I have a question!

[luvthesun2]

I have a question about a phrase! This is the pronunciation of it. I do not know Chinese at all, but my boyfriend said this to me and I wish to know what it means. The phrase is "Aye eesh ta mus, kee mi ya dee ti" Your help would be appreciated greatly! Thank you!

[%sig%]

[Celeste Olivier]

I'm going to be travelling to Bejing and living there for 5 months and desperately want to know what the main and proper dialect to speak while I'm there......
If you could please respond that would be wonderful
Thank you kindly

[seba]

In Beijing they speak mandarin Chinese, and all over China people have to learn it at school. So if you speak mandarin you will find your way through China ...

[Dylan Sung]

Allegedly, since there are different accents across China.

Dyl.

[seba]

and not everybody's pronounciation is as correct as it should be

altough most Chinese speak their 'dialect', when you (as a foreigner) try to talk to them, they try to speak mandarin in the most proper way they can ... (that's my experience, one of the few one's over there )

[Jane]

hi i was wondering if anyone knew how to translate the name Lauren in chinese?
thanks Jane

[fiona]

when did chinese first start being spoken?!
plz answer soon!!!!!! thanx!

[Dylan Sung]

"Chinese" like any language has a long linguistic history. Along the way it also branched out into various dialectal forms, so you've heard of Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghai, there are others but won't bore you. If you trace the writing and recording of Chinese back, via the history of China, then they supposedly goes back several thousand years. Before then, some proto language, the ancestor of Chinese must have existed. Linguists think Chinese and Tibetan may have a common linguistic ancestor, and call it by the big heading known as Sino-Tibetan.

How far back this goes is anyone's guess. European languages branch out from a so called Proto Indo European ancestor. Likewise the guess on how old it could be.... Try googling for SinoTibetan and ProtoIndoEuropean, and the like and see what it says on the net...

Dyl.

[mike]

Is chinese really that hard to understand

[Dylan Sung]

Depends what you reckon is hard!

Dyl...