學中文 Learn Mandarin Chinese
Why learn chinese language? You ask …
- FUTURE: Spoken by 1/5th of the population on this lovely planet.
- PAST: Chinese culture has 4,000 years of continuous human history.
- GOOD: Amazing chinese culture: stories, history, philosophy, poetry, art, science and so forth.
Fluency in this language means having the ticket to the playground at the riverbank of tomorrow!
Now, ain’t that fun?
Mandarin language (中文) consists of Hanyu Pīnyīn (拼音) phonetic system and an “alphabet” in the form of 47,035 mandarin words/characters or Hànzì (漢字). Learning mandarin is a lesson in duality, as both right and left brain hemispheres are active when learning pictograms and their corresponding pronunciation and tones.
I have always been personally convinced that my precise drawing skills (e.g. ability to draw people’s faces from visually study them from life) are a result of years of writing Chinese calligraphy correctly. In order to produce recognizable chinese characters, one must pay special attention to the propotions, spatial placements, distances between elements of strokes in chinese characters. All these chinese character writing skills makes it feel natural to draw a human face, e.g. to judge the distance between tip of nose and tip of lips, spaces between eyes, sizes and propotions in foreshortening, etc in life drawing. Just a gut feeling!
Chinese idioms for children 兒童成語故事
Classical Chinese Poetry in easily digested format for children and adults alike.
Meet interesting people!
Travel interesting places!
Devour such interesting stories!
Taste delicious delights of the hearts.
Sing Songs and Dance in mandarin chinese!
Peek into the meaning of life!
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Joseph M.
I just stumbled upon your lovely site — and, indeed, have posted a question about Franz Schubert’s portrait on your musicians’ birthdays page.
Here I comment on your “Another gut feeling of mine, no double-blind control research on my part to prove the theory of sing-song mandarin language induced musical pitch perfection just yet”:
Whereas I cannot (from memory) reproduce the relevant references,* as a neuroscientist (and undergrad Chinese major) I can confirm your intuition: While most of us (if taught early enough) can learn relative pitch, absolute pitch on the other hand seems to be largely innate. But for whatever reason, speakers of tonal languages have a significantly higher prevalence of singers possessing absolute pitch.
* It shouldn’t be too hard to track these down, espec. via Google Scholar or even, Medline.
Thank you and do keep up the great work!
jzinius
Thank you most kindly, Joseph for taking the time to connect. With great joy and shock, I realize my ramblings are indeed read by someone out there besides coerced family members! Read by a neuroscientist, no less. Gasp! I will need to start listing the most up to date peer-reviewed references (Science, Nature) for all my hyperbolic assertions!