I want make friends.(come from china
I can speak Chinese but I’m not from China. I can’t read or write Chinese though.
Hi there! I come from China and consequently speak Chinese! 你好！你是个大陆网友吗？我是大陆的。很高兴今天又认识个会中文的网友！你能告诉我你一开始怎么知道wikiHow的吗？最早我下了一个wikiHow的软件（很可能是盗版的），后来我又看了下它的官网。说实话，官网比软件好多了！我注册账号有三年了，我想你应该是新来的吧？
@ 艾米丽·波尔（Emily_Pole）
对，我刚注册两天。我是一名初中生，在做英语阅读是看到这个所以就…
我比较内向，想尽量多交些朋友。
1 Like
Emily Pole是我的网名，你可以叫我Kindness的。
I’ve a question about Chinese , I hope you don’t mind. Do the symbols represent words or letters? Are they hard to write?
@LabLover
The characters represent words. Characters can be put together to make longer words. Some of them are a little bit hard to write, but some are not. Hope this helps!
@Emily_Pole
Oh yes that makes sense. Thanks
I feel horribly ignorant now…I thought there was no such language as Chinese and people spoke Mandarin or Cantonese or any of the other dialects/languages.
Think it’s by pinyin (how the word is said), but I don’t live in China, so I may be wrong.
@LabLover
You’re welcome! @CPenguin17
In a Chinese dictionary, a character is sorted according to how it sounds (its Pinyin), but you can find any character in a Chinese dictionary by either searching up how it’s written or by searching up its sound. For example, 妈 (mother, Pinyin is mā) would come before 霉 (mold, Pinyin is méi) alphabetically. To search up a character by its written form, you have to look up one of its components if it is two characters squished together (like both examples above) in the index. Usually you search up the left part if it is squished side-to-side or the top part if it is squished up-and-down. If it is not a “squished” character, you just look that same character up in the index and forget about components. I think (since I haven’t used one for a long time) then it will direct you to a second index which lists all characters that can be formed with that component. It will show a page number for each character respectively that directs you to that character’s entry. I know it might be a little mind-bogging, but once you are familiar with the system, you will see that Chinese dictionaries are better than European ones because whereas European dictionaries can be searched only according to its spelling, Chinese ones can be searched according to both the written form and the Pinyin. @HumanBeing
In China, we consider Chinese as one language. Mandarin (which I speak), Cantonese, and others are “dialects.” We use one writing system (without regards to simplified or traditional), though. @FlowerPower555
I was trying to answer CP’s question when you stepped in.
Thank you for explaining Kindness. So can everyone who speaks Cantonese understand everyone who speaks Manderin because they both speak Chinese? I didn’t know they were both written in the same way, that makes sense. In the UK, there are places where all the road signs, for example, have two languages, English and Welsh and also some places in NZ have Teo Reo Maori and English. It’s efficent to have one written language that everyone understands.
I can speak Chinese (I can speak it fluently, but I have some trouble writing and reading)
@HumanBeing
Not everyone who speaks Mandarin can understand Cantonese because, after all, Cantonese is a dialect and it sounds a bit different then Chinese, so you can’t understand it sometimes. For example, if your from Shanghai and you go to Hong Kong, you might have some trouble communicating.
@WikiaWang
Exactly. For example, I come from Beijing. I remember the last time I went to Hong Kong, the information about the next subway train was broadcasted in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. I could only understand the Cantonese because it was repeated in Mandarin. Otherwise, it sounded like a foreign language to me. @HumanBeing
No problem!
I’m learning Chinese, but I can’t type on an iPad…
Download the keyboard for Chinese on iPad and simply change languages when you have to type Chinese.
