet; This is actually pronounced more like "Tsuh soo-oh".

One thing to note is that when you go to china, you will see many different signs for toilet. The key thing to look for is if it's male or female...

Take "he" and "she" for example...
他 [tā] - he, him; 他们 them
她 [tā] - she, her; it; 她们 them
See the part on the left? that is called a 'radical'.. There is one for male (人, but actually looks like the left bit on the "he" above) and female... (女 = woman)

It's worth noting that if you see these two radicals that it's quite often to do with male/female... Especially the female radical. The problem is that.

When saying tā as him or her it sounds exactly the same and you know if it's he or she from context, but written down you'll know exactly. If you encounter native chinese speakers in ireland, you will probably notice that a common mistake they make is with genders... They say stuff like "My mother... He is chinese".. This is the reason why, and as a learner of chinese, you should be aware of it.

ChineseSpeaker wrote: »

饭店 [fàndiàn] - restaurant

饭店 [fàndiàn] is generally used as "restaurant" in china as the two characters stand for 'food' 'shop', but officially this word means "Hotel".

餐馆 [cān guǎn] is the official word for "restaurant", but if you actually go to China, you will see both. It's worth noting as you will need a hotel if going to china. Also, the dictionary might confuse you.