50 Fun Facts About Chinese Language (Mandarin)

Which everyday machine do Mandarin speakers call 'diànnǎo', a word that literally means 'electric brain'?

Computer is diànnǎo, 'electric brain', a word coined by a Taiwanese expert in a 1965 book. Mandarin builds many modern words like this: a mobile phone is shǒujī, 'hand machine'.

Which animal's everyday Mandarin name, xióngmāo, translates literally into English as 'bear cat'?

Panda in Mandarin is xióngmāo, 'bear cat', a name first given to the red panda. In Taiwan many people flip the order and say 'cat bear' instead.

In the classic Mandarin tone drill on the syllable 'ma', the dipping third-tone 'mǎ' names which animal?

Horse is mǎ, but change only the pitch and the same syllable becomes 'mother' (mā) or 'hemp' (má).

Which number is prized as lucky in China because its Mandarin name, bā, sounds like the word for prospering?

Eight, bā, echoes fā, 'to prosper'. That is why Beijing opened its Summer Olympics on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008.

Which city, named 'northern capital' in Chinese, gave standard Mandarin its pronunciation?

Beijing, the 'northern capital', got its name in 1403 to set it apart from Nanjing, the 'southern capital'. A national commission settled on its dialect as the spoken standard in 1932.

Which English term for eager enthusiasm did US Marines adopt from Chinese words they understood as 'work together'?

Gung-ho was the motto of China's industrial cooperatives. Marine officer Evans Carlson borrowed it for his Raider battalion, and a 1943 war film carried it into everyday English.

Which English phrase for a fierce-looking but harmless threat is a direct translation of the Chinese 'zhǐlǎohǔ'?

Paper tiger translates zhǐlǎohǔ word for word. Mao Zedong made it famous by aiming it at the United States, and he joked to Henry Kissinger in 1973 that he had coined the English phrase.

Speakers love to claim the Chinese word for what combines 'danger' and 'opportunity', a reading linguists reject?

Crisis is wēijī, and its second character alone means something closer to 'change point' than 'opportunity'. Sinologist Victor Mair calls the popular reading a widespread public misperception.

Which Chinese term, now shorthand for martial arts, originally meant any skill earned through hard work and practice?

Kung fu first appeared in English print in Punch magazine in 1966, already narrowed to fighting. In Chinese it still praises any mastery won through long effort.

The Mandarin word 'chá' and the Min Chinese word 'te' gave the world its two names for which drink?

Tea reached English in the 17th century through Dutch traders, whose word traces back to the Min Chinese 'te'. Regions supplied overland along the Silk Road say 'cha' or 'chai' instead.

Which Southeast Asian country lists Mandarin as an official language alongside English, Malay and Tamil?

Singapore launched its Speak Mandarin Campaign in 1979 to promote the language over other Chinese varieties at home. Even so, English remains its strongest rival there.

Standard Mandarin distinguishes how many main tones, alongside a light neutral tone on weak syllables?

Four tones separate otherwise identical syllables, and pinyin marks each over the vowel, starting with a flat bar for the high first tone. Signs and logos usually leave the marks out.

Which philosopher's Western name is a Jesuit Latin version of the Mandarin title 'Kǒng Fūzǐ', meaning Master Kong?

Confucius was coined by Jesuit missionaries in the late 16th century. Mandarin speakers usually call him Kǒngzǐ, a shorter form of the same title.

Which condiment's name is often traced to 'kê-chiap', a Hokkien Chinese word for the brine of pickled fish?

Ketchup first appeared in English print in 1682, long before tomatoes were involved. Early recipes were made from mushrooms, oysters or walnuts.

The Mandarin word 'kuàizi', built on a character meaning 'quick', names which everyday item of tableware?

Chopsticks are kuàizi, written with a bamboo element over the character for 'quick'. The older word, zhù, survives in Hokkien and in the character Japan uses for hashi.

Which Chinese tile game was originally called 'máquè', the Mandarin word for a sparrow?

Mahjong took shape in 19th-century China under the name 'sparrow', which several southern varieties of Chinese still use for the game.

Nüshu, a script written for centuries in Hunan province's Jiangyong County, was used by which group of people?

Women of Jiangyong wrote Nüshu songs in cloth-bound booklets that they gave to their sworn sisters three days after a wedding. The name simply means 'women's script'.

The oldest known Chinese writing was carved into ox shoulder blades and the shells of which animals?

Turtles supplied flat belly shells that royal diviners heated until they cracked. They read the cracks as answers and carved the question and the verdict on the same piece.

Which Chinese variety, native to Guangzhou and Hong Kong, can a Mandarin-only speaker barely understand?

Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin but sounds so different that the two have little to no mutual intelligibility. Its English name comes from Canton, the old Western name for Guangzhou.

Which Japanese word, meaning 'Han characters', names the Chinese characters that Japan adapted for its own writing?

Kanji share the page with hiragana and katakana, two syllabic scripts that Japanese writers later derived from Chinese characters.

English took the word 'Mandarin' from which European country's traders, who used it for Chinese officials?

Portugal's traders said mandarim, a word they had picked up in Malay and that goes back to the Sanskrit for 'counsellor'. The tongue those officials spoke then took the same name.

Pǔtōnghuà, the name mainland China gives to standard Mandarin, translates into English as what?

Common speech is the mainland's label, while Taiwan calls the same standard Guóyǔ, 'national language'. The old court term Guānhuà, 'officials' language', is the one English rendered as Mandarin.

Měiguó, the Mandarin name for the United States, begins with a character that literally means what?

Beautiful is the literal sense of měi, but the character was picked for its sound. Měiguó shortens Měilìjiān, an attempt to write the word 'American' in Chinese characters.

Which English word, first printed in 1950 during the Korean War, is a literal translation of the Chinese 'xǐnǎo'?

Brainwashing copies xǐnǎo, 'wash brain', which Chinese intellectuals first used approvingly for modernising one's thinking. Journalist Edward Hunter gave English the darker sense.

Which literal translation of the Chinese cheer 'jiāyóu' was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018?

Add oil began as a Hong Kong English rallying cry at sporting events. One popular account traces it to fans urging on drivers at the Macau Grand Prix in the 1960s.

Chinese texters type which number as shorthand for 'I love you', because it sounds like 'wǒ ài nǐ' in Mandarin?

520 is read wǔ èr líng, a near rhyme for wǒ ài nǐ, so lovers type the digits instead of the three characters.

Which soft drink is sold in China as 'Kěkǒu Kělè', a name settled in the 1930s to echo the brand's sound?

Coca-Cola chose Kěkǒu Kělè after shopkeepers' home-made versions matched the sound but came out as nonsense such as 'bite the wax tadpole'. The official name suggests a mouth made happy.

Which bird do Mandarin speakers call 'māotóuyīng', a name that literally means 'cat-headed eagle'?

Owl is māotóuyīng, from māo, 'cat', tóu, 'head', and yīng, 'eagle'. Mandarin often names animals by description, so a giraffe is a 'long-necked deer'.

Which flightless bird's Mandarin name, 'qǐ'é', translates literally into English as 'standing goose'?

Penguin became qǐ'é, 'standing goose', in 1844, when Samuel Wells Williams coined the word.

Mandarin numbers its weekdays; which day is 'xīngqīyī', the word for week followed by the number one?

Monday is literally 'week one', and the count runs on through Saturday. Only Sunday breaks the pattern, taking the word for 'sun' or 'day' instead of a number.

Mandarin needs a counting word such as 'gè' between a number and its noun; what are these words called?

Classifiers change with the noun: flat things such as tables take zhāng, while long, thin things take tiáo. In casual talk, gè stands in for most of them.

The Chinese character for 'tree', 木, written three times over as 森, produces a character with which meaning?

Forest is the sense of 森, where tripling 木 suggests a great many trees. In the same pictorial spirit, a person leaning on a tree, 休, means 'rest'.

The Chinese character 明 is usually explained as a pairing of the symbols for sun and moon; what does it mean?

Bright is the meaning of 明, read as the sky's two most luminous objects side by side. An early variant of the character paired the moon with a window rather than the sun.

The famously complex Chinese character 'biáng', written with 58 strokes, names a Shaanxi style of which food?

Noodles named biangbiang are said to take their name from the slap of thick dough on the counter. The character is so unusual that modern dictionaries leave it out.

Mainland China adopted which set of characters in the 1950s, while Taiwan and Hong Kong kept older forms?

Simplified characters came out of a 1956 scheme meant to raise literacy by trimming strokes from everyday forms. Malaysia writes with them too.

Written Chinese ends a sentence with which mark, where English would use a solid dot?

A small circle, 。, closes a Chinese sentence and takes up a full character's width. Its Mandarin name, jùhào, simply means 'sentence mark'.

The Mandarin word 'dào', which gives Taoism its name, is most often translated into English as what?

The Way is the usual rendering of dào, a word whose plain senses include 'road' and 'path' and, by extension, a method or doctrine.

Traditional Chinese texts run top to bottom in columns; in which direction do the columns follow one another?

Right to left is how the columns advance, each new one starting beside the last. Horizontal lines read like English spread from the nineteenth century under European influence.

Which emperor, buried with the Terracotta Army, ordered China's rival writing styles replaced by one standard script?

Qin Shi Huang ordered the change around 220 BC, in the same sweep that fixed the empire's weights, measures and coinage. The seal script he imposed replaced the styles of the states he had conquered.

Which Mandarin toast, written with the characters for 'dry' and 'cup', tells drinkers to empty the glass?

Gānbēi is closer to 'bottoms up' than 'cheers', since it literally asks for a dry cup. Japan's kanpai is the same two characters in their Japanese reading.

Which older romanisation, still seen in Taiwanese names such as Kaohsiung, did pinyin largely replace on the mainland?

Wade–Giles takes its name from its creators, Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles. Mainland China dropped it after adopting pinyin in 1958, but Taiwan still spells names such as Chiang Ching-kuo in that style.

Which phonetic alphabet, named after its opening symbols, do Taiwanese schoolchildren use to learn Mandarin sounds?

Bopomofo strings together the sounds of its first symbols, just as 'alphabet' comes from alpha and beta. Taiwanese phones and keyboards still use it to type characters.

Dungan, a Mandarin variety spoken in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, is officially written in which script?

Cyrillic sets Dungan apart from every other language in its family. Its speakers descend from Hui Muslims who left north-west China in the 1870s and 1880s and settled in Central Asia.

The Kangxi Dictionary of 1716 sorts Chinese characters under 214 building-block components known by which name?

Radicals work as the dictionary's index: characters are grouped under one of them, then sorted by how many extra strokes they need. The emperor ordered the work in 1710.

A famous Chinese poem written with one repeated syllable tells of a poet who vows to eat ten of which animals?

Lions fill the roughly 90-character tale, in which every syllable is the same sound in one tone or another. Linguist Yuen Ren Chao used it to show how badly Chinese fares when written by sound alone.

Zhou Youguang, often called the father of pinyin, held which job in New York before returning to China?

Banker by trade, Zhou went home in 1949 to help rebuild the country and joined the committee that devised pinyin in the 1950s. He lived to 111.

Which legendary scribe of the Yellow Emperor is credited in Chinese tradition with inventing written characters?

Cangjie is said to have had an extra pair of eyes, and legend says ghosts wept when his characters appeared. The UN chose the date of its Chinese Language Day as a tribute to him.

China's standard Mandarin proficiency test for foreign learners is known worldwide by which three-letter abbreviation?

HSK abbreviates Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì, the exam's old name, and the letters stuck even after it was renamed Zhōngwén Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì.

Which Chinese word names the compact classical idioms, many drawn from ancient poetry, that educated Mandarin prizes?

Chengyu usually pack a whole story into a handful of characters, and some are lifted straight from the Classic of Poetry.

Oracle bone inscriptions, the earliest form of Chinese writing, record royal divinations from which Bronze Age dynasty?

Shang kings' questions and the answers they received survive on some 150,000 inscribed pieces, most of them dug up at the dynasty's last capital near modern Anyang.