Mandarin Chinese Quotes

Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream.

Because, ten-year-olds of the world, you shouldn't believe what your teachers tell you about the beauty and specialness and uniqueness of you. Or, believe it, little snowflake, but know it won't make a bit of difference until after puberty. It's Newton's lost law: anything that makes you unique later will get your chocolate milk stolen and your eye blackened as a kid. Won't it, Sebastian? Oh, yes, it will, my little Mandarin Chinese-learning, Poe-reciting, high-top-wearing friend. God bless you, wherever you are.

‎We come to enjoy ourselves in it, come what may. And in doing so we add meaning of our own, proving ourselves to be life's creative participants. We discern and live, thereby enhance life. We change life by making life coherent, and we are in the meantime changed by living the coherence we continually create.

If we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else's play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn't come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn't taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said , Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand year, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep?

Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation.

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 Freshly baked apple pie makes a tasty dessert. 新烤的蘋果派是很可口的飯後點心。 Xīn kǎo de píngguǒpài shì hěn kěkǒu de fànhòu diǎnxīn。

most schools also focus too much on providing students with a set of predetermined skills, such as solving differential equations, writing computer code in C++, identifying chemicals in a test tube, or conversing in Chinese. Yet since we have no idea what the world and the job market will look like in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans, and a new Google Translate app will enable you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese, or Hakka, even though you only know how to say “Ni hao.

What is the use of beauty in woman? Provided a woman is physically well made and capable of bearing children, she will always be good enough in the opinion of economists. What is the use of music? -- of painting? Who would be fool enough nowadays to prefer Mozart to Carrel, Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard? There is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use. Everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and man's needs are low and disgusting, like his own poor, wretched nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet. For my part, saving these gentry's presence, I am of those to whom superfluities are necessaries, and I am fond of things and people in inverse ratio to the service they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase with its mandarins and dragons, which is perfectly useless to me, to a utensil which I do use, and the particular talent of mine which I set most store by is that which enables me not to guess logogriphs and charades. I would very willingly renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen for the sight of an undoubted painting by Raphael, or of a beautiful nude woman, -- Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi when she is entering her bath. I would most willingly consent to the return of that cannibal, Charles X., if he brought me, from his residence in Bohemia, a case of Tokai or Johannisberg; and the electoral laws would be quite liberal enough, to my mind, were some of our streets broader and some other things less broad. Though I am not a dilettante, I prefer the sound of a poor fiddle and tambourines to that of the Speaker's bell. I would sell my breeches for a ring, and my bread for jam. The occupation which best befits civilized man seems to me to be idleness or analytically smoking a pipe or cigar. I think highly of those who play skittles, and also of those who write verse. You may perceive that my principles are not utilitarian, and that I shall never be the editor of a virtuous paper, unless I am converted, which would be very comical. Instead of founding a Monthyon prize for the reward of virtue, I would rather bestow -- like Sardanapalus, that great, misunderstood philosopher -- a large reward to him who should invent a new pleasure; for to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth. God willed it to be so, for he created women, perfumes, light, lovely flowers, good wine, spirited horses, lapdogs, and Angora cats; for He did not say to his angels, 'Be virtuous,' but, 'Love,' and gave us lips more sensitive than the rest of the skin that we might kiss women, eyes looking upward that we might behold the light, a subtile sense of smell that we might breathe in the soul of the flowers, muscular limbs that we might press the flanks of stallions and fly swift as thought without railway or steam-kettle, delicate hands that we might stroke the long heads of greyhounds, the velvety fur of cats, and the polished shoulder of not very virtuous creatures, and, finally, granted to us alone the triple and glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, striking fire, and making love in all seasons, whereby we are very much more distinguished from brutes than by the custom of reading newspapers and framing constitutions.

It is not often realized that even the word ‘Mandarin’, standing as it does for a central concept in Chinese culture, is derived from a Sanskrit word, Mantrī, which went from India to China via Malaya.

Roman augurs and Chinese mandarins both knew well that when rumors about monstrous beings became more than usually common in a community, that might indicate rising stresses that could take a more overt political form later on. The same logic still applies today; the parts of America most caught up in the cattle mutilation panic of the mid-1970s, for example, were exactly those areas where radical anti-government activism took off most rapidly a decade later.

Yet since we have no idea what the world and the job market will look like in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans, and a new Google Translate app will enable you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese, or Hakka, even though you only know how to say “Ni hao.

Alas! what are you, after all, my written and painted thoughts! Not long ago you were so variegated, young and malicious, so full of thorns and secret spices, that you made me sneeze and laugh — and now? You have already doffed your novelty, and some of you, I fear, are ready to become truths, so immortal do they look, so pathetically honest, so tedious! And was it ever otherwise? What then do we write and paint, we mandarins with Chinese brush, we immortalizers of things which lend themselves to writing, what are we alone capable of painting? Alas, only that which is just about to fade and begins to lose its odour! Alas, only exhausted and departing storms and belated yellow sentiments! Alas, only birds strayed and fatigued by flight, which now let themselves be captured with the hand — with our hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer, things only which are exhausted and mellow! And it is only for your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colours, many colours, perhaps, many variegated softenings, and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds; — but nobody will divine thereby how ye looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and marvels of my solitude, you, my old, beloved — evil thoughts!

It turns out that, in addition to China’s eight ‘big’ languages—Mandarin and its seven close relatives (often referred to collectively simply as ‘Chinese’), with between 11 million and 800 million speakers each—China also has over 130 ‘little’ languages, many of them with just a few thousand speakers.

Junior year of high school, he had seen a Chinese woman in the Littletown Mall. Thin, with permed hair, gripping plastic bags with the handles twisted around each other. She'd honed in; there was no hiding his face, and when she spoke he understood her Mandarin. She was lost. Could he help? She needed to make a phone call, find a bus. Her face was scared and anxious. Two teenage boys, pale and gangly, had watched and mimicked her accent, and Daniel had said, in English, "I can't speak Chinese." Afterwards, he tried to forget the woman, because when he did think of her, he felt a deep, cavernous loneliness.

One day, in a grocery store, I swept clean a shelf of microbrew beer for my husband and three giant jars of mustard, leaving none for future shoppers. It was victory tinged with guilt. What would the next expat shopper think, when looking for beer or mustard? I couldn't afford to think about them. Every man for himself, in modern China!

Time will solve all the problems Chinese school graduates face. In our bilingual society, there are no more Chinese school graduates, only English school graduates who can speak Mandarin. These English school graduates probably can also read and write Chinese, but they did not go to a Chinese school, and they act and think differently from us. Drawing a line between us, they would never say they graduated from a Chinese school, because former Chinese school graduates, that is, the vanishing group of people that includes us, are second-class citizens. They, on the other hand, belong to the first class, the Chinese elite, English school graduates who are fluent in Chinese.

As we followed, she listed all the dishes Auntie Tina had ordered: crispy eel in sweet sauce, smoked duck two ways, hand-pulled noodles with crab roe- "luckily we had enough pregnant crabs on hand!"- and others I could not decipher from their poetic yet opaque Chinese names: squirrel-shaped Mandarin fish, eight treasure rice, four happiness pork.

He reached into his memory to recall how Chinese conversations felt, how Mandarin sounded when it rolled naturally off his tongue, when he didn’t have to pause to remember the tones of the next word he uttered. But he was forgetting. That terrified him. Sometimes, during practice conversations, he found himself blanking on a word he used to toss around constantly. And sometimes he sounded, to his own ears, like a European sailor imitating Chinese without knowing what he said.

Charlie glanced at the poster hanging on the door, which announced the store's annual Hungry Ghost Festival, just four days away. It used to be Charlie's favorite holiday, from the puppet shows at the community center to the paper lanterns that his mom hung outside and to the food- especially the food. Sautéed pea shoots. Roasted duck. Pineapple cakes that fit into the palm of your hand. Then there was his grandma's shaved ice with all the toppings- chopped mangos, condensed milk poured on thick, and her famous mung beans in sugary syrup. He could eat a whole bowl of those.

Few Chinese who write can write all of the spoken Chinese words that they can understand. To become significantly learned in the Chinese writing system normally takes some twenty years. Such a script is basically time-consuming and élitist. There can be no doubt that the characters will be replaced by the roman alphabet as soon as all the people in the People's Republic of China master the same Chinese language (‘dialect’), the Mandarin now being taught everywhere. The loss to literature will be enormous, but not so enormous as a Chinese typewriter using over 40,000 characters.

Besides information, most schools also focus too much on providing pupils with a set of predetermined skills [...]. Yet since we have no idea how the world and the job market will look in 2050, we don't really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or how to speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans, and a new Google Translate app enables you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese or Hakka, even though you only know how to say 'Ni hao'.

If a man jumped as high as a louse (lice), he would jump over a football field. In Ancient Egypt, the average life expectancy was 19 years, but for those who survived childhood, the average life expectancy was 30 years for women and 34 years for men. The volume of the moon is equivalent to the volume of the water in the Pacific Ocean. After the 9/11 incident, the Queen of England authorized the guards to break their vow and sing America’s national anthem for Americans living in London. In 1985, lifeguards of New Orleans threw a pool party to celebrate zero drownings, however, a man drowned in that party. Men and women have different dreams. 70 percent of characters in men’s dreams are other men, whereas in women its 50 percent men and 50 percent women. Men also act more aggressively in dreams than women. A polar bear has a black skin. 2.84 percent of deaths are caused by intentional injuries (suicides, violence, war) while 3.15 percent are caused by diarrhea. On average people are more afraid of spiders than they are afraid of death. A bumblebee has hairs on its eyes, helping it collect the pollen. Mickey Mouse’s creator, Walt Disney feared mice. Citarum river in Indonesia is the dirtiest and most polluted river in the world. When George R R Martin saw Breaking Bad’s episode called “Ozymandias”, he called Walter White and said that he’d write up a character more monstrous than him. Maria Sharapova’s grunt is the loudest in the Tennis game and is often criticized for being a distraction. In Mandarin Chinese, the word for “kangaroo” translates literally to “bag rat”. The first product to have a barcode was a chewing gum Wrigley. Chambarakat dam in Iraq is considered the most dangerous dam in the world as it is built upon uneven base of gypsum that can cause more than 500,000 casualties, if broken. Matt Urban was an American Lieutenant Colonel who was nicknamed “The Ghost” by Germans because he always used to come back from wounds that would kill normal people.

BITCH THE POT Tea and gossip go together. At least, that’s the stereotypical view of a tea gathering: a group of women gathered around the teapot exchanging tittle-tattle. As popularity of the beverage imported from China (‘tea’ comes from the Mandarin Chinese cha) increased, it became particularly associated with women, and above all with their tendency to gossip. Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue lists various slang terms for tea, including ‘prattle-broth’, ‘cat-lap’ (‘cat’ being a contemporary slang for a gossipy old woman), and ‘scandal broth’. To pour tea, meanwhile, was not just to ‘play mother’, as one enduring English expression has it, but also to ‘bitch the pot’ – to drink tea was to simply ‘bitch’. At this time a bitch was a lewd or sensual woman as well as a potentially malicious one, and in another nineteenth-century dictionary the phraseology is even more unguarded, linking tea with loose morals as much as loquaciousness: ‘How the blowens [whores] lush the slop. How the wenches drink tea!’ The language of tea had become another vehicle for sexism, and a misogynistic world view in which the air women exchanged was as hot as the beverage they sipped. ‘Bitch party’ and ‘tabby party’ (again the image of cattiness) were the terms of choice for such gossipy gatherings. Men, it seems, were made of stronger stuff, and drank it too. Furthermore, any self-respecting man would ensure his wife and daughters stayed away from tea. The pamphleteer and political writer William Cobbett declared in 1822: The gossip of the tea-table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. The girl that has been brought up, merely to boil the tea kettle, and to assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to affix his affections upon her. In the twenty-first century, to ‘spill the T’ has become a firm part of drag culture slang for gossiping. T here may stand for either ‘truth’ or the drink, but either way ‘weak tea’ has come to mean a story that doesn’t quite hold up – and it’s often one told by women. Perhaps it’s time for bitches to make a fresh pot.

Selecting officials on the basis of their mastery of literature and philosophy had several advantages. It ensured that most Chinese bureaucrats were smart—the examinations had the effect of screening for IQ as well as the ability to memorize. Another advantage of the examination system was its emphasis on merit over family background, engaging the loyalties of the lower classes by making it possible for a man of humble birth to pass the jin shi and become a mandarin. Still a third advantage was that the examination system co-opted the intellectual classes, who in other societies were often critics of the established order. Intellectuals in traditional China had a ready avenue to power. Above all, the examination system ensured that throughout the country, voluntarily, each generation of the most talented people in China steeped themselves in the core cultural values of the empire. From a pragmatic standpoint, this was a good thing for preserving cultural continuity. But it was also a good thing because those core cultural values constituted such a remarkable legacy in themselves, amalgamating properties that in the West would be divided into religion and civic culture.

Maia called me a few endearing pet names in Mandarin. In the years we’d been together, I’d learned all kinds of helpful Chinese phrases like Idiot white boy and My father told me not to date barbarians.

The sound of some initials is similar to that of English letters: b like “b” in ball p like “p” in push m like “m” in mine f like “f” in far d like “d” in day t like “t” in tea n like “n” in name l like “l” in look g like “g” in girl k like “k” in kind h like “h” in hot j like “j” in just q like “ch” in cheese x like “sh” in sheep z like “ds” in reads c like “ts” in sits s like “s” in silk zh like “dge” in judge ch like “ch” in rich sh like “sh” in shop r like “r” in rubber y like “y” in yellow w like “w” in way

I’mAmerican.I’mlearningChinese.Wǒshìměiguórén.Wǒzàixuézhōngwén.我是美国人。我在学中文。Ho,ho!Youhavenowspokentwoveryimportantsentences.Practicethemwithyourfriendsandfamily.They’llbesurprisedwithyourprogressinyourfirstlesson.You’reabletospeaksomerealChinesesentences!Notbad!Now,takeabreak,andthenwe’llstartanewchapter.Therearealotofinterestingthingsaheadforyoutolearn.

The Han language resembles no other on this earth. While I had no trouble learning to speak Mongol, and to write with its alphabet, I never learned more than a rudimentary comprehension of Han. The Mongol speech is gruff and harsh, like its speakers, but it at least employs sounds not too different from those heard in our Western languages. The Han, by contrast, is a speech of staccato syllables, and they are sung rather than spoken. Evidently the Han throat is incapable of forming more than a very few of the sounds that other people make. The sound of r, for one, is quite beyond them. My name in their speech was always Mah-ko. And, having so very few noises to work with, the Han must sound them on different tones—high, mid, low, rising, falling—to make a sufficient variety for compiling a vocabulary. It is like this: suppose our Ambrosian plainsong Gloria in excelsis had that meaning of “glory in the highest” only when sung to its traditional up and down neumes, and, if the syllables were sung in different ups and downs, were to change its meaning utterly—to “darkness in the lowest” or “dishonor to the basest” or even “fish for the frying.

learning the tones of Mandarin Chinese is difficult enough to begin with: you must distinguish between the flat first tone (m), the rising second tone (má ), the dipping third tone (m), and the fast-falling fourth tone (mà ), not to mention the unobstrusive neutral tone (ma). If you have no sense of tones when speaking Mandarin, people won’t understand you, and you may find yourself making mistakes like asking for a kiss (qng wn) when all you wanted was an answer to a question (qng wèn). But in Sichuanese even the standard tones are all

For sure he deserved it. Every man shall be put to death for his own sin. From

You only have to look at the Chinese language today to understand how many modern ideas came via Japan. A remarkable number of words in Mandarin have been imported from Japan: Independence (duli). Women's rights (nvquan). Gender equality (nannv pingdeng). Science (kexue). Industry (gongye). Atom (yuanzi). International (guoji). History (lishi). Market (shichang). Invest (touzi). Economics (jinji). Society (shehui). Telephone (dianhua). The list goes on.

Chinese internet dissidents are especially famous for using puns. For example, they might write héxiè, "river crab", which sounds like héxié, the Mandarin word for "harmony", but with different tones. "Harmony" itself is a Chinese euphemism for "censorship", derived from the purported goal of a 2004 internet censorship law to create a "Harmonius society".

Accept 接受 Jiēshòu Add 增加 Zēngjiā Admire 欣赏 Xīnshǎng Apologize 道歉 Dàoqiàn Ask 问 Wèn Become 成为 Chéngwéi Believe 相信 Xiāngxìn Bring 带 Dài Borrow 借 Jiè Buy 购买 / 买 Gòumǎi/mǎi Change 更改 Gēnggǎi Choose 选择 Xuǎnzé Climb 爬 Pá Complete 完成 Wánchéng Cry 哭 Kū Decide 决定 Juédìng Deny 拒绝 Jùjué Dream 梦想 Mèngxiǎng Drink 喝 Hē Drive (car） 开(车) Kāi (chē) Eat 吃 Chī Enjoy 享受 Xiǎngshòu Examine 检查 Jiǎnchá Explain 说明 Shuōmíng Fall 摔倒 Shuāi dǎo Feel 感觉 Gǎnjué Fly 飞 Fēi Forget 忘记 Wàngjì

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 The earth is made up of sea and land. 地球是由海洋和陸地組成的。 Dìqiú shì yóu hǎiyáng hé lùdì zǔchéng de。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 Bananas are tropical fruit. 香蕉是熱帶水果。 Xiāngjiāo shì rèdài shuǐguǒ。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 The night skies will be aglow with fireworks. 煙花将点亮夜空。 Yānhuā jiāng diǎnliàng yèkōng。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 The bridge is now open to two-way traffic. 這座橋現在已經雙向通車了。 Zhèzuò qiáo xiànzài yǐjīng shuāngxiàng tōngchē le。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 He rode to work on a bicycle. 他騎自行車上班。 Tā qí zìxíngchē shàngbān。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 Lunch is on. 午餐送到了。 Wǔcān sòngdào le。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 We had ten day's travel by train. 我們乘火車旅行了十天。 Wǒmen chéng huǒchē lǚxíng le shítiān。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 Would you like to try pink eye shadow? 你要不要試試看粉红色的眼影？ Nǐ yàobuyào shìshikàn fěnhóngsè de yǎnyǐng？

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 The sea was blue, and white puffy clouds sailed by. 大海一片蔚藍，朵朵白雲飄過。 Dàhǎi yípiàn wèilán，duǒduǒ báiyún piāoguò。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 I need a good pair of sunglasses. 我需要一副好的墨鏡。 wǒ xūyào yífù hǎode mòjìng。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 An owl hooted nearby. 一隻貓頭鷹在附近啼叫。 Yīzhī māotóuyīng zài fùjìn tíjiào。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 I hammered a photo frame. 我釘了個相框。 wǒ dìng le gè xiàngkuāng。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 The horse jumps nicely. 这匹馬跳躍得很好。 Zhè pǐ mǎ tiàoyuè dé hěnhǎo。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 He wore a plain blue shirt。 他穿一件素淨的藍色襯衫。 Tā chuān yíjiàn sùjìng de lánsè chènshān。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 He started piano lessons at the age of 7. 他七歲開始上鋼琴課。 Tā qīsuì kāishǐ shàng gāngqínkè。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 Can this brush go for a paintbrush? 這把刷子可以用作畫刷吗 ? zhèbǎ shuāzi kěyǐ yòngzuò huàshuā ma?

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 The mask was so lifelike it was quite frightening. 那個面具非常逼真，看起來有點恐怖。 Nàgè miànjù fēicháng bīzhēn，kànqǐlái yǒudiǎn kǒngbù。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 She was trying to teach him to play the guitar. 她在試著叫她彈吉他。 Tā zài shìzhe jiāo tā tán jítā。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 The monkey made a long arm for the peach. 猴子伸臂去摘桃子。 Hóuzǐ shēnbì qù zhāi táozǐ。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 They will get married next Saturday. 他們將在下星期六結婚。 Tāmen jiāngzài xià xīngqīliù jiéhūn 。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 She put sevral cloves of garlic in the dish. 她在菜裡放了幾瓣大蒜。 Tā zài càilǐ fàngle jǐbàn dàsuàn 。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 No smoking in the auditorium. 禮堂內不准吸煙。 Lǐtáng nèi bùzhǔn xīyān 。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 He is entranced by the kindness of her smile. 他被她和善的微笑迷住了。 Tā bèi tā héshàn de wēixiào mízhù le。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 My aunt sent me a birthday present. 我阿姨送了我一個生日禮物。 Wǒ āyí sòngle wǒ yígè shēngrì lǐwù。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 Jenny wanted an ice cream cone. 珍妮想要一個冰淇淋甜筒。 Zhēnní xiǎngyào yígè bīngqílín tiántǒng。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 Oh, there's a butterfly. 哦！有一只蝴蝶。 ò！Yǒu yìzhī húdié。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 The magic cube is a toy in the shape of a tetrahedron. 魔方是個四面體的玩具。 Mófāng shì gè sìmiàntǐ de wánjù。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 There was a camera for sale in the window. 橱窗里有架相機待售。 Chúchuāngli yǒu jià xiàngjī dàishòu。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 The teacher told us a funny story 老師跟我們說了一個有趣的故事。 Lǎoshī gēn wǒmen shuōle yīgè yǒuqù de gùshì 。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 Did you go to the art exhibition？ 你去看藝術展覽了嗎？ Nǐ qù kàn yìshù zhǎnlǎn le ma？

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 Don't get angry. 別生氣。 Bié shēngqì。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 Jim is an alien in this film. 吉姆在這部電影里是個外星人。 Jímǔ zài zhèbù diànyǐng lǐ shì gè wàixīngrén 。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 Bread is mae from wheat. 麵包是用小麥做成的。 Miànbāo shì yòng xiǎomài zuò chéng de 。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 A happy Mid - Autumn Festival ！ 中秋節快樂！ Zhōngqiūjiē kuàilè！

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 He wore patent leather shoes. 他穿着漆皮鞋。 Tā chuānzhe qī píxié。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 I don't know who are you? 我不知道你是誰? Wǒ bùzhīdào nǐ shì shuí ?

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 She wears like an angel. 她穿的像天使一樣。 Tā chuānde xiàng tiānshǐ yīyàng 。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 The sky is clear. 天空很晴朗。 Tiānkōng hěn qínglǎng。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 The flower vase was cut to pieces. 花瓶被打得粉碎。 Huāpíng bèi dǎde fěnsuì 。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 I'd like some more bread, please. 我想再要些麵包，謝謝。 Wǒxiǎng zài yào xiē miànbāo，xièxie。

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 Wine is made from grapes. 葡萄酒是用葡萄做成的。 Pútáojiǔ shì yòng pútáo zuò chéng de

Daily Mandarin Chinese!每日普通話 A photographer recorded the scene on video for posterity. 攝影師用攝影機為後代記錄了這個場景。 Shèyǐngshī yòng shèyǐngjī wéi hòudài jìlù le zhège chǎngjǐng。

Talk about your ideal scenario, your philosophy, and anything you can think of. Would you like to burn incense and have your baby ushered into the world by a troupe of Tibetan monks? Great. Have your partner give birth standing on one foot while riding horseback? Have the delivery filmed live for a new reality show? Have the entire medical team speak only Mandarin Chinese so that your baby will be able to begin life bilingual? Have the baby licked clean by your pet schnauzer rather than cleaned up by the nurses? Wonderful.

bridge into mainland China. It was a pleasing message of ‘business as usual’ smartly tailored to the merchant princes of the Mandarin Oriental. Few would have predicted such Sino-British ‘harmony’ (a favoured Beijing phrase) when Hong Kong was handed back to China on 30 June 1997, after the ninety-nine-year lease on the New Territories came to an end. Then, it was all tears and angst, pride and regret. At the stroke of midnight the Union Jack was lowered to the strains of ‘God Save the Queen’, the Hong Kong police ripped the royal insignia from their uniforms, and Red Army troops poured over the border. Britain’s last governor, former Conservative Party chairman Chris Patten, recorded the final, colonial swansong in all its lachrymose glory: its ‘kilted pipers and massed bands, drenching rain, cheering crowds, a banquet for the mighty and the not so mighty, a goose-stepping Chinese honour guard, a president and a prince’. Steaming out of Victoria Harbour, as the Royal Marines played ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and

節日的第二天是星期六，上午我在幫

EpressingDurationToexpressdurationinMandarin,you’llhavetostatethenumberandtheunit.Herearecommonexpressionsinduration:______fēnzhōng>分钟->______minute(s)______xiǎoshí>小时->______hour(s)______tiān>天　->______day(s)______xīngqī>星期　->______week(s)______yùe>月　->______month(s)______nián>年　->______year(s)

Walter Benjamin suggested almost a century ago that capitalism is a religion as well, a “cult” with its own ontology, morals, and ritual practices whose “spirit … speaks from the ornamentation of banknotes.”6 I take this as a point of departure and argue that capitalism is a form of enchantment—perhaps better, a misenchantment, a parody or perversion of our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world. Its animating spirit is money. Its theology, philosophy, and cosmology have been otherwise known as “economics.” Its sacramentals consist of fetishized commodities and technologies—the material culture of production and consumption. Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism. Its clerisy is a corporate intelligentsia of economists, executives, managers, and business writers, a stratum akin to Aztec priests, medieval scholastics, and Chinese mandarins. Its iconography consists of advertising, public relations, marketing, and product design. Its beatific vision of eschatological destiny is the global imperium of capital, a heavenly city of business with incessantly expanding production, trade, and consumption. And its gospel has been that of “Mammonism,” the attribution of ontological power to money and of existential sublimity to its possessors.

到时候，他得学会怎么跟那些有钱人说话。”我知道我这样说不太好，但是我还是得说。

Erica fixed her angry gaze on me. “I can speak fluent Chinese. In Mandarin and Wu dialects. Can you speak fluent Chinese?” “Er, no . . . ,” I confessed meekly. “But I can order dinner in a Chinese restaurant.” “Great,” Erica growled. “When you meet Jessica Shang, you can ask her for some egg rolls. I’m sure that’ll go over well.

China might be a quite convincing story, through the works of a genius observer, Joseph Needham, who debunked quite a few Western beliefs and figured out the powers of Chinese science. As China became a top-down mandarinate (that is, a state managed by Soviet-Harvard centralized scribes, as Egypt had been before), the players somehow lost the zest for bricolage, the hunger for trial and error. Needham’s biographer Simon Winchester cites the sinologist Mark Elvin’s description of the problem, as the Chinese did not have, or, rather, no longer had, what he called the “European mania for tinkering and improving.” They had all the means to develop a spinning machine, but “nobody tried”—another example of knowledge hampering optionality. They probably needed someone like Steve Jobs—blessed with an absence of college education and the right aggressiveness of temperament—to take the elements to their natural conclusion.

Few Americans can claim to know China as well as Ambassador Stapleton Roy. Born in China, a fluent Mandarin speaker, Roy also served as the American ambassador to China from 1991 to 1995 and has stayed exceptionally well informed on US-China relations. He explained what happened: In a joint press conference with President Obama on September 25, 2015, Xi Jinping had proposed a more reasonable approach on the South China Sea. Xi had supported full and effective implementation of the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, signed by China and all ten ASEAN members; had called for early conclusion of the China-ASEAN consultations on a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea; and had added that China had no intention of militarizing the Spratlys, where it had engaged in massive reclamation work on the reefs and shoals it occupied. Roy said that Obama missed an opportunity to capitalize on this reasonable proposal. Instead, the US Navy stepped up its naval patrols. China responded by proceeding with militarization. In short, Xi did not renege on a promise. His offer was effectively spurned by the US Navy. The big question is how an untruth becomes accepted as a fact by well-informed, thoughtful Western elites.

行 事 公 义 、 说 话 正 直 、 憎 恶 欺 压 的 财 利 、 摆 手 不 受 贿 赂 、 塞 耳 不 听 流 血 的 话 ， 闭 眼 不 看 邪 恶 事 的 ， 16 他 必 居 高 处 ； 他 的 保 障 是 磐 石 的 坚 垒 ； 他 的 粮 必 不 缺 乏 （ 原 文 是 赐 给 ） ； 他 的 水 必 不 断 绝 。

One criterion might be mutual intelligibility: while we wouldn't expect to understand another language, we might well understand a different dialect of a language we do speak. But this criterion soon poses problems. The ‘dialects’ of Chinese (e.g. Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese) share a writing system but are mutually unintelligible, whereas the Scandinavian ‘languages’ Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are similar enough to be mutually comprehensible (sometimes with a little effort). The difference in practice is generally determined on socio-political rather than linguistic grounds: we tend to associate languages with nation states where they are spoken. Or, as cynics would have it: ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’. To avoid problems of this kind, linguists talk of language varieties.

the Greek name she had given for the image of the snake was an outright lie. In fact, she hadn’t even spoken in Greek. She had spoken in Mandarin Chinese, which she knew both Dante and Milana understood.

Thursdays she had Mandarin, private lessons out of a West Village brownstone with a woman named Li. I felt like Li distrusted me immediately because I was one of those American-born Chinese kids who wasn't really Chinese enough.

Chinese government documents show that in some Uyghur-majority areas, as many as 70 percent of children up through age five are now held in Mandarin-medium “Kindness Kindergartens” while their parents are in prisons, camps, or factories.

The Chinese had invented the modern state more than a thousand years before Europe did. A finishing touch was added when the Mandarin examination system was instituted in 124 BC under emperor Wu. Besides an army, tax collection systems, registration of the population and draconian punishments, China had another institution, one that the sociologist Max Weber considered the defining mark of a modern state, that of an impersonal bureaucracy chosen by merit.

How many years ago was it that I heard you quoting Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara? Have you forgotten ‘The True Faith of an Armorer’? ‘To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect to persons or principles: to aristocrats and republicans, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes.’ In the name of that True Faith you defended the selling of arms to Chinese mandarins and South American filibusters, and even to Nazis, who for ten years had no pretense of being a government, but were simply organized assassins shooting down their political opponents in the streets.

So I see people mocking my usage of patois… or Jamaican creole which is a form of pidgin created from Afrikaan, Spanish and English languages. This is a Jamaican page by a Jamaican author. The person in the video is Jamaican. It’s common for people to think English is an indication of intelligence albeit only 20% of the world’s population speaks English and only 5% are native English speakers. I mean English itself is a creole of sorts with words from Celtic, Slavic and Latin languages.. Smartest people in the world are Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Indians) their native languages are Hindi, Mandarin and Creole Cantonese. Swahili and Igbo are big creole languages in Africa. Linguistic discrimination is not even warranted based on how languages are developed. Glottophobics are as bad as racist with their linguicism. English is just a superstrate language due to Anglo- Saxon colonization and the British empire… English is still a superstrate because of large English speaking populations such as America, England, South Africa, Nigeria and Canada.

THE HIPPOCAMPUS: TRACKING THREATS AND MAKING MEMORIES The hippocampus is a seahorse-shaped structure in the center of the limbic system. In my live workshops, the analogy I pick for the hippocampus is that of the military historian. Its most vital job is to compare incoming information with the memory of past threats. If there’s a match, it sounds the alarm by activating the amygdala, which in turn switches on the whole fight-flight-freeze (FFF) system. 3.6. The hippocampus: tracking threats and recording memories. By deciding which signals to pass to the amygdala and which to ignore, the hippocampus regulates our emotions. Some people have an active hippocampus that effectively regulates emotion. Others do not; these unfortunates have a hair-trigger response to their own emotions. They become angry, fearful, or anxious at the slightest stimulus. Their behavior is dictated by their emotions. The hippocampus is also the seat of learning. Novel experiences produce the growth of new synaptic connections in the hippocampus. Go take a class in Mandarin Chinese, learn pickleball, date a new love interest, experiment with recipes from a Hungarian cookbook—your hippocampus will start to grow new connections. But the most essential function of the hippocampus is to catalog the bad stuff of the past, and if anything coming our way in the present resembles that bad stuff, it makes a match and turns on the FFF response.

Life was like the Bible, translated from Hebrew to Greek, from Greek to Latin, from Latin to English, from English to Mandarin Chinese.

Southern Chinese have always noshed more widely through the animal kingdom than virtually any other peoples on earth. During the Era of Wild Flavor, the range, scope, and amount of wild animal cuisine consumed would increase to include virtually every species on land, sea, or air. Wild Flavor (yewei in Mandarin) was considered a way of gaining “face,” prosperity, and good luck. Eating wild, Greenfeld explained, was only one aspect of these new ostentations in upscale consumption,

M. Keith Chen, an economist now at UCLA, was one of the first to explore the connection between language and economic behavior. He first grouped thirty-six languages into two categories—those that have a strong future tense and those that have a weak or nonexistent one. Chen, an American who grew up in a Chinese-speaking household, offers the differences between English and Mandarin to illustrate the distinction. He says, “[I]f I wanted to explain to an English-speaking colleague why I can’t attend a meeting later today, I could not say ‘I go to a seminar.’” In English, Chen would have to explicitly mark the future by saying, “I will be going to a seminar” or “I have to go to a seminar.” However, Chen says, if “on the other hand I were speaking Mandarin, it would be quite natural for me to omit any marker of future time and say Wŏ qù tīng jiăngzò (I go listen seminar).”13 Strong-future languages such as English, Italian, and Korean require speakers to make sharp distinctions between the present and the future. Weak-future languages such as Mandarin, Finnish, and Estonian draw little or often no contrast at all. Chen then examined—controlling for income, education, age, and other factors—whether people speaking strong-future and weak-future languages behaved differently. They do—in somewhat stunning fashion. Chen found that speakers of weak-future languages—those that did not mark explicit differences between present and future—were 30 percent more likely to save for retirement and 24 percent less likely to smoke. They also practiced safer sex, exercised more regularly, and were both healthier and wealthier in retirement. This was true even within countries such as Switzerland, where some citizens spoke a weak-future language (German) and others a strong-future one (French).14 Chen didn’t conclude that the language a person speaks caused this behavior. It could merely reflect deeper differences. And the question of whether language actually shapes thought and therefore action remains a contentious issue in the field of linguistics.15 Nonetheless, other research has shown we plan more effectively and behave more responsibly when the future feels more closely connected to the current moment and our current selves. For example, one reason some people don’t save for retirement is that they somehow consider the future version of themselves a different person than the current version. But showing people age-advanced images of their own photographs can boost their propensity to save.16 Other research has found that simply thinking of the future in smaller time units—days, not years—“made people feel closer to their future self and less likely to feel that their current and future selves were not really the same person.”17 As with nostalgia, the highest function of the future is to enhance the significance of the present.

I decided to study for one year, at least. But what if Chinese was too difficult? What if I didn't like it? I speak three other languages, including English. But they were romance languages, Spanish and French. Melodious and romantic, inspiring many sighs. To that end, I briefly considered learning Italian, like author Elizabeth Gilbert. Given my linguistic background, that would have been an easier, more attainable, task for me. Attempting to learn Chinese would be like setting out to land on the moon. Or a galaxy far, far away. I had nothing to compare it to.

Your soul does not exist. I have seen men in all conditions and states of lust and madness—fetishists, syphilitics, even Americans.

I love you, Kris. I’m always going to love you,” he whispered. “Please forgive me.” I looked away from him, wiping a tear from my cheek. “I can forgive you if you can forgive me back.” He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pressed his cheek to the side of my head. Our embrace was full of loss and regrets and what-ifs. Tyler was a version of my life. A path I could have taken. But now I was so far off course I didn’t even know where I was going anymore. All I knew was I was headed for a dead end. And when I got there, I’d be alone. “Kristen, have you ever heard of the red thread of fate?” Tyler said over me. “No.” I sniffled. He turned me until I sat facing him. “I’ve been studying Mandarin,” he said, speaking to my eyes. “Learning a lot about the Chinese culture. And there was a story I read that really resonated with me.” He reached out and tenderly wiped a tear off my cheek with his thumb. “In Chinese legend, two lovers are connected by an invisible red thread around their pinky fingers. The two people connected by the red thread are destined lovers from birth, regardless of place, time, or circumstances. The cord might stretch or tangle, but it can never break.” His eyes moved back and forth between mine. “You are on the other end of my thread, Kris. No matter how far apart we are, you’re tied to me. I stretched us and I tangled us and I’m sorry. But I didn’t break us, Kris. We’re still connected.” He paused. That pause that he always did on the phone, the one that told me he was about to tell me the good part. Then he pulled a tiny, black velvet box from his pocket and opened the lid. My heart stopped dead. Oh my God. “Marry me.