Chinese Hanfub By 瞳莞汉服

adjusting to another culture is going to be hard. that sounds obvious, but i don’t think anything can actually prepare you for having to adjust to another place and culture. so here are some things i wish someone had told me beforehand, plus some tips from my experience.

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reading web novels/articles for traditional chinese mandarin language learners

if you’re like me and want to eventually make reading your primary way of learning chinese characters, you’ll notice that a lot of the resources online are using simplified characters. new tong wen tang (chrome; firefox) is a browser extension that will help you convert webpages between simplified and traditional chinese. and regardless of the writing system, another helpful extension to have is zhongwen (chrome; firefox), which adds the ability to hover over a chinese character and see a pop-up containing the pinyin and english translation of a word.

before enabling the two extensions (notice how everything is in simplified!):

after enabling new tong wen tang and zhongwen (text has been converted to traditional chinese and doesn’t interfere with zhongwen’s pop-up dictionary):

So... how do you say "rice" in Chinese?

Seems like an easy question, right? In some languages it certainly would be, but since rice has been a staple crop of parts of what is now China for at least 10,000 years, Mandarin Chinese has developed a lot of ways to talk about rice. In this post, I'm going to walk you through not two but three characters that mean rice and how they are used.

#1: 飯 (S: 饭) fàn

This is probably the first rice word that most learners learn. It means cooked rice, and because of how central rice is to many people's diets it also means meal and can be used metaphorically to refer to one's livelihood.

飯 is used in the names of dishes like 炒飯 (炒饭) chǎofàn "fried rice" and 滷肉飯 (卤肉饭) lǔròufàn "Taiwanese braised pork rice". In the sense of "meal", it is used in the words 吃飯 (吃饭) chīfàn "to eat a meal", 做飯 (做饭) zuòfàn "to cook" and 飯館 (饭馆) fànguǎn "restaurant".

#2: 米 mǐ

This is usually the second rice character that learners encounter. It means uncooked rice.

米 is used in words that refer to rice as an ingredient, such as 米粒 mǐlì "grain of rice" and 糯米 nuòmǐ "sticky rice". It is also used in the names of ingredients and dishes in which rice is processed in some way instead of being served boiled/steamed, such as 米粉 mǐfěn "rice flour, rice noodles" or 米豆腐 mǐdòufu "rice tofu". Finally, the character 米 also appears in the names of certain non-rice grains, such as 玉米 yùmǐ "corn" and 小米 xiǎomǐ "millet".

#3: 稻 dào

This is the character that most learners can go a long time without encountering. It means rice plant or paddy. It's mainly seen in words somehow relating to the cultivation of rice.

There are multiple words that can mean "rice paddy", such as 稻穀 (稻谷) dàogǔ or 稻田 dàotián. 稻 also appears in words that refer to parts of the rice plant, like 稻草 dàocǎo "rice straw" or 稻穗 dàosuì "rice ear". Finally, 稻 is used in words referring to various crops of rice, such as 早稻 zǎodào "early-season rice" or 晚稻 wǎndào "late-season rice".

Putting It All Together

Just because these words have distinct meanings doesn't mean they can't overlap! In fact, they can be combined to make new ways to say rice. 米飯 (米饭) mǐfàn means "cooked rice", and 稻米 dàomǐ means "rice (crop)". But can you combine 飯 and 稻? You can't-- they are just too far apart in meaning.

So there you have it-- three characters for rice. This is just a small snapshot of all rice-related vocab in Chinese, but I guarantee almost all of it contains one of these three characters. Do you have a favorite rice-related word? Or do you speak a language with many different ways to talk about a staple food?

i found these two quick tests that are supposed to estimate how many characters you know:

test one

test two

as the explanation for the second test explains, you should only click on a character if you know both the pronunciation and definition since it’s fairly easy to guess a character’s pronunciation. you can take both tests in simplified or traditional

according to these tests, i know somewhere between 2,800 and 2,900 characters! what about you?

(if you study japanese you can give these tests a try too just for fun!)

this post is meant to be a directory of every resource I come across for Mandarin, often referred to as Chinese or Standard Chinese. It will be a continuous work in progress so thank you for your patience! if you have any issues or things to add, please reply to this post!

info

history of the chinese writing system

“in mandarin chinese, we don’t say…”

language learning profile

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the languages gulper

wikipedia

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Numbers

1314: “For ever”, usually preceded by a phrase such as “I love you” or whatever. 1314 (pinyin: yīsānyīsì) represents 一生一世 “one life, one world” (pinyin: yīshēng yīshì).

233: “laughter" 233 (pinyin:èr sān sān） represents 哈哈哈 （pinyin: hā hā hā).

4242: “Yes” or “It is”, 4242 (pinyin: sìèr sì'èr) represents 是啊是啊 (pinyin: shì’a shì’a).

520: “I love you”. 520 (pinyin: wǔ'èrlíng) represents 我爱你 (pinyin: wǒ ài nǐ).

555: “(crying)”. 555 (pinyin: wǔwǔwǔ) represents 呜呜呜 (pinyin: wūwūwū) the sound of tearful crying.

666: “doing something really well” 666 (pinyin: liùliùliù) represents 溜溜溜 (pinyin:liùliùliù ).

7451 or 7456: “I’m angry”. 7451 (pinyin: qīsìwǔyī) or 7456 (pinyin: qīsìwǔliù) represents 气死我了 (pinyin: qìsǐ wǒle)

748: “Go and die!”, 748 (pinyin: qīsìbā)：represents 去死吧 (pinyin: qùsǐba), the equivalent of “Get lost!”, or “Go to hell!”

88: “Bye bye” (goodbye). 88 (pinyin: bābā) represents “bye bye" 

995: “Help”, “Save me!” 995 (pinyin: jiǔjiǔwǔ) represents 救救我 (pinyin: jiùjiù wǒ).