Literature
Chinese Idiom
| 对牛弹琴 (duì niú tán qín) Literal Translation: To play music to a cow. Meaning: A speaker or writer has over-estimated his listeners or readers in that they are not able to comprehend the full meaning of the message delivered to them. |
About the Chinese Language
Introduction to Chinese Characters
Written Chinese employs characters rather than an alphabet. There exist more than 50,000 Chinese characters. Each character corresponds to a single spoken syllable that usually has a basic meaning.
Moonlight Through the Door
Larger Chinese characters are cobbled together from smaller ones. In fact, there may be half a dozen different component characters inside a large Chinese character. Certain component characters are particularly common as building blocks for larger characters.
More...The Origin of Common Chinese Names
When Chinese people give their names, the last name is always said before the first name. The "surname", "clan name", "family name", "last name" of a Chinese person - the name they say first when they introduce themselves - is almost always one character in length. Of the thousands of Chinese surnames, only about two dozen are two characters long, and these names are very uncommon. Certain Chinese names are more common than others in China and their concentration is significantly greater.
Chinese Writing System
Chinese characters are remarkably similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs. They were both created thousands of years ago. They were both originally pictographic and ideographic. They both developed over time to allow new words to be written phonetically using whole characters/glyphs. And they both spawned off modified forms of writing that were purely sound-based.
More...Traditional Characters vs. Simplified Characters
There are two general forms of Chinese characters. Traditional characters have been used for hundreds of years. They are the characters that most Chinese literature, history, and philosophy are written in. Simplified characters are a more recent development and are used in daily commerce.
More...