Category Archives: Mandarin

Website for kaiji characters 解字の書き方

Kaiji (解字) characters are often used for carving one’s name on a stamp and used to sign documents.

Here is a very useful website which allows you to enter the characters in Chinese or Japanese and the corresponding kaiji characters are output as gif images. Try it here: http://www.yutun.net/tool/001.htm

This is the example for 版画作品展 Hanga sakuhin ten (wood block print exhibition):

Learn Mandarin

先下手為強(xian1 xia4 shou3 wei2 qiang2) this is the Chinese equivalent of the common English expression first come , first served. For more interesting expressions like this one go and check out one a dayfor one Chinese expression daily in both traditional and simplified characters with pin yin readings and English translation. Very simple site!

Taxi!

Although Mandarin Chinese is the largest dialect of the Chinese languages and most widely spoken, it is interesting to note that there are still linguistic differences between Taiwan mandarin and Mainland Chinese mandarin. For example the word for taxi on the Mainland is commonly known as chu zu (出租), which translates literately into English as a for hire or rent and familiarly known as da di I am not sure what is the Chinese character for da di is but [...]