I am still struggling learning Chinese, and one month is for sure not enough to learn a language. The teacher told me there are 5000 characters in Mandarin but only 1500 characters that are commonly used. Although it’s not expected to learn to write any characters in the class but I was able learn 2 characters that I noticed written at the train station. Very exciting I only need to learn 1498 characters 🙂
Another student joined the class he’s from Japan. He was telling me that the situation in Japan is very bad. A lot of people are leaving Japan to go find work in Taiwan, China or Korea. He also said that the food is very dangerous because of the high radiation.
It’s been very hot here in Taipei, the temperature every day is above 35C with a lot of humidity and no wind. I’ve been trying to limit my activities in the outdoors. I recently visited the National Palace Museum. The museum has some of the most valuable collection of the Chinese culture; some of it goes back to 8000 years of china’s history. During the Chinese civil war the nationalist party removed these items out of China to Taiwan
Presently the National Palace Museum in Taiwan has the most rare and valuable collection of Jade, bronze, artifacts, calligraphy and artworks over 600, 000 items. There are only 60,000 items on display and get rotated every year so to see the whole collection you would need more than 10 years.
I also visited the miniature museum of Taipei; they feature small houses that are assembled from very little objects. It’s really impressive to see how much work goes into this. Just to put it in perspective, the sizes of the light bulb on some of the chandeliers in these houses are the size of a rice grain. They claim one of the houses has the smallest TV in the world; it’s the size of a stamp.
The houses & rooms featured in the miniature museum are just amazing. So small yet so much detail and accuracy. It would be interesting to know how much time it took making some of them. Not to mention the chandeliers and the TV 🙂
Tarek, as far as I know, Traditional Chinese is mainly used in Taiwan and Simplified Chinese is used in Mainland China (called Simplified as it was simplified in the 1950s & 1960s). So, where does Mandarin register between the two?
There are many Chinese languages, the most common one is the Mandarin, but a lot of people don’t know what do you mean when you ask someone if he or she speaks Mandarin. Mandarin is the name of the Chinese language as known to foreigners. In Taiwan, some Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore and many parts of main land China they speak Mandarin. But in Hong Kong for instance they speak Cantonese, and in some parts of main land China they speak Cantonese, Hakka, Wu and others. There has been a push by China to standardize the language that’s why Mandarin the only language that’s taught in schools. But the public announcements in Trains is still done in 3 or 4 different languages. And these are languages not dialect, for instance; if someone from Hong Kong who speaks only Cantonese come to Taiwan, he cannot understand people on Taiwan and they cannot understand him.
As for the traditional versus the simplified, it relates to the way of writing. It’s still Mandarin but the way of writing in Taiwan is different than China. If a Taiwanese goes to main land China, he might be able to communicate in main land China but he may not be able to read everything. Same for a main land Chinese who come to visit Taiwan, he will be able to communicate but he may not be able to read some of the writing.
It’s really fascinating when you think about it, China is like a country of multiple countries and it was just recently that has been unified as one country.
Not as simple as I thought 🙂 Well, thanks to you, I’ve got a much better idea now. Thanks for this!!