Skip to content

Category Archives: linguistics

Does the Beijing-R mean anything?

I happened to have lunch the other day with some university students, a couple of Guangdongers and a Shanghainese, in one of those Rolex-Louis Vuitton malls that clutter central Beijing, the kind where shopgirls outnumber customers 23 to 1 on gleaming floor after floor of luxury goods, until you get to the food court and [...]

Posted 14 January 2008 † syz § beijing-r § běijīnghuà § érhuàyīn ‡ Comments (45) °

Update: Mandarin edges out Fyem

An earlier post mentioned no tense in Mandarin as a bonus for the second language learner. It compared Romance languages and English. Now you can be happy you’re not learning Fyem, which I just came across here:
“Fyem, spoken in Nigeria, has, as well as a past tense, tenses for precisely yesterday and precisely earlier [...]

Posted 28 December 2007 † syz § ‡ Comments Off °

Mandarin is easy; 中文 is a pain in the…

From the recent deluge of email*
Dear SYZ: Is it unfathomably hard to learn Chinese, or is it actually laughably easy?
- Tone-deaf in Dōngzhímén
Dear TD in DZM
I feel your confusion. Daily. The short answer is, Yes. Another common answer is “Go to hell” (if you happen to ask someone who has just misread 农 for 衣 [...]

Posted 16 December 2007 † syz § beijing-r § běijīnghuà § érhuàyīn ‡ Comments (7) °