Hidden gem in Ikebukuro sells unique flavours of nikuman you’d never find in a convenience store.
Chinese
Colorful costumes and elegant poses guide passengers through safety instructions with remarkable style and finesse.
Chinese swimmer Fu Yuanhui has won herself plenty of new fans from around the globe with her delightfully candid interview at the Rio Olympics.
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The various related but often unintelligible Chinese language varieties collectively have 1.2 billion first-language speakers. Of those varieties, Mandarin, also known as Standard Chinese or Putonghua, has 848 million native speakers, which is higher than any other language on Earth. It’s no wonder that more and more people around the world are seeing the practicality of learning Chinese as a second language.
However, learning a second language takes time and effort, especially if the intrinsic features of your target language differ significantly from those of your native language. A recent YouTube video titled “Foreigners’ Difficulties of Learning Chinese” explores this exact scenario by asking four Westerners about their own experiences studying the language.
Whether you’ve already dabbled in Chinese yourself or are thinking about it, the short clip makes for an interesting watch for anyone looking to expand their linguistic horizons.
After a controversial Halloween stunt landed them in some hot water, Shanghai prankster group Monkey Kingz is back and at it again–and this time, with a decidedly less-gory theme.
Their latest video is titled “Single Chinese Guy vs Single White Guy,” which pokes fun at the predicaments of two available guys, one Chinese and one white, on Singles’ Day in China. In a hilarious sequence of short clips, the two men try busting out all the moves to win over a girl using exceptionally different tactics. Will they find true love, or will they be forced to spend Singles’ Day wallowing in total rejection? Watch the video and see the funny progression of events for yourself!
With their complex writing systems, getting around in Japan or China can be stressful for even the most seasoned of tourists. Sure, you could carry a travel dictionary in your pocket while you go sightseeing, but how are you supposed to look up all those funny looking sticks and squiggles when you don’t even know how to pronounce them? Often the locals try to be helpful by providing an English translation, but there are reasons why that doesn’t always work out. If only there was a way to just wave your magic smartphone over some unintelligible text and have it provide a reliable translation on the spot. Well, as we discovered over at Shanghai List, there’s an app for that.
We’ve all seen a strange work of public art at some point while traveling–you know, that piece that makes you scratch your head and look at it upside-down to try to figure out just what the heck is going on. Fortunately for the residents of San Francisco, they have their very own bizarre–and ginormous–piece of public art to contemplate whenever they feel like it.
Japanese internet users recently stumbled across photos of this particular sculpture created by Chinese artist Zhang Huan and were quick to comment on its unique appearance. One fan even decided that it resembled nothing other than the final boss of a video game. While we’re pretty sure that’s not the interpretation that the artist was going for, the fan’s cleverly manipulated photo still gave us a chuckle.
The Chinese language is widely regarded as one of the most difficult languages to learn.
There are more than 80,000 Chinese characters in existence, although a non-native speaker can get by with 1,000 of the most frequently used.
To make matters more complicated, the characters that make up each word or phrase individually carry different meanings based on the context in which they’re used. For example, the Chinese character 吃 could mean “eat,” “drink,” “bear,” or “take,” depending on the phrase that surrounds it.
As hard as the language is, it can also be incredibly poetic when translated character by character into English, and sometimes hilarious.
Everyone loves a good tongue twister, especially when getting to grips with a new language. I’ve had fun being challenged by Japanese coworkers at drinking parties to get my mouth around phrases like basu gasu bakuhatsu (“the bus gas explodes”) five times in a row, or aka-makigami ao-makigami ki-makigami (“red paper roll, blue paper roll, yellow paper roll”) on many occasions, but this Chinese tongue twister blows them all out of the water.
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