Quotes About Mandarin

We did not, of course, speak Mandarin, but the question "What the hell do you think you're doing?" has a familiar ring in any language. The mere idea of even attempting to account for ourselves defeated us. We settled instead for explaining, by means of elaborate mime and sign language, that we were barking mad. This worked. He accepted it, but then hung around in the background to watch us anyway.

It is not often realized that even the word 'Mandarin', standing as it does for a central concept in Chinese culture, is derived from a Sanskrit word, Mantr?, which went from India to China via Malaya.

perfect pitch is much more common among people who speak a tonal language, such as Mandarin, Vietnamese, and several other Asian tongues, in which the meaning of words is dependent on their pitch.

I'm sorry," James says. "I don't speak Mandarin." Here's a liability of his: he always wants to help, but his ignorance makes him useless to his own kind. Not just to this man, but to every lost Mandarin-speaking traveler fumbling in mid-transfer who mistakes him for a helpful guide.

I am Chinese. I speak fluent Mandarin. And I go, 'Man, it's about time a Chinese person could step up to a Hollywood screen, and international screen, and help save the world.'

Sichuanese dialect is like Mandarin put through a mangle. So the Mandarin 'sh' becomes 's', vowels are stretched out like warm toffee, there are pirate-like rolling 'r' sounds at the end of sentences, and no one can tell the difference between 'n' and 'l' or 'f' and 'h' (the province of Hunan, for example, is known in Sichuan, helpfully, as 'Fulan').

With the potentially disruptive issue of the role of Islam in the state temporarily out of the way, the praetorian guard and its mandarin friends sanguinely accepted the constituent assembly's stance on fundamental rights. As they knew only too well, the proof of the pudding lay in the eating.

I've just had a wonderful time doing Chinese music, and it's been so rewarding for me. I feel like there's so much potential in mandarin music, and there's so much, you know, ground left to be broken.

I was born and raised in China, Mandarin is my first language, and I definitely know America. I think that will be my strength, to try and bring the two worlds together.

His critics, like H. G. Wells, blamed him for his mandarin attitude towards life, which prevented him from any involvement with the social and political issues of the day.

This is not a military war in the old sense. It is not even a political war. What we're facing here is a social war, a class war. As long as we don't destroy the mandarin class, abolish excessive tenancy rates and do fail to give every farmer his own plot of land, this country'll go Communist as soon as we turn our backs.

The memories of long love gather like drifting snow, poignant as the mandarin ducks who float side by side in sleep.

When I was at Yale, I was one of the students chosen to go to China. I lived there for 1-1/2 years and I can speak Mandarin fluently.

Example 3. (T: Male Mandarin teacher in his late twenties. B1 and B2 boys about 13 years old; G1: a 12-year-old girl.) T: (Speaking slowly as he writes on the whiteboard) ?-?-? (bai wulong). Mess up. ?? (wulong), black dragon. ??? ???? Wulong Tea, do you know? Black Dragon tea. ?? (wulong)? means /mI ?eIp/.

For Mandarin scripts, there's software now where you can just insert the Chinese script, and it comes out all in pinyin.

Language-wise, my mom and dad's dialect, they're pretty obscure. It's Chinese, but not your traditional Chinese, like Cantonese or Mandarin. It wasn't something that I got to use very much growing up. We eventually just spoke English around the house.

One suit for the White Devil!" in Mandarin

There were dumplings on the train, sold by grim men and women with deep lines cut into their faces by years and worry and hunger and misery. This was the provinces, the outer territories, the mysterious China that had sent millions of girls and boys to Canton to earn their fortunes in the Pearl River Delta. Matthew knew all their strange accents, he spoke their strange Mandarin language, but he was Cantonese, and these were not his people. Those were not his dumplings.

ignored the expensive dress and affected mandarin nails in favor of the personality which blazed like a beacon

We want a money that some government mandarin can't just whisk into existence with a pen stroke.

Cantonese, which has up to nine tones as opposed to the five in Mandarin, is much more versatile and one of the richest dialects in Chinese.

So Mandarin, I picked it up, I spent a year in Beijing studying but then when you don't use it, languages, you just kinda forget it all.

Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.

I do speak Mandarin, and I also relate to the hunger that China has for culture and architecture and style.