What would a straight Chinese man say to describe another man as "very gay"?

Arh hah, let me tell you the new generation expressions!

『同性恋者』is too formal to address a gay man. I would say it's equivalent to "homosexual".

The popular terms to the concept in Chinese have nothing to do with their original meanings, just as "gay" now has nothing to do with "joyous", but instead, they directly take after English counterparts.

他显然并非直男。
Obviously he is not a straight man.

Comment: Now in Chinese net community, the word 直男 is stigmatized by extreme feminists, referring to conservative, male-chauvinistic men. So it's now not a strict equivalence to "straight" in gender preference aspect.

他看起来给给的。
He looks like a gay.

Comment: Don't suspect!  It is actually a transliteration of "gay", and it IS the most common expression. And for this reason, often it's used unchanged as "gay".

他看起来gaygay的。
他一看就是弯的辣～

Comment: To avoid being seemingly harsh, often we use some tricks to soften the tone to show our innocence and acceptance. As in example, 辣 is a homophonic substitute to 啦, and a cursive ~ conveys (somehow) cute tone.

他明显就是基佬。

Comment: WARNING! Many homosexual people may feel offended by addressing them 『基佬』. It's derogatory. The etymology of 『基』meaning homosexual related is now hard to determine. Here are two explanations: 1. 基 in Cantonese is pronounced very similar to "gay". 2. In ancient Chinese, 㚻 （ji1）is the character for homosexual practice, which has evolved to 鸡, finally to 基. But whatsoever, 基佬 in Cantonese （as in Mandarin now）is derogatory. However, 基 used alone is not derogatory, as in 『腐眼看人基』.

活学活用，EXAMPLE（轻小说文风）：

我的新同桌似乎是个基佬。自上次座位轮换他与我同桌以后，我上课时常能感受到侧方的异样目光。原本我不是很在意，但偶然投以回视，发现他正奇异地注视着我，那是什么神情？稍有些怯退又探寻的眼神，像是由于实在太过喜欢（？）但又害怕主人发现而盯着鸟笼的橘猫所表露。四目相对，他疾速收回双眼，这次轮到我凝神注目，看他有何动作。果然，不到一分钟，一双黑眸又瞥到我这里，但发现我居然正在看，便泄气地折返。诶呀呀，这也太给了啦！我思忖着自己有什么优点呢？瘦高、匀称、四肢颀长，嗯唔，算是分明的五官吧！此后很久我都不再察觉他偷瞄了，突然稍有不习惯。课正讲到无聊的部分，我不禁端详起同桌来：嗯嗯，头发浓黑茂盛、粗硬，短茬勾勒出圆润的后脑，深颔，嘴唇饱满，隆准……还不错，我想着。至于眼睛嘛……我移动目光向眉眼看去，正接上他深邃的瞳仁——我大吃一惊：“你你你看我干嘛，好好上课啦！”他没有回应，只不过缓缓转动眼珠向我扫射，眉梢轻挑，下巴微抬——“啊，被我发现了～”，他一定是这样想的吧！我感觉皮肤有些干燥，摸一摸脸，居然滚烫！明明，明明是他先的，我有什么紧张的呢！“但他确实还挺好看的……”停停停停！这一句是从脑海哪个角落冒出来的？难不成我要给魂觉醒，从此被掰弯了？我十八年来都是钢铁大直男哎哎哎哎！“哪里有★那么多可爱的女同学，你看上哪一个了？”啊，不要再这样想了！正当脑内挣扎之时，我忽略了右方，浅浅的笑意。

Nah~ I used all four ways to express "gay". May this short paragraph help your own writing!


Why “mistreat” is translated as "三顿饭" by Google translate?

Mistranslation is the cause of this ridiculous translation.

Don't trust Google translate, especially when it comes to Chinese. Just report this mistranslation to Google.


I found something in Baidu Encyclopedia.

For 吹牛

http://baike.baidu.com/view/3806.htm

  Originally 吹牛 comes from 吹牛皮 (blowing cow leather). In the old times,
  people who lived along the Yellow River used cow leather to make
  rafts, cuz the yellow river could easily destroy wood boats. However
  there was no bumpers at that time. So it was strong people who were
  responsible to blow air into the "leather bag" to make it a raft.
  However, even the strongest man could not make it by himeself. So if
  someone says "I can blow a raft by myself", he must be bragging. As a
  result, people use 吹牛皮 to refer to bragging.

The photo comes from: http://www.chinavalue.net/Wiki/%E7%89%9B%E7%9A%AE%E7%AD%8F.aspx

For 拍马屁

http://baike.baidu.com/view/26474.htm

  When it was Yuan dynasty in ancient China, the mongolians loved riding
  horses (cuz they conquered China and many other places with their
  cavalry force). At that time, when a mongolian met another mongolian,
  he would pat the other's horse, and say something like "nice horse".
  It was the best way to make generals and officers of the Yuan dynasty
  happy by saying "your horses are good". And when the mongolians ruled
  China, this custom also came to China.

  However, originally it was 拍马 (patting the horse), not 拍马屁.

Forgive my translate ^_^


How is 儿化 represented in other romanization systems like Wade-Giles, Zhuyin Fuhao, etc.?

This is not a complete answer, but the Wade-Giles example chart on this Chinese-language Wikipedia entry includes "kêrh" as a transcription of the rhotacized "哥儿." I do not know the general rule.

The GR (Gwoyeu Romatzyh) transcription system, which was used officially in China from 1928-1958, has complex rules for 儿化 spellings. I can't find a complete chart online, but, again, Chinese Wikipedia has some details. GR uses "l" to represent rhotacization, but the precise rules for how the resulting work is spelled differ depending on the syllable final and tone.


What is the difference between 书呆子 and 迂夫子?

书呆子 is most accurately translated as IYI (Intellectual yet idiot), a phrase coined by
Nassim Taleb. While "nerd" in modern English often refers to someone who is rusty in social skills.

迂夫子 is seldom used in modern Chinese. On those occasions they are used, it often refers to someone who adheres to strict moral code, sometimes in a way that embarrasses others. It is not a derogatory word, but sometimes used in a humorous tone.


On the day: Difference between 每到教师节 and 每到教师节这一天

"每到教师节这一天，..." refer to the actual day, and the actual day alone

"每到教师节，..." can refer to the actual day or the time period around that day.

If you said: "Every Christmas, all the family members would come home from different parts of the country."  It gives room to the possibility of the family members arrive in different days. (may be a day early or a day late)

If you said: " Every Christmas day, all the family members would come home from different parts of the country." then it must mean all of them arrive on Christmas day.

Another example:

每到教师节, 心意咭的销售量都会比平时大几倍 (the increase of greeting card sale wouldn't occur just on the actual day, it would happen days before.)

In short, "每到教师节这一天" refers to one specific day only; "每到教师节" can be used as a shortened form of "每到教师节(期间)"


Now let's begin with the syntax analyzes:

波兰(Subject) 是(Prediate) 欧洲最漂亮的(Adjective) 国家 (Object).

The whole statement is structured by:

S+P+Object. But there comes a short pharse to modify the Object：欧洲最漂亮的.

最：means "most" in English, used as an adverb to modify the adjective 漂亮 (beautiful).

And let's come to "……的", it REALLY has many usages, according to your descriptions, "最...的" is a fixed phrase, yes, that's right.

Besides, a verb/adjective + 的 = someone who is doing the job/relying on sth.

E.g：

 卖鱼(selling fishes) <=> 卖鱼的 (fish-selling men).

 卖花(selling flowers) <=> 卖花的 (flower-selling men).

And what's more——For MOST CASES, We add "的" at the back of an adjective to modify a noun:

漂亮 is an adjective, but we don't say：他是一个漂亮人 but 他是一个漂亮的人

Another example: 这是一个木头的船。

Sometimes "的" means "A belonging to B,part of B"：

我的苹果(My apple), this apple belongs to me.

牛的眼睛（An Ox's eye）, this eye belongs to the ox.


What does "kwukyel" mean in regards to Chinese language characters?

kwukyel or gugyeol is a Korean system to write Chinese characters phonetically that predates Hangul. As for 丷 itself, to quote from Wiktionary:

  This is a kwukyel note. Kwukyel was a system formerly used in Korea whereby correct interpretation of texts written in Classical Chinese was aided by small interspersed notes such as this one. The notes represent Korean morphemes but were only used within Chinese text.


How has "素以为绚" be rendered into English?

You asked a hard question.

The original text of Analects is as following.

子夏曰、巧笑倩兮、美目盼兮、素以為絢兮、何謂也。
子曰、繪事後素。
曰、禮後乎。
子曰、起予者商也、始可與言詩已矣。

There is a wide range of opinions in the interpretation of 素以為絢.

子夏 was a discipline of Confucius. He asked Confucius the meaning of an ode 碩人 in "The Book of Song" (詩經). The ode praises a noble lady 莊姜, who was the wife of the Duke of Dukedom 衞.

Unfortunately, the known version of 碩人 contains only 巧笑倩兮 and 美目盼兮, but 素以為絢兮 is missing. This breeds speculations and opinions from Han Dynasty to nowadays.

Confucius did not explain 巧笑倩兮 and 美目盼兮. They are too obvious. He explained 素以為絢 with 繪事後素.

James Legge translated 素以為絢 as "The plain ground for the colors" and 繪事後素 as "The business of laying on the colors follows (the preparation of) the plain ground". This is what the majority of scholars interpret it.

  For simplicity, before you draw or paint, you need a plain ground. On
  a plain ground you could draw and paint anything colourful.
  This is what 素以為絢 means.

The story does not end here. After the explanation of Confucius, 子夏 connected it with 禮, namely ceremonies, which is the core theme in Confucius study. (If a person with qualities of plain ground, namely, honest and trustful, he would learn 禮 well.)

Confucius commented that 子夏 got what his mean and then he had the qualification to discuss the odes in "The Book of Song".

The odes are full of allusions and metaphors. They requires a learner not only understanding the literal meaning of the words, but also getting the underlying meaning of odes and connecting them to life.

The story of 素以為絢兮 in the Analects illustrates how to learn and use "The Book of Song".  It is more than the words 素以為絢.


This is one of the core conceptual mistakes that learners of Chinese make.
Let me try to shed some light on it:

了 does NOT express past tense, it expresses change.

Why not past tense?!

Because as 倪阔乐 has also stated, (1) there are no tenses in Chinese.
And because (2) 了 can express change in the past, present and future, too.

Let's just examine these two statements. The first one should not be that hard to realize, because in Chinese you do not conjugate verbs, in fact there is no such thing as conjugation in Chinese, so there is no exact corresponding term to express: 'was', 'wrote', 'had', etc. In Chinese, you express actions that took place in the past in a different way, most notably by adding temporal markers, like 昨天 (yesterday), 以前 (before, in the past), 当时 (in those times), etc. 了 may or may not be used in these sentences, it's entirely possible to construct sentences that recount past actions without using 了, e.g.

我年轻的时候家里没有电脑。 When I was young, we had (lit. there was) no computer at home.

If I said: 我年轻的时候家里没有电脑了。, that would be different. The latter expresses the idea that in the past we had a computer, but when I was young my family somehow lost or got deprived of that computer (i.e. there was a change from the "state" of having a computer at home to the "state" of not having one anymore).

Also, to further illustrate that 了 and the past tense do not go hand-in-hand, let's take a look at this sentence:

哦，啤酒就很快没了！ Oh, we'll soon run out of beer!

As you see, here we express something that is going to happen in the (near) future, yet still use 了 – to express the expected change of going from the situation of having beer to the situation of having no more beer. And to have an example where 了 can be used to refer to the present, regard the following example: You sit at your desk at your company and your colleagues are Chinese, at noon one of them will shout: 吃饭了！ Time to eat! So why do we use 了? Because it express the change of interrupting your work and taking a lunch break.

By now, I think, it should be clear that 了 and past tense are not connected. You use 了 when you want to express that there was, is or will be some change that you want to point out, regardless of the perceived tense (past, present, future) of the action or event.

We can now go back to your examples and work them out:

We were in(at) the shop on Saturday There is not really a change here, so suppose you are telling your friend what you did on Saturday: 星期六我们在商店。 However, this sentence may also express that Saturdays you are usually at the shop. So, you may want to add some extra elements to make it clear, like last Saturday: 上个星期六. The context (previous sentences or earlier information about your usual Saturday activities) may also help the listener to understand what you mean.

The proposed translation of the other sentence We were happy. has two major mistakes. First, 快乐 takes the place of the predicate by itself, there is no need for 是 (as a copula, unlike the English is) [This is something you need to lookup in your textbook, I won't go into it]. The other mistake is the use of 了. As you by now know that it does not express past tense per se, it's just not going to turn your sentence into past tense. You have to express past with some modifier, e.g., by introducing something that expresses the temporal aspect. You could use 当时 or 那天, or many other words entirely depending on how and when things happened. 当时我们很快乐。 In those times we were happy or 那天我们很快乐。 That day we were happy. What the that day refers to depends on the rest of your story, when you say something like We were happy., you probably have already established the time frame in an earlier sentence, so it should be clear, or choose another  more adequate temporal marker.

So this is quite a bit of an explanation, and do expect some people to add comments on it, so please also check those, and most importantly consult your textbook or teacher on this for more example and exercises.


Some suggestions:

多愁善感 is a common phrase for describing moody

Moody teenagers would be 多愁善感的少年 or simply 多愁少年

林黛玉 in 紅樓夢 is a classic example of 多愁善感的少女 (多愁少女)

~

憤青 short for 憤怒青年 (angry teenager)

~

抑鬱少年 (depress teenager)

~

情緒化 means 'emotional'

情緒化的少年 means 'emotional teenager'


How does one understand the [verb] + 在了 grammar structure?

在了 is very common, even colloquially, but it'd be better to see it as separate 在 and 了.
The usage of 了 and its position in a sentence is complex. In the example sentence

手机忘在了出租车上,

忘 here can be understood as a labile verb (perhaps?), meaning "be forgotten".
在 is a 结果补语 (complement of result).  Accroding to 刘月华(Liu Yuehua) et al.'s 《实用现代汉语语法》(Practical Modern Chinese Grammar, I'll refer to it as Gr from now on), the function of 在 is to "表示通过动作使人或事物处于某个处所，后边一定要有处所宾语" (convey the idea that something or someone is placed in some position via an action, and must be followed by an object of location).
出租车上 is the 处所宾语 (object of location) of 在. The object 出租车, or taxi, usually can't convey the idea of location on its own, but can do so when compounded with the adverb of position 上.
了 is a 动态助词 (aspect particle).  According to Gr, it's a bit complex; for a verb like 忘 in the sense of "to leave something at some place", 了 means the action has happened and has ended.

I think your problem here can boil down to where should the article 了 be in this sentence?
According to Gr, "如果谓语动词后有结果补语，“了”位于结果补语后：动词＋结果补语＋“了”＋宾语" (if there is a complement of result after the verb, then 了 is placed after the complement of result: verb + complement of result + 了 particle + object). So,
手机(Subject)忘(Verb)在(Complement)了(Particle)出租车上(Object)。
This rule can explain the first four sentences you provided. I think the fifth one is the same, but I'm unsure for now.
Also, please note that in every sentence you provided, 了 can be placed at the very end. This kind of 了 is called a 语气助词 (Modal particle), and the meanings of some sentences will change when you move 了 to the end, and some will not change very much. However, this is a much more complex grammar mischief of Chinese and I don't consider myself capable of talking about it.
Hope this helps.


Interestingly, there is another character 褢 [same reading as 褱], with 鬼 inside.

Here are a few parts where Humanum mentions the relationship between 褱/褢/鬼 and even 歸:

  又表示給予，史牆盤：「受(授)牆爾福，褱(懷)祓彔(祿)」，兩句句意相同，意謂授給牆多福。《詩．檜風．匪風》：「懷之好音」，毛亨傳：「懷，歸也。」「歸」有饋贈之義。

So there is a usage of 褱 that means 歸 [kjuj] "give" and related to 饋 [grjujs] "make offering to."

  又通假為「鬼」，伯[冬戈]簋：「隹(唯)用妥(綏)神褱(鬼)，唬(效)前文人」，意謂以安寧神鬼，效法前世有文德的人。

Here's evidence that 褱 [gruj] and 鬼 [kjujʔ] were homophones. Actually, 歸 and 鬼 might be cognates (人所歸爲鬼), but I digress. The point is, [kjuj] is the much more likely target reading to hit for 褱, not the [k-l- | -p] initial/final pattern of 眔.

  「褱」與從「鬼」聲的「褢」字有異文關係，《漢書．外戚傳》：「褢誠秉忠」，顏師古注：「褢，古懷字。」玄應《一切經音義》十八「懷孕」作「褢孕」。

褢 was used in the Han-Tang era to mean "hold in," without the emotional semantics.

  又表示安撫、招來，毛公鼎：「率褱(懷)不廷方」，意謂安撫不來朝覲的方國。陸賈《新語．道基》：「附遠寧近，懷來萬邦。」
  ...
  又借「鬼」為「懷」，表示安撫，《睡虎地秦簡．為吏之道》簡46-47貳：「君鬼(懷)臣忠，父茲(慈)子孝，政之本殹(也)。」

This is the same as the "give" meaning.

We learn several things:

鬼/褢/歸/褱/懷 were near homophones and were interchanged in writing at various times.
There is a "hold in" meaning of 褱 that seems cognate with the "hide tears/miss" meaning for which the character was apparently constructed, possibly a direct extension, but more likely to be the actual root -- there is a Proto-Tibeto-Burman etymon [*kway] that means conceal/hide.
There is a (fairly archaic) "give" meaning of 褱 that is related to some of the meanings of 歸 (namely its use as 饋), and seems like a phonetic loan and unrelated to the first meaning.
The reading of 褱 [gruj] is fairly secure given the readings of the other characters, in particular, the [g/k-r/j-uj] pattern. It is most likely not related to the reading of any crying related etymon, for which there is a fairly established Proto-Sino-Tibetan reconstruction [*krap], nor to the 泣 [khrjəp] that is posited to be 眔, nor to the 徒合切 [dup] spelling given by Shuowen for 眔, nor to 涙 [c-rjuts], 隶 [c-rəts], or 逮 [ləts] that have been written with 眔 in Oracle Bone for its meaning and/or sound.
See also my comment to droooze's answer on why I believe 褱 is a rebus.

So, to answer the question: "Why doesn't 褱 sound like its phonetic etymon 眔?" It's because it has no sound component, and 眔 is not its phonetic part. On the other hand, the later character 褢 would be good candidate if you're looking for a legitimate phonetic part for a cognate of 褱.


What is the difference between 实质 and 本质?

I think when used as nouns, they have the same meaning. (But in the phrase "现象与本质", often we don't use “实质” to replace “本质”.)
When used as adjectives 实质 means "substantive" or "actual", 本质 means "essential".

  本质区别、本质原因
  实质进展、实质性证据


How to say "Say hi to someone" as a description?

“Say hi to someone” in Chinese is just a simple 打招呼 (unless you mean "please say hi to so-and-so for me - then it's 问好).

so what you want to say here is: 我跟老板打了个招呼....


What is this character and what does it mean? (Characters identified: 仁爱)

仁爱（rén ài），谓宽仁慈爱；爱护、同情的感情。语出《淮南子·修务训》：“ 尧立孝慈仁爱，使民如子弟。”


The fact that it is a transliteration of English "dog" points to its possible use and appearance. Perhaps, it was used for those foreign breeds of dogs that looked different from the breeds that Chinese people were accustomed to at that time (end of Qing dynasty).

But also note that this particular word (道搿) does not seem to appear in any other text than the mentioned novel (文明小史). So it might have been simply the novelist's invention, that the authors of Hanyu Da Cidian still felt they needed to explain. (Mind you that this dictionary was compiled before widespread use of corpus linguistics, so the authors wouldn't really know if this word is just a one-time appearance across all of the Chinese literature, or if it got some traction and started to be used by others.)


According to dictionaries, 人 here means this sense:

  （人的身体或意识） state of
  one's health; how one feels:

  When the patient was taken to hospital, he had already lost
  consciousness.

  送到医院，(他)人已经昏迷过去了。

  I haven't been feeling well for several days.

  这几天我人不大舒服。

In your context, it means the sense of one's body. It could be also referring to one's feelings/consciousness(see the above example).

It is a pretty common usage of 人. Let's say when I say 我人不太舒服, I might mean 我身体不太舒服, feeling vomiting, headache and etc.


What does 多少 mean in 但是我也相对得到多少的感动?

What 多少 means?
In this context it means "somewhat"
"Somewhat" is an adverb.
多少的感动 = "somewhat affected / moved / touched"


It is a 棋諺 (Go saying/ common wise words for Go playing).

見棋不是棋 would mean the hand that's obvious to you is not the hand --- meaning you need to look beyond the obvious and decide your move with more in-depth analysis.

Simply put: If a move is obvious to you, it would also be obvious to your opponent, therefore, it wouldn't be as effective as a surprise move.

Shu Ha Ri 守破離 is a martial art saying. The only commonality between 守破離 and 見棋不是棋 is they are both "saying/ common wise word" (口訣).

Other 棋諺 I remember:

左右同形中間有棋 : refers to "the middle point is the key to connecting two weak groups with the same shape".
七死八活 : "seven dead, eight alive", referring to the minimum number of stones in a row on the side that you need in order to live.
白鶴守巢 : "white crane guarding nest" or, as usually translated into English: the crane's nest, a specific famous instance of a snapback.

I play Go too, but I am only at SDK level.


There are several cases in Mandarin of multiple sounds sharing the same symbols in Pinyin, such as -uan as you've noticed, as well as -i which has multiple sounds associated with it. In the case of -uan, this final behaves differently when prefaced with the initials y-, j-, q-, and x-. As a general rule, -u, -ue, -uan, and -un behave differently when prefaced with those 4 initials and you'll see them separated  out on any pinyin chart:

The u in these cases is actually a ü which does not exist in English and is something I struggle with myself so I'll just redirect you here.


How many Chinese characters have multiple readings/pronunciations in Mandarin?

There are official lists for this. See the following pages in the Chinese Wikipedia:
普通话异读词审音表 for mainland China
國語一字多音審訂表 for the ROC (Taiwan)
Neither of the lists is complete; they are basically there to provide standard answers to test students on correct pronunciation.

How many characters have variant readings is actually quite hard to answer; one reason is the large number of 'literary' readings which are still often used when reading or reciting older literature.  Chinese opera of all varieties typically uses such readings.  This phenomenon (called 文白異讀) is quite extreme in some dialects; in the Minnan dialect for example, there are variant readings (sometimes multiple variants) for almost every character.

Note: Here is the official version of 普通话异读词审音表 from the 国家语言文字工作委员会 (State Language Commission). They don't seem to have a pdf version, but you can copy the text from places such as 百度百科 (here).

All those characters where the list says 统读 mean that those characters 'used to' have different readings in earlier versions of the list. Now through a wave of the SLC's magic wand, they have miraculously disappeared. Actually many (most) people continue to use them, but For your HSPK you may skip them.  This is one way to pick out the first ones to learn.

The ROC list is much longer than the PRC list, because it reflects more of the 文白 differences.  Be sure to keep the ROC and PRC readings separate! A number of the differences between the two standards are because the PRC simplification process has merged two different forms with two different readings into one form with (still) two different readings.


How do you express intention (for + gerund English structure) in Chinese?

Since there's no indication of you actually studying Chinese, I could just give you the answer by providing the correct Chinese phrase .

However, other users who are actually studying Chinese can benefit from a more detailed answer.  I would make here.

In English, the grammar structure of "a proposal for creating a website" is:
"A" (classifier) + " proposal" (noun) + "for creating a website" (adjective phrase)

A word for word translation in Chinese would be 「一個建議，有關創立一個網站的」

The problem is, the  (classifier)+ (noun)+( adjective phrase) structure  is rarely used in Chinese grammar;

We use (classifier) + (adjective phrase) +(noun) structure in Chinese instead. So the sentence should be 「一個(有關創立一個網站的)建議」

「的」 in 「有關創立一個網站的」is needed to indicate「有關創立一個網站」 is a adjective phrase, (the same rule apply to adjective clause, relative phrase and relative clause)


Learning abstract "tone contours" for words and phrases

There's an  animation named "喜洋洋和灰太狼" might give you a little help. It is usually for Chinese children at 3-4 years old when they start to learn the Chinese.
I am a chinese native speaker, if you have any other problem,I'm glad to help.


Where should I place the comma in large numbers?

It's 50 000 or 50,000, the same as international standard.

Reference: 出版物上数字用法的规定 (General rules for writing numerals in publications)

  8    多位整数与小数: 8 Multidigit integers and decimals:

  8.1  阿拉伯数字书写的多位整数和小数的分节 8.1 Segmentations for multidigit integers and decimals written in Arabic numerals

  8.1.1  专业性科技出版物的分节法：从小数点起，向左和向右每三位数字一组，组间空四分之一个汉字(二分之一个阿拉伯数字)的位置。  8.1.1 Segmentation rules for professional scientific publications: from the decimal point, towards the left and the right, make every three digits a group; the width of the gap between two adjacent groups should be 1/4 of a Chinese character width (or 1/2 of an Arabic numeral width).

示例：2 748 456      3.141 592 65

  8.1.2  非专业性科技出版物如排版留四分空有困难，可仍采用传统的以千分撇“,”分节的办法。小数部分不分节。四位以内的整数也可以不分节。  8.1.2 For non-"professional scientific publications", if it is difficult to use "quarter space", the traditional segment comma "," is acceptable. Decimal part should not be segmented. Integers less than 4 digits can be either segmented or not segmented.

示例：2,748,456    3.14159265    8703

Edit by Stan:

If following 8.1.1, then the 四分空(quarter space) should be used according to the standard. Unfortunately, the standard hasn't exactly defined which space should be used. The list of spaces can be found in wiki. And practically, when rendering NOT by a monospaced font, I suggest using

U+2005 Four-Per-Em Space, or
U+202F Narrow No-Break Space

for the "quarter space". Specially, the "Narrow No-Break Space" is for the intention of not breaking a digit number.

Rendering results with mixed font 宋体+Calibri via Microsoft Word are as follows:

and for the line-breaking case (text aligning setting: 两端对齐 Justify)

*Note that in the "Narrow No-Break Space" case, no matter how you edit the content, the number won't be break into two lines.

BTW, you can use the Alt and the numeric keypad to input the special space, like Alt+8197 or Alt+8239.


The translations on internet are not very accurate. I will give the best translations of 叱咤 and 叱咤风云 below. :P

The word chì zhà can be written as 叱吒 or 叱咤, but not 叱诧 (chà）。

Originally, it means 大声吆喝、呵斥 (shouting loud and powerfully)。It is often used in the idiom 叱咤风云。It means 怒斥之声,令风云失色。形容轰动一时的人物。(Thundering voices out-powered roaring storms. It describes a phenomenal and influential character.)


How can I find where a dialect word come from?

There ARE dialect dictionaries available in this country, for example:
现代汉语方言大词典
But it includes 41(!) volumes and may cost you more than $300.


What is the difference between 省 and 省份?

IMO, it's OK.

PS: 省份 means province, but it can't be used with specific names. For example we can say 山东省, but not 山东省份.

Some examples: (from http://www.fantizi5.com/ciyuzaoju/zj23292.html)

1、辽宁是中国的一个省份。
2、有些工作地点遥远，在另一个省份。
3、并不奇怪的是，这些省份都位于中国较富裕的东部。
4、开始的时候，我向其他省份的亲戚朋友们询问，或者向他们传达我的信息。
5、但是，瓶颈已经出现了，一些省份报告说电力短缺，并且煤的库存量很低。
6、有些省份报道了用电短缺和煤炭低库存的现象。
7、在2004年总统选举中，该家族帮助她赢得了在这一省份的绝大多数选票。
8、在荷兰的12个省份中，每个省都会有一双特别设计的木屐鞋。
9、有报道说今年在沿海省份中因为劳动力短缺和工人要求提高工资，工资也大幅上升。
10、在中国的一些省份，其比例史无前例的达到了130比100。
11、我和妻子住在不同的省份。
12、中国政府压低了煤油和其他自然资源的价格，牺牲了内地出产这些资源的省份的利益，造福了使用这些资源的沿海出口商。
13、在收到卫生部的进一步信息之前，世卫组织将发布详情，以表格显示所有24例的发病日期、结果和省份。
14、在2007年，中国最北部的省份黑龙江报告了夏季干旱，这几乎是闻所未闻的事情，通常这时候是汛期。
15、其中许多城市位于远离北京和上海的欠发达的内陆省份。
16、在接下来的四天时间里我们要穿越五个省份，游历其中的三个。
17、在改革税制中，你们和下面的省份没有遇到任何比较强烈的对抗吗？
18、我们已呼吁其他省份的人们加入进来。
19、但是俄罗斯方面没有作出回应，并且一直在轰炸格鲁吉亚这个要求分离的省份周边的一些地区。


我們走去了三分鐘 and 我們走路了三分鐘 are unnatural. The common way to say it is 我們走了三分鐘.

走去 is not a good set. We don't really use it.

More often, 走路 is more like a gerund, and 走 alone is usually used as a verb. You can say 我們走路走了三分鐘.

步行 could be used as a verb as it's in your example.

So, these sentences convey the same thing:

  我們走了三分鐘.

  我們走路走了三分鐘.

  我們步行了三分鐘.


主要 as adverb?? or is it a sub+pred as subjet phrase

Fix #1

'Mainly' = '主要是'. The 是 is omitted

补习老师[主要是]帮她练习什么?

(What does the tutor [mainly] help her practice?)

Also, it would be more specific to use "补习老师的工作" or "补习老师的責任" as the subject instead of just  "补习老师"

  Q: "What is the tutor's job mainly help her practice?" (补习老师的工作主要是帮她练习什么?)

  A: "The tutor's job is mainly help her practice English." (补习老師的工作主要是幫她練習英語)

Fix #2

Using 主要 as an adjective:

  补习老师的主要工作是帮她练习什么?

  补习老師的主要工作是幫她練習英語

In this case, 主要(main) would be the adjective for the noun 工作 (job) and you have to add 的 after 补习老師 to indicate possessive


入 (to put into/ to enter into)
进 (to advance/ to advance and enter)

进入 (advance into/ to enter) is a compound word

进(advance) is the main verb

入(into) is the resultative/ directional verb particle


Which part of speech is 看起来: an adverb or a verb?

'看起来' means "seem" (look like) and it is a verb, same meaning as '似乎' (seem)

  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/seem

  seem:

  intransitive verb

  1 : to appear to the observation or understanding

  2 : to give the impression of being

Example:

He seems very weak = 他看起来很虚弱/ 他似乎很虚弱

he seems quite angry = 他看起来很生气/ 他似乎很生气

看起来 is usually reduced to 看来 in everyday speech


生抽酱油 (light soy sauce) and 老抽酱油 (dark soy sauce) are two different types of 酱油 (soy sauce). 生抽 is the abbreviation of 生抽酱油 while 老抽 is the abbreviation of 老抽酱油, 酱 is the abbreviation of 酱油, 酱 also refer to a general name of all kinds of sauces.


The Chinese text says "he died in 1610 and was buried here in the next year", the English text is just an indirect tranlation.


I am not an expert in this area but online search gave me:

Cataplasma is a Spanish word. It could be a typo here. The English version is Cataplasm, Wikipedia says:

  A poultice, also called cataplasm, is a soft moist mass, often heated and medicated, that is spread on cloth over the skin to treat an aching, inflamed, or painful part of the body. It can be used on wounds such as cuts.

巴布膏, according to Baidu Zhidao, means:

  巴布剂是一种外用贴膏剂，在日本有较久的应用历史，系药材提取物或化学药物与适宜的亲水性基质混合后，被涂布在背衬材料上制成的贴膏剂。

From what I read, the narrow meaning of cataplasm and 巴布膏 may not be exactly the same, but in your context they both mean medicated cloth patch applied on skin. I think the translation you've mentioned is accurate.


How to say "Oops"; or other exclamation/interjection you might say if you make a mistake

There is no exact equivalent of the English "oops" in Chinese.

This is mostly because "oops" is a special English word, with an uncertain etymology but one theory is that it derives from "upsy-daisy". It is special because it is only used to express a mistake; I think you'll find that many other languages also don't have an exact equivalent of "oops".

Therefore I think you are right that 哎呀 is a close equivalent, but unlike "oops" it can be used to express general surprise, and it is onomatopoeic. Other related words that people can utter include the shorter "呀" or the longer "哎呀妈呀", depending on region and/or severity.

And yes, obviously there are many Chinese curse words that can be used to express "oops", similar to English words like "shit" or "damn". I won't list them because there are so many, and I'm sure many regional variants that I don't know of.


What is few English translations for 吃窩邊草?

Do you mean like 兔子不吃窝边草?

If so, you could try something like "Don't bite the hand that feeds you" or "Don't foul your own nest."

Colloquially (and if you want a phrase with more profanity) "Don't shit where you eat" is common and could be used instead.

Also, a proverb like "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" is pretty intuitive as well.


賖 is listed in Hanyu Da Cidian and defined as:

  shē
  同“賒1”。

The entry for 賒 says:

  1 买物延期交款。

Zisea also just notes:

  同【赊】。

Not sure if their info is from 字海 or 汉语大字典 but there is no mention of Chữ Nôm in either of the references. It seems to just be treated as a variant in modern Chinese.

Wiktionary also gives the following references:

  参考
  - 大字源：1673页，第14字
  - 汉语大字典：第6卷，3643页，第2字
  - 宋本广韵：165页，第3字
  - 辞海：1275页，第5行，第4字
  - Unihan数据：U+8CD6

and only mentions:

  异体字
   赊


Hello! Can someone please translate: 'My Little Ghost' to Chinese?


What is the difference, if any, between 即使 and 無論？

They have different meanings.
即使 is the correct word in this case because it means "even if" or "in fact".
無論 means "regardless" (as does 不管) and would be used in a sentence like 無論是誰畫的，etc. (regardless of who painted it, etc.).


楊牧 《十二月十日辭清水灣》

  我探首看崖下潮來潮去
  讓記憶擱淺在那裏。正午
  窗子裏空氣虛構一種寧靜
  花瓣無懈可擊，紛紛拋落針織
  刺繡上，暗微的香氣洴澼浮沉
  湧進我多風的心裏

  光影在石礁一帶遊戲。遙遠
  水鳥各自東西，隨我的意志
  翻飛，有些在夢的邊緣失落
  有些自動回歸。山勢略顯憂愁
  傾斜若時間之餘韻
  太陽在翳紅與蒼黃間忐忑滑行

  By the cliffs, I overlook a tide that comes and goes
  and leave my memory stranded there. At noon
  behind the window the air fabricates tranquillity
  the petals are impeccable, their delicate
  fragrance scattered over the stitching
  floating, rushing down to my goustrous heart

  Light and shadow play around the rocks. Further out
  seagulls break from each other, fluttering
  by my grit some are lost at the edge of dreams
  though others return. The ridge seems to dishearten
  it lies aslant like the rests in a temporal cadence
  with care the sun slides from crimson to straw

  利文祺 和 Colin Bramwell 合譯

翳紅 crimson

蒼黃 straw


How to write character components on a keyboard?

You need 五笔输入法, but I think it would be very difficult to learn, even to native Chinese speakers.

I think the best way to do it is draw it with mouse, some input method support the feature.


(女 vs 女): Unicode points U+5973 vs U+F981

Astoundingly, while there are explanations as to why these events happen in general, there is none concerning the actual symbol under question.

U+F981 exists for the reason of Korean standard KS X 1001, the primary Korean standard. It has a peculiar feature: it has multiple actual duplicate characters. For some reason, the standard decided: if a character has N Korean readings, it will be encoded N times, in locations corresponding to all readings.

女 was encoded twice, due to the process of N-erosion in Korean: once, as Row 50 Character 19, with the other starting with [n], for the reading nyeo, another time as Row 69 Character 92, with other the other starting with [yeo], for the reading yeo. Hence, for a backwards compatibility with this standard, Unicode encoded the character once – but added another codepoint at U+F981, to guarantee that the Korean texts typed in some environment where the difference was vital (I don’t know, perhaps to make readings recoverable?), then the Row 50 character goes to the normal one, and the Row 69 one maps to the compatibility one.

There is lots of stuff in Unicode made for backwards compatibility, deal with it.


Using 到底, how could we naturally complete the sentence 虽然这是两棵不同的植物，...?

Try:

  虽然这是两棵不同的植物，但我们到底应该怎样来区分呢？// Though these are two different plants, how on earth should we distinguish them?


I think if this this phrase means

release your stress and get a little rest, (maybe take some breath to help you relex ?)

there is some Chinese expression “缓口气”


翻译这个传统的中国地图 －－坤輿萬國全圖－－

Many of the names have Japanese katakana so if you (learn to) read katakana, that will help you. E.g., in Europe, Italy 意大利亞 has イタリア (i-ta-ri-a), and in the Pacific, Solomon Islands 沙蠟門島 has サラモん (sa-ra-mon).

Some katakana and Chinese don't match though, like Madagascar, which katana is マダカスカ (ma-da-ka-su-ka) but the Chinese is 仙勞冷祖島 (with a Chinese approximation of Madagascar as an also-known-as, "一名XXXXX").

Australia looks totally wrong.


These are font names

方正康体简体 (Standard kang Simplified)

方正粗倩简体 (Standard Bold Qian Simplified)

ＭＳ Ｐゴシック (MS P Gothic)


Is this email correct grammatically and structurally? 希望你一切都好。我已经学习七张纸你给我。……

There are some basic grammatical things you should take note of, along with some stylistic/cultural things you need to keep in mind, considering that you are writing to a teacher, and not a peer. Furthermore, letters are a unique class of literature in most languages, including Chinese. There are specific formats, traditions, and phrases that are unique to letters. In the modern setting, some apply to emails as well, while some are considered a bit archaic. Your command of the balance between modern and traditional will grow as you write and receive more and more letters. I've written some notes sentence by sentence below.

張博士晚上好 -- This sounds a bit Western to me, which isn't necessarily bad, because many native speakers are also influenced by Western phrases these days. In more traditional spheres, the opening to a letter usually follows the formula: 稱謂＋提稱。稱謂 basically means a name, in this case it's just 張博士。 提稱 literally means "elevating phrase." There's a whole list of these things--I've attached a helpful guide below in case you're interested. For a teacher, an appropriate 提稱 is 尊鑑 or 台鑒。  They literally translate to something like "Please view, your dignity." This opening phrase is ALWAYS followed by a :, and nothing else.
希望你一切都好。 The second line is always on the second line and indented. Also, when referring to someone who is higher than you in social class--in this case, to a teacher-- always use the more polite 您。There's not much else wrong with this sentence, except that if you want to be a bit fancier, you could add a 啟辭, literally "opening phrase." Some suitable ones include 「謹啟者」。
我已經學習七張紙你給我。Grammar--take note of the modifying clause here, 「你給我」。This is directly modifying the noun clause 「七張紙」。Modifying clauses come before the noun in Chinese, and is linked with the word 「的」。You seem to have gotten it in the next sentence, so I imagine this was more of a careless mistake. Additionally, the word for study guides, which I'm assuming the 紙 are, is 「講義」or 「學習單」。As to the verb--已經 is paired with Verb+了 to denote tense. And finally, use 您。This gives us: 「我已經學習了您給我的七張講義。」
明天我也要提交ＬＴＴ1。 I don't really understand the context here, so it's hard to say whether or not this sentence should be changed. One thing to note, though, is saying 「明天我也要」implies a connotation of you either really looking forward to submitting LTT1, or you being forced to do so. Chinese contexts get crazy sometimes and this is a good example.
除了你發送的兩封電子郵件之外，還有什麼我應該學習的？ This may be just me, but it sounds a just a tiny tiny wee bit demanding. In Chinese, just a bit more polite fanfare is often a good idea. Other than the usual 您 instead of 你，there's something you can make even more polite for the second part. A more polite sentence could be 「不知道還有沒有其他我應該學習的講義/重點/內容？」
謝謝你的幫助。 - 您

6.你的學生。 In Chinese letters, we don't use the last sentence to describe ourselves. Usually the last line is used to express some polite sentiments to the receiver, such as gratitude, love, care, etc.. This is highly formulaic and you should always consult a guide before you write this. Some gratitude lines include: 「多勞費心，銘感不已」, which means "I have endless thanks for your worries and inconvenience," or 「至盼即時示下,無任感禱」, literally "I very much look forward to your guidance, and am very thankful."

7.歐陽威利 - Following the letter, it is customary to write the word 「緘」 to mark the ending of the letter. In a letter that doesn't have any strong emotions, just the one word is fine. However, if you wish to express more, such as in a case of respect, you may write 「謹緘」, literally "I close this letter with much care".

Some extra info: In Chinese, there's something called 「抬」, which literally means lifting up, or elevation. It is used when you mention a respected person's name within the body (i.e., not the opening or the ending) of the letter. This applies to basically all writings, including novels, official documents, plaques, and of course letters.

There are many kinds of 抬，and there are two that are the most common: 「平抬」and 「挪抬」。平抬 is when you put the respected name in the next line. For instance:

張博士親鑑：

博士晚上好。學生聽聞

王安娜博士近日發表論文，昨日拜讀，奈學生愚鈍有諸多不解之處，特書此請教

張博士高見。

As you can see, breaking the line every time this happens can get quite a bit clunky, especially in official emails that involve a lot of people. Thus, people invented a compromise, i.e. 挪抬. This means just adding a full space before the respected name.

張博士親鑑：

博士晚上好。學生聽聞  王安娜博士近日發表論文，昨日拜讀，奈學生愚鈍有諸多不解之處，特書此請教  張博士高見。

The full edited letter would read:

張博士尊鑑：

謹啟者希望您一切都好。我已經學習了您給我的七張講義，明天也將提交LTT11。
  除了您發送的兩封電子郵件之外，不知道還有沒有其他我應該學習的講義？

多勞費心
歐陽威利 謹緘

中文傳統文書格式


Which one of these two ISO 639-2 code refers to Traditional Chinese, chi or zho?

chi and zho stands for the Chinese language, but not one of its writing forms.

Specific codes for traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese widely in use being zh-Hant and zh-Hans respectively, specified by IETF and also RFC 5646.

The use of improvised codes "tc" and "sc", which abbreviate "Traditional Chinese" and "Simplified Chinese", are often observed too in Chinese websites.

So, just as @TactMayers said in the comment, I also think that the designer chose them deliberately, or simply due to misunderstanding.

By the way, here may not be a right place for this question; Stack Overflow is more suitable.


Fixing sentences with object and complement after a verb

Different from other verb complements that you can place directly after the verb and before the object, the verb complement 来 and 去 require the object to be placed between the verb and them,

Insert the object between the verb 回 and the verb complement 来 as in '(回)中国(来)' = '(back to) China (here)' connects the object with the verb in Chinese grammar
Place the object after both the verb 回 and verb complement 来 as in'(回来)中国' = '(back to here) China' , the verb and the object would become disjointed.

The verb complement that can be placed directly after the verb and before the object here is 到, as in '回(到)中国' = 'back (at) China' not '回(来)中国' = 'back to (here) China'


cha,
usually use it as, fork, you stick fork into food. you stick your finger into your mouth, etc. its usually not aggressive.

ci,
the second one, basically as, needle, eg: the fish bone hurt my finger... when you are having a shot from doctor, etc.

tong,
I feel this is like, you use weapon firmly stick into something, a bit aggressive. for example, the knife sticked into your body...etc

zha,
this one is like an accident, you accidentally hurt your finger, by a very small, sharp thing, for example: the glass hurt me, you can use "zha", also "zha" usually is not deep, its like hurt you on the surface...

just a brief explain.


Writing critique request: Upgrading your DNA is like upgrading software on your computer

我们不知道谁在互联网上泄露了这个发明，**但是以后， **几乎每个电子公司开始提供廉价的适配器。

但是以后: But later on (xxxxx), you don't need a comma between.

  我们不知道谁在互联网上泄露了这个发明，但是以后几乎每个电子公司开始提供廉价的适配器。

有的人认为免费开源（FOSS）社区发挥了作用。

有的人: some of the people, usually you are referring to a group of people you have mentioned before but you didn't here, use 有人 instead

有人: someone

  有人认为免费开源（FOSS）社区发挥了作用。

如果拥有电脑，像把软件更新一样，现在你可以在网上更新自己的DNA。

  就像电脑软件更新，现在你可以在网上更新自己的DNA。

社会的态度完全改变了：

社会的态度 : the attitude of society

社会态度 : the society's attitude

  社会态度完全改变了：

起初没人想要编辑自己的DNA，但很快发现了“DNA优化人”有许多巨大的竞争优势。

想要: apply to objects, e.g. 我想要你 (I want to have you)

想: apply to actions, e.g.  我想你 (I want you/ I miss you)

  起初没人想编辑自己的DNA，但很快发现了“DNA优化人”有许多巨大的竞争优势。

如果你不愿意维护最新自己的DNA，就找不到工作、做什么事都比别人慢、交恋人也很难等。

维护: means repair/fix use 维持 instead

维持: maintain

很难等: if you need to list out examples, you need to provide the category of your examples, like 困扰 (worries).

就会有.....等困扰: you will have worries such as ....

  如果你不愿意维持最新自己的DNA，就会有找不到工作、做什么事都比别人慢、交恋人也很难等困扰。

总之，人们不得不接受大家需要一直安装更新，否则不会成功。

安装更新: install updates ,更新 can be use as a verb already, you can just say 更新DNA: update DNA

不会成功: you are missing the subject of this bit, what kind of things won't work/succeed?

  总之，人们不得不接受大家需要一直更新DNA，否则生活不会成功。


I do not think it is dated, I have been seeing this characters in company names as well.

The character 砼 is invented as a substitute for word 混凝土，which is often used but complicated to write. 砼 means 人工石，which is what concrete is.

You can look at 百度百科 and other resources to find information on it.


In Taiwan, According to dictionary owned by Ministry of Education.
的 can mean:

句尾助詞：置於句尾，表示肯定或加強的語氣。

(助詞 at end of the sentence denoting affirmation, or intensify tone.)
有一天你會明白的它 is not correct. You put 它 at wrong position. 有一天你會明白它的 can be better.


Help to decipher Russian names written in Chinese characters

the link provided in the 3rd comment has two russian name mentioned:
“華西列夫”, which would be “vasilev”, “vasilyev”, “vasiliev” or “vassiliev”
another one is “闊菲爾格”
the place they visited was “黃岩”, the trees was “citrus”
https://baike.sogou.com/v141878.htm
http://www.05760576.com/2006/11/23/133442357.html
one more russian expert’s name: “柯魯索夫”
have fun :)


Where can I find Chinese IPA transcriptions?

As you probably know, in China they use pinyin to describe the pronunciation. Dictionaries will normally always mention the pinyin for the characters.

Here you can find the link between pinyin and IPA:

http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp052_chinese_ipa.pdf
http://talkbank.org/pinyin/Trad_chart_IPA.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_Mandarin

This is a website that will generate both Pinyin and IPA for a certain text:
https://code.google.com/p/transcripa/wiki/Mandarin

In Chinese tones change depending on the context, but the pronunciation itself much less so. Especially if you take what is considered as Standard Chinese (what they speak on CCTV), this is not expected to happen.

In my humble option, it is best that you learn Pinyin as it will help you in the long run.

Although it is not what you are asking for this website might also be very interesting for you: http://lost-theory.org/chinese/phonetics/

For every possible pinyin you can hear the pronunciation.


Are there different English words for the two types of caterpillar 毛虫 and 肉虫?

It's quite easy to distinguish between 毛虫 and 肉虫. 毛 means furry, and 肉 means meaty. If a caterpillar looks "furry", it's 毛虫. Otherwise, it's a 肉虫.

This one is a 毛虫:

And this one is 肉虫:


"Drink" is one possible meaning of 吃. From the Taiwan Ministry of Education dictionary definition for 吃
(emphasis added):

口中咀嚼食物後嚥下。有時吸、飲液體亦稱為「吃」。如：「吃飯」、「吃茶」、「吃藥」。

It also has an entry specifically for 吃酒.


Translate Seal Characters to Mandarin? Picture #2 (Characters identified: 青鸞舞鏡)

as droooze indicated, the characters are “青鸞舞鏡“ ( read from top right, bottom right, top left, bottom left).

the 國語辭典 has the entry: 青鸞

the third explanation is:

  傳說青鸞喜歡對鏡起舞，故用以代稱鏡子。

so, i guess the seal is on frame of a mirror, is it?


Does 愛 belong to 你 or to 我 in this sentence 你心裡明白 我對你的愛?

In 我对你的爱, it should be broke up into 我 [ (对你的) 爱 ].
So 你的爱 is not a sub phrase here.
对你的爱 means love for/to you.
The sentence can be tranlated as: In (your) heart you understand my love to you


verb. "to shoot" (weapon): difference between 射击，开枪， 击中， 射中

射击 is "shooting".
开枪 is "to pull the trigger (on a gun)".

So a shooting sport would be called 射击運動, and cover fire is called 掩護射击.

击中 means "hitting".
射中 means "hitting with a flying object".

It works with a self-propelled missile/artillery shell/arrows etc too.

The 中 is there to to contribute the meaning of a "hit" to the terms. 射 without 中 is only "shooting"; with 中 it becomes "shooting and hitting"


諷刺: to satirize; to mock

暗諷: make an innuendo; indirectly mock

禮義廉:  諷刺某人「無恥」。

Calling someone 「無恥」is 明駡 (direct insult)

Calling someone「禮義廉」is 暗諷 (indirectly mock)

As for the technique of omitting part of a phrase to imply someone is lacking the omitted part -- it is called  暗示 (hinting)

Similar example:

他這人有勇無謀 (he has courage but doesn't have any strategy) clearly stating (明示) he is not smart

他這人很有勇 (he has courage) hinting (暗示) he is not smart.

It works because 有勇無謀 is a common phrase, therefore, the hint is strong enough that anyone who know the phrase 有勇無謀 can correctly understand what is being hinted. Same goes to 禮義廉恥 --> 禮義廉


What kind of typology does ancient Chinese belong to?

There are two kinds of morphology:  inflectional and derivational.  The first is like English –ed or –s, or case endings in languages like German or Latin.  Adding an inflectional morpheme doesn’t make a new word, but it changes the grammatical function.
Derivational morphology, on the other hand, does make a new word.  It might be a different part of speech, like sing > sing-er (verb to noun – person that verbs).  Or it might change the meaning in some other way, like call > re-call.
Linguists who study this believe that Old Chinese did not have inflectional morphology, but it did have derivational morphology.  Here is just one example from Laurent Sagart’s book The Roots of Old Chinese:

*s- prefix changing noun to verb:
帚  zhou3 (*tuʔ) a broom →
掃  sao3 (*s-tuʔ)  to sweep

There were suffixes, too, such as *-s, but when the tones developed many of these disappeared and were preserved only in a tonal change.  This can explain some tonal differences like the two pronunciations of 好  (tone 3 vs. tone 4 – the tone 4 one originally had an –s suffix.)
This is really advanced stuff, and I’m not sure if there’s a lot of agreement among the handful of linguists that study it as to exactly what prefixes and suffixes existed in Old Chinese, and what uses they had.  If you’re curious, there’s an exciting new book that just came out on this topic.  It’s called Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction by William Baxter and Laurent Sagart.


風 is general mood (風氣), or social custom (風俗).

in ancient times, there're regional differences between vassal states (諸侯國); after confucius's editing, fifteen "lessons from the state" (國風) were preserved. each groups of poems from the vassal state, shown that particular state's social custom.

雅 is odes of the kingdom (周朝), where the ruler were.

頌 is odes for the purpose of praising in the ancestral temple (宗廟).

the contents, styles of these three groups of poems / odes are significantly different.


噗通 PK 扑通: What's The Difference? If Any?

The way I see it is that 噗通 is neutrally describing the "plonk" sound when you drop something into a liquid, while 扑通 describes something going "plonk" into a liquid (there are other uses of these characters to describe other sounds). Generally, one is an action, the other is a sound.
Because the 2nd one is an action of "going plonk" (to phrase it inelegantly), it could be used comically to describe somebody falling into a pond, for instance. But, I wouldn't say that it's usage is connected to something being comical all or even most of the time.
Contrary to what one of your sources says, 噗 and 扑 are not variants of each other, and 扑 is not the simplified form of 噗 (it's the simplified form of 撲). It just so happens that the two are interchangeable in this one word.
Even though this difference exists, most people seem not to distinguish between them because they sound the same and are so similar in meaning. Many people will just use 扑通 all the time, especially on a computer when sifting through 扑通 and 噗通 is a pain.
To back up my claim with google:

扑通: 969,000 results
噗通: 639,000 results (and most of them a K-drama)
噗嗵: 74,000 results


In simplified Chinese, both would be 台, easy peasy. Otherwise, things get a little complicated. Sometimes 台 is just an alternative form for 臺, which is the case for Taiwan: you can write 臺灣 or 台灣, both are acceptable, though the former is considered more formal. In the case of 台山, that is the correct name already, so you can't write 臺山 because 臺 is not an alternative form of 台. Also, for place names like 台州 and 天台山, the pronunciation of 台 is a little different from normal, all the more reason that you can't always choose to substitute 台 with 臺.

Don't be fooled by the Traditional and Simplified Chinese bisection. Only very little Simplified Chinese characters were invented to replace the old ones. Most Simplified Chinese characters were either the archaic but "correct" forms or were simpler variants of the "correct" characters. In fact, many "traditional Chinese" characters are actually much simpler (having fewer strokes) than some of the variants, so 繁體字 is a misnomer, and as for 正體字, what is the "correct" way to write a certain character? Is there a "correct" way to write those characters? Defined by whom? It is not just black and white.

Chinese is hard, and I think the more I learn about Chinese, the harder it gets. I think the best way to learn when to use 臺 and not 台 and vice versa is to just remember each instance and go by the ones most people use even if that usage is not correct semantically. Occasionally, you may want to consult a reference such as the Dictionary of Variants published by the MOE of Taiwan, in which you'll find that 台 and 臺 are originally two different words with similar pronunciation, but 台 has been borrowed as a substitute for 臺 and has therefore acquired the pronunciation and meaning of 臺. One definition of 臺 is "stage", and of 台 is (originally) "delight", interchangeable with 怡. Keep in mind though, that it is just ONE reference, the fact that it's "official" doesn't mean it's always correct or reflects what most people use, even in Taiwan.


日 and 月: Transition from pictographs to hanzi

I'm afraid that an explanation in any book is probably just speculation. The two characters in question have probably been around as long as Chinese characters themselves.

This site (chineseetymology.org) is a very useful resource for tracing the history of Chinese characters. In particular, it appears that both 日 and 月 were sometimes also written without the extra line, as one would expect from a pictogram:

http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterImages/Oracle/J10000/j15800/j15869.gif
http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterImages/Oracle/J10000/j15800/j15887.gif

with line http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterImages/Oracle/J10000/j16400/j16449.gif
without line http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterImages/Oracle/J10000/j16400/j16459.gif

although 日 without the line is rare. (Check the entries of 日 and 月 for many more pictures. The history of these characters starts at least some 3000 years ago with the oracle bone script found at the bottom of the page.)

As for interpreting these pictures, 新漢和大辞典 writes the following

  月

  象形。三日月を描いたもので、まるくえぐったように、中が欠けていく月。
  Pictogram. A drawing of a crescent moon, waning as though being hollowed out.

  日

  象形。太陽の姿を描いたもの。
  Pictogram. A drawing of the shape of the sun.

In particular, no word about the line in 日.


Does anyone know what these symbols mean? Cantonese? They appear in a tray marked "Hong Kong"

Hong Kong as the name for the islands started around 1810 during the Qing dynasty (嘉庆十五年) This is to point out these marking are misleading.
like 水巷孑蠻 pointed it out, its "至正之寶" in the typeface of 小篆

the above image is coming from typeface converter - http://www.diyiziti.com/zhuanshu


So it is a general rule of thumb that any Cantonese syllable with the voiced initial consonants ng-, n-, l-, m- plus tones 1/2/3 is not "Classical", as it violates the defining voicing-based tone split of the four tones that happened in the transition from Middle Chinese to Modern Chinese.

This means that 啱 is either not derived from Middle Chinese (so from a Tai-Kadai or an Austroasiatic or other non-Sinitic source), or it has gone through a more complex history that means it's only indirectly traceable to a Old or Middle Chinese lexeme (it thus might have a regular Old/Middle Chinese complement, which is often considered its 本字).

In the world of Chinese word etymology, things have very seldom been certain. A lack of good corpus data and earliest attestations for these dialectal characters is a major reason for the current state of affairs. Not much can be said "definitively" at all, though we do know it is not in the Kangxi Dictionary.

The theories on English Wiktionary seem possible, perhaps even reasonable (though unsourced at this point; I have found a source that points to the connection with 諳 deriving from a certain Mr 楊子靜, perhaps through his 廣州話分韻詞林), but that is all that can be said about them really.

The other colloquial word that comes to mind with ng- with tones 1/2/3 is 奀, although that has a variant with the null initial too.


can you help translate this painting caligraphy

the calligraphy is the poem "趙伯駒六馬圖歌" by emperor 乾隆 (1736-1795).
read top to bottom, right to left:

平川苜蓿豐且滋﹒清泉映帶沙岡披﹒戎人習馬知馬性
此䖏調馬實所宜﹒牽者樴者二皆駵﹒白駒黒鬛緤栁枝
昻蔵翹足驪其色﹒一戎跨背鞍不施﹒紫騮廻首嘶厥匹
有駓齕草意自怡﹒驥不稱力稱其徳﹒况復一一皆英竒
作者寓意應有在﹒夏官遺法誰深知﹒即今大宛致汗血
骨格皆合圖中姿﹒亦不渥洼詡作瑞﹒亦不交河資興師
迥立閶闔詄蕩蕩﹒欲起王孫走筆為

the last "column" stated the date as

辛巳首夏御題

the first month of summer of the year 1761.


'他是個老人' - 'he is an old man'

It is a plain statement. The classifier 個 should not be omitted because 老人 could be a noun or adjective. '他是老人' sounds like your sentence is incomplete. Using the classifier 個 indicates it is a noun and it is a complete sentence (not "他是老人... 恊會的主席" )

'他是個老人家' - 'he is an elderly'
'老人家' is more respectful term than just '老人'

Notice '他老人家' - (he the elder) is a respectful way to address someone senior in age, or high in status.)

'他是一名長者'- 'he is an elderly'

The classifier for '長者' (senior/ elderly) should be those that reserved for human only, like '一位' or '一名'.

'他是個上了年紀的人' - 'he is a man of advanced age'

A matter of fact statement


享受一切理所应当的美好 = enjoy all the beauty you deserve

Here, 'beauty' refers to the nice features that Mac and Sogou provide.

However, this expression seems to be a little bit strange. Usually, we do not put the word 理所应当的 before a noun. For example, instead of saying '这是理所应当的美好', one should say '这份美好是理所应当的'.


Chinese equivalent of "I can honestly say..."

Below all are fine.

(1)坦白說,...
(2)老實說,...
(3)坦白講,...
(4)老實講,...
(5)說[老]實話...
(6)說真心話...
(7)[我]打從心底說...
(8)[我]敞開心房[向你]傾訴 (more literal, less colloquial)

+我已經盡[全]力了

or

+我已經做到最佳(表現,etc).

If you are writing a formal letter or convey in a more literal way, you may say,

我已付諸全力(+以赴).


You are absolutely correct to be skeptical about the translation offered. A more accurate translation for skepticism would be:

质疑精神

Breaking it apart,

  质疑 [zhì yí] means: 提出疑问 (raise a query, be critical minded) 精神 [jīng
  shén] means: 意识、思维 (spirit or mindset)

You can read more about 质疑精神 here.


Mandarin Chinese Alphanumerical Ordering

I'd use the 10 heavenly stems (天干):

1 - A - 甲
2 - B - 乙
3 - C - 丙
4 - D - 丁
5 - E - 戊
6 - F - 己
7 - G - 庚
8 - H - 辛
9 - I - 壬
10 - J - 癸


How does 稱's 2021 meanings appertain to its semantic component 禾?

The meanings which aren't related to weighing are not really related to 「禾」 - these meanings were actually held by 「爯」. 「稱」 and 「爯」 are related by the following:

「稱」 is a complexification of 「爯」.
「爯」 originally meant to lift up. This was eventually semantically extended to to commend, to praise, then to call, to name.
「爯」 later acquired the meaning to weigh.
「爯」 has now been totally replaced by 「稱」, so 「稱」 has acquired most/all senses of what was originally represented by 「爯」.

時期字體
字形
參考資料

商甲

鐵102.2合集7395

西周金

裘衛盉集成9456

戰國・楚金

者⿰水尸鎛集成123

篆

冓部說文解字

楷

「爯」 depicts a hand 「爫・爪」 grabbing a fish 「魚」 upwards (e.g. out of the water), indicating the original meaning to lift up, to raise up. Occasionally, 「爯」 was complexified with extra components, which don't survive today.

The meaning to lift up, to raise up is given in e.g. 《甲骨文合集》32420:

丁戼（卯）鼎（貞）：「／
王（其）爯（琡），／
尞（燎）三，／
戼（劉）...... 牢？／
」
Divination on the day of dīngmǎo, it is asked: "Shall the king offer up a ceremonial jade weapon, conduct a burning ritual with three penned sheep, and perform a slaughtering ritual......penned cattle?"

Very early on, 「爯」 or its variations started also acquiring the meaning to weigh. From the Late Warring States State of Jìn artefact 信安君鼎《殷周金文集成》2773:

⿰言身（信）安君厶（私）官／
（容）⿱八斗（㪵）／
⿱罒氏（視）叓（事）欨、⿰⿱冫火刂（冶）癐／
十二秊（年）／
⿱爯又（稱・秤）二益（鎰）六釿／
[DǏNG VESSEL] OF THE BUTLER FOR THE LORD OF XÌN'ĀN
Vessel capacity: half a dǒu
Officer on duty: 欨
Vessel bronzesmith: 癐
[Date:] Year 12
Vessel weight: 2 yì and 6 jīn

Since 「爯」 had taken up too many meanings, semantic components were sometimes piled on to the character to disambiguate the uses:

「偁」 was created emphasise the meaning to lift, raise > to praise, by drawing a person 「人」 behind the hand 「爫・爪」:
商金偁缶作且癸集成3601西周金戜者鼎集成2662篆人部說文解字楷

「稱」 was created by adding semantic 「禾」 (crops), as weighing crops and grain from harvest was a common and important activity in Ancient China.

Unfortunately, the character 「偁」 fell into disuse, so 「稱」 in turn also became overloaded. This was probably the major reason for the creation of 「秤」, which is only used for meanings to do with weighing, balance, scales, and not used for the overloaded meanings to raise, to praise, to call that 「稱」 had taken on.

References:

漢語多功能字庫
季旭昇《說文新證》
何琳儀《戰國古文字典：戰國文字聲系》
陳劍《說殷墟甲骨文中的「玉戚」》
小學堂

字形演變
甲骨文
金文
異體字表

國學大師

郭沫若《甲骨文合集》
中國社會科學院考古研究所《殷周金文集成》

中國哲學書電子化計劃

宋・徐鉉等奉敕校定　漢・許慎《說文解字》


From Dictionary:

everywhere:
(adverb): in or to all places.
e.g. "I've looked everywhere"
(noun): all places or directions.
e.g. "everywhere was in darkness"

~

When 到处 and 处处 are used as a noun, they are interchangeable

Example:
到处都有特价 = 处处都有特价 = everywhere has discount
到处都有人 = 处处都有人 = everywhere has people
到处都有老鼠 = 处处都有老鼠 = everywhere has mice
'到处' and '处处' here are nouns with the same meaning

When it is used as an adverb, 到處 and 處處 have different meanings.

到处 = everywhere; in all place (adv)

处处 = in all aspect; in all directions; in all angles (adv)

Example:
到处查询 (ask everywhere) You go place to place and ask people there
处处查询 (ask in all aspects) You inquire all aspect of the object, e.g. Where you live? Where you work? What school you went to?
到处受阻挠 (be obstructed everywhere) e.g. Everywhere you go, you are obstructed
处处受阻挠 (be obstructed in all aspects) e.g. You want to see the boss and they say no. You try to check the bill and they refuse. You apply to transfer and it is denied
到处挑剔别人 (pick on people everywhere) e.g. you go place to place to pick on people
处处挑剔别人 (pick on people in all aspects) e.g. you complain about the coffee shop staffs work too slow. You point out someone has bad teeth. You told someone the reason of he being poor is because of his laziness
'到处' and '处处' here are adverbs with different meanings


What is the difference between 学科 and 专业?

When we talk about the courses we choose in college, they are pretty much the same thing, but actually they are just different from the purposes of their courses.

学科 is for academic purpose, studying a certain science or academic field.

专业 is based on social professions and the social division of labor, learning skills and knowledge of a certain industry or business.


What is the difference between 老X and X老 as a term of address?

Here's an explanation: In the case of people with good moral standing and high reputation (德高望重), you can add 老 after their surname, this is a very respectful (很恭敬的) address.

Screenshot from a book on Google Books. The relevant, very short sentence touching your question is highlighted (sorry, not very professional, but legible).

Here's another source explaining this (mentioning scientists, statesmen, old teachers as the circle to whom you can apply this):

  对德高望重的老科学家、老政治家、老教育家、老文学家，可以在姓之后加“老”字，以表示尊重。如“郭老”、“‘钱老”、“徐老”。


When translating "he thinks I bought three books, but I didn't buy anything", do we add a completion 了 for "bought"?

which gives a contradiction.

There is no contradiction. Everything described in "他以为 (he thought)" is hypothetical.
Similarly, everything described in [He said: "...." ] doesn't need to be in the same universe with the rest of the text.

Nothing wrong with '他以为我买了三本书，但是我什么都没买。' (The fact -- 'you bought three books' is in his mind only)

'我看着我买了三本书，但是我什么都没买。' would be contradicting (The two facts cannot be both true)

'他叫我买了三本书，但是我什么都没买。' would also be contradicting. It has to be '他叫我买三本书，但是我什么都没买。' ('told you to buy' cannot be changed to 'told you to have bought')


If I go to a store and the cashier asks "有會買嗎?" what does that mean?

Are you sure it's not "有會員嗎"(員 vs. 買)? It certainly sounds like it, the cashier is asking if you have a membership at the store.


Note that sometimes the transcription reflects the actual reading rather than the "single-character-pinyin".

For example, 你好 is sometimes transcribed as ní hăo, even if the "actual" transcription per-character would actually be nǐ hăo. This happens because when two third tones are next to each other, the first one becomes a second tone (when reading/pronouncing the characters, not when writing).

In other cases there is a totall loss of the tone, such as in 窗户 (window) transcribed — and read — as chuāng hu1, rather than chuāng hù.

1: The source is the CEDICT dictionary.


What is the difference between the measure words 面 vs 张

张 (zhang1) is used for different objects, that may or may not be related with each other, e.g. sheets and flat furniture. If we really want to find a common denominator, I think that would be objects that are spread open [1]:

纸 paper (一张纸 a sheet of paper)
地图 map
照片 photo, picture
桌子 table
床 bed
木板 plank
脸 face （一张脸）
嘴 mouth （一张嘴）
弓 (gong1) bow （一张弓）

面 (mian4) is used for flat objects with a face or a surface:

镜子 mirror
旗子 flag
墙、墙壁 wall
鼓 drum
锣 （luo2) gong
盾 (dun4) shield

[1] that's not a dictionary definition. It's personal advice that hopefully makes enough sense to you to work as a reasonable rule of thumb.


Can't find suitable resource for character frequencies for traditional Chinese (Mandarin)

I made an effort to summarise available information about character and word frequencies for learners and teachers a while back and came up with the following which are relevant for traditional characters.

Chih-hao Tsai has a list of well over 13 000 characters, described as follows: "The corpus consists of all the BIG-5 Chinese characters appeared on Usenet newsgroups during 1993-1994. It consists of 171,882,493 characters. This is perhaps by far the largest Chinese corpus in the world." More info here.
The following list is also linked to on that page, referring to frequency data from Shih-Kun Huang. Maybe both lists are based on the same data; I'm not sure.
I don't know about any downloadable corpora for traditional Chinese, but I have mainly relied on Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese, which is also tokenised, although I don't know if there's any frequency data based on that corpus.
The Taiwan MoE offers a frequency lists that is available for free, based on mixed sources totalling around two million characters. You can get it here, but you have to download and run an executable file in Windows (but why?). It does work, though. Info about the samples used can be found here. The sources are not as new as one would wish, but they are more balanced than online Usenet newsgroups at least.

I summarised all the resources I found for both simplified and traditional Chinese, for both character components, characters and words here, in case anyone is interested: The most common Chinese words, characters and components for language learners and teachers


Places where the use of 小姐 is inappropriate

People say calling a woman 小姐 in Hong Kong and Taiwan is ok.  but not so good in Mainland China. I have to disagree with this presumption. It all depend on the context and the situation this term is used.

Generally 小姐 is a polite/ formal address for single woman in Chinese everywhere.

For example:

張小姐 (Miss Zhang)

我家小姐 (my daughter/ the daughter in the family I serve)

The term 小姐 can be interpreted as a nickname for prostitute because people in places where women provide various degrees of sexual service, would not use derogatory terms liked 舞女， 陪酒女郎 or even 妓女 to address the female sex workers directly, They just call them "小姐" (ladies) for politeness and subtlety.

For example: "我們店的小姐" (the ladies in our establishment) ; "去做小姐" (go work as a Miss) would clearly imply 小姐 is not an honorific but a code for female sex workers in the context

Even in Hong Kong, people often refer 舞女 or 妓女 as 小姐 like in mainland China.

It is not ok. even in Hong Kong to ask a woman "妳係邊間店嘅小姐呀？" (which place's lady you are?)

One thing is sure. It is perfectly fine to address a female stranger as 小姐 in Hong Kong or Taiwan, No one would think 小姐 be anything but an honorific.

Some people argued with me that 小姐 is ambiguous in Mainland and should be avoided. I thought those people just treated a specific nickname in a specific area as a general term

小姐 is mainly an honorific/ title in Chinese , 张 in 张小姐 is that person's identify and 小姐 is an honorific/ title . But the term 小姐 itself can also be used as a code for female sex workers in certain context. And Mainland Chinese seem to be more sensitive to this additional usage than Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan


What's the difference between 停车 (tíngchē) and 泊车 (bóchē), which both seem to mean "park car"?

请勿泊车 = No Parking

  No Parking mean you can stop the vehicle there, and you can load or
  unload people and goods, but you can't leave the vehicle unattended
  and go off.

禁止停车 = No Stopping

  No Stopping means no dropping people off or picking them up, and no
  loading/unloading. You're not supposed to be there unless you're
  moving.

The signs above the text should clarify - they are international signs and there is only a slight difference between the individual meanings of Stopping, Standing/Waiting, and Parking, anywhere in the world.

No Stopping signs are the strictest, and No Parking signs are the most lenient.


不 is the negative prefix for a verb and adjective, here are some examples:
不对,not right;
不好，not good;
不错，not bad;
你想去购物吗?不去.Do you want to go shopping? No,I don't;

However 没 is focused on existence or ownership, for example:
没有，I don't have it.
从没发生过，This never happens before.
这里没有人, No one is here.
我没钱, I don't have money.

I hope you are clear now!


Techniques for learning and retaining characters

You can use a SRS (Spaced Repetition System) software, I personally use Anki to create a deck of study cards and I review them on my mobile phone.

I also recommend Memrise.

2014 update:

I still use Anki, but combined with Google Images Search and Forvo: When I make new flashcards, I'll add the writing (hanzi & pinyin), its pronunciation (from Forvo) and a picture of the character's meaning (from Google Images), that way all the card's content is in Chinese, and I avoid relying on translation. By the way, Anki now allows to synchronize media files (audio/images) between devices.

I've started using this new method few months ago, and it has worked very well for me (especially with nouns). Credits of this method goes to the "Fluent Forever" book.


I am particularly fascinated by the Chinese character that is pronounced SHIN & means faith or belief

I'm afraid that you are reading much too into this. There is no "meaning behind each stroke".

「信」(Baxter-Sagart OC: /*s-ni[ŋ]-s/, sincerity) is composed of semantic「言」(speech, here vaguely hinting at honest words) and phonetic「人・亻」(/*ni[ŋ]/).


UPDATE: I noticed that different sources disagree on whether to call the 到 in the context you used it a complement of result. For example according to the Chinese Grammar Wiki it is not a complement of result (and it's also my feeling). The most common definition is that a complement of result implies that an action has attained the expected aim or result. However the Mandarin Essential Grammar Guide of the University of Yale lists this use case under complement of result. See below for more details.

In any case, regarding to your question

  Is using the resultative complement 到 generally equivalent to saying
  "at the time this action was finished"?

In your examples the 到 doesn't refer to time but to the location where you arrived.

Chinese Grammar Wiki (complemented with my) explanation

I would say this in not a complement of result.

In your examples the 到 is not a complement of result, but one to indicate direction, target or  location. See Complements with "dao", "gei" and "zai"

The translation of your examples correct, but the reference to time doesn't come from 到, but from 的时候. 到 only refers to the location.

In case you actually are using a complement of result, the 到 will express that the outcome of the verb is achieved - what its result is.

For example

我昨天买到了一辆汽车: Yesterday I (successfully) bought a car.

It emphasizes that the action has finished with a success.

Also see Result complements "dao" and "jian"

You can also express ability and possibility with these complements of result. For example:

买得到: can buy
买不到: can't buy

Explanation in Mandarin Essential Grammar

The Mandarin Essential Grammar Guide of the University of Yale also has a section on the Complement of Result. In this they write (see http://comet.cls.yale.edu/mandarin/content/result/grammar/Result-9.htm):

  dào到: implying that an action has attained the expected aim or result

  kàndào    看到            see
  tīngdào    听到            hear
  yùdào      遇到            run into
  jiēdào      接到            receive
  shōudào  收到            receive
  zhǎodào  找到            find
  mǎidào    买到            succeed in buying

  Example 1: zhǎodào找到 (zhǎo找to look for + dào到[attain the expected result]) find
     Wǒ zhǎodào Lǐ Xiānsheng le.
     我找到李先生了。
     I have found Mr. Li.

  Example 2: mǎidào买到 (mǎi买to buy + dào到[attain the expected result]) succeed in buying
     Wǒ qùwǎn le. Méi yǒu mǎidào diànyǐng piào.
     我去晚了。没有买到电影票。
     I was late./ I got there late. [So,] I did not manage to get the movie tickets.

  dào到: reach or arrive at (a place or a point of time)

  zǒudào    走到            walk to /until/up to
  pǎodào    跑到            run to /until/up to
  xuédào    学到            study until/up to,
  shuìdào   睡到            sleep until/up to
  mángdào 忙到            be busy until/up to
  kàndào    看到            read or watch until/up to
  tīngdào    听到            listen until/up to

  Example 1: xuédào学到        (xué学to study + dào到 until/up to) study until/up to
       Wǒmen xuédào Dì Bā Kè le.
       我们学到第八课了。
       We have studied up to Lesson 8 so far.

  Example 2:
       Zuótiān wǎnshang wǒmen xué Zhōngwén xuédào shíyī diǎn.
       昨天晚上我们学中文学到十一点。
       We studied Chinese until 11 o’clock last night.

In your case it refers to the fact that one reaches or arrives at a place. So the 到 on its own doesn't is not generally equivalent to saying "at the time this action was finished". The time reference comes from 的时候 (到的时候 = when (one) arrived)


Accepting compliments (without rejecting them)

This question is a bit self-contradictory to me.

On the one hand, you asked for responses in keeping with Chinese culture's "highly [valued] modesty and humility". Yet on the other, you explicitly ruled out a customary phrases doing exactly that. Is there a specific issue you have with 哪裡哪裡 or are you rejecting all similar phrases?

Perhaps there's some misunderstanding here. Phrases like 過獎了 or 哪裡哪裡 and equivalent are hardly "overhumbling" or "belittling". They are in fact simply standard ways of accepting compliments with appropriate modesty and humility, as the question asks for. It would not be understood by most people as "rejecting" a compliment.

Having said that, you don't have to take "modesty and humility" into that much consideration. To levelly accept compliments without trying to show those virtues, simply use 謝謝, a plain "thank you".

Or you can straight up translate English into Chinese:

你喜欢让我很高兴 - I'm glad you liked it.
得到你的夸奖很高兴 - I'm very happy to hear your compliments.
你太仁慈了 - You're too kind.


Can you help me identify the name of the artist on my painting? (Characters identified: 雲茜)

I googled for a while, I think she doesn't have a famous English name. Her name in chineses is 云茜 or 雲茜 in traditional chinese. You could google this and some kind of this painting  will come out.


How do you say "this article was originally published in German?

This article was originally published in German.
这篇文章最初是以德语出版的。


What software can detect the parts of speech of written text?

There is a web demo system called ICTCLAS (Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Lexical Analysis System). It was developed by the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Science.

There is also a web demo system from THULAS (Tsinghua University - Lexical Analyzer for Chinese), which was developed by the Nature Language Processing Group, Tsinghua University.

NOTE: I don't know (and I cannot test) whether these site can be accessed freely across the world.
NOTE2: As with any software language tool, take the results with a grain of salt, they aren't perfect.


Why does mulberry have so many different endings? (桑葚、桑椹、桑甚、桑黮)？

桑葚（sāng shèn），又作桑椹，桑树的成熟果实，为桑科植物桑树的果穗。又名桑椹子、桑蔗、桑枣、桑果、桑泡儿，乌椹等。
黮
dàn
云黑色：“当时黮闇犹承误，末俗纷纭更乱真。”
shèn
古通“葚”，桑果：“食我桑黮。”

So it seems that 桑椹 and 桑葚 are the same. And 黮 is the interchangeability character of 葚 in ancient time. While 甚 should be a wrong word since I didn't find any explanation related to 桑甚.


Which non-sinitic languages contributed to the wordstock of common chinese words before 1800?

You have the entire stock of Sanskrit buddhist terms that have been incorporated to Chinese, like 菩萨, 佛, 涅盘 and similar terms. 苹果 is also Sankrit in origin, while 葡萄 and other fruits have been picked up along the Silk road.

Mongolian words such as 达赖 (as in 达赖喇嘛, where 喇嘛 is Tibetan), have also crept into the langauge through religion.

Cantonese and Vietnamese have had a lot of exchange throughout the years, but are mostly local.

Although Japan has greatly been influenced by Chinese from Tang and onwards, there has also been a large import from Japan to China. Words like 经济 and 社会 do not really make sense in Chinese (component-wise), but are Japanese in origin. A more modern example would be the redefinition of 萌 as a cute young person, like in 萌妹纸.

Refer to Marc's answer for Manchu and Russian influences; there are quite many loanwords from northern tribes, like 哥哥.


(Let me know if you read traditional characters better! I'll switch upon request.)

  Use of 二年 and not 兩年，I have also seen 二位姑娘，but only in period dramata, so I assumed it was antiquated.

二年馀 is a Classical construction, and sounds formal / literary / etc. in colloquial Mandarin, which would normally say 两年多. But since this is a written text, the author went through solid classical education, and the author was generally not writing in the most vernacular way possible but communicating with some degree of Classical (i.e. written Chinese) tinges, yes there are some Classical constructions that do not appear in modern colloquial Mandarin.

A related phenomenon is that, sometimes people write generally in colloquial Mandarin, but write the characters used in Classical Chinese or formal Mandarin according to the actual meaning, instead of the sound. So you see people write

  我5月12日-6月3日在上海

but hear them say

  我5月12号到6月3号在上海.

The same thing happens with pairs like 角 and 毛, 元 and 块, 已 and 已经, etc.

As for 二位姑娘, that is a script that actually faithfully transcribes the spoken language, so the issue there is that the use of 二位 instead of 两位 dates to an older era -- which is why you see that in period dramata.

  Use of 不見，not 沒見。Is this the difference between "it's been two years since I saw him" and "haven't seen him in two years"?

I suppose this is readily understood in English actually.

  我與父親不相見已二年餘了。

  Me and my father not seeing each other...

There, you just can't mark the aspect of have, or, in Mandarin, 没.

This syntactic choice (the construction of the whole sentence) is not frequently used, so that is probably why you think 没 should be used there. Indeed people normally say this using this construction:

  我和我父亲已经两年多没见了。

There is also an issue of Classical constructions: 相 + [verb] meaning "to [verb] each other" is normal in Classical Chinese, but no longer active or productive in colloquial Mandarin. People speak colloquial Mandarin, so of course they don't say

  我和父亲不相见...

because you need to do a Classical construction there, and that does not exist in colloquial Mandarin.


What is the meaning of 用支 in this setence?

用支 could mean expense， i.e. "所用開支"

The complete sentence means:

  Some modern people finically planed how they expend in life time.


The two most common systems are Yale and Jyutping, the latter was invented as late as 1993. I think both are included alongside pinyin in Unicode's table of Chinese characters.

Most native speakers don't use and are not even aware of these systems, especially in mainland China where Cantonese speakers never study their native language at school - it's hardly considered a "real language".
I have heard though that natives tend to use Jyutping, while Yale is used in nearly all English teaching material for Cantonese and is thus more popular among foreigners.

Then there is a third, obscure system with no tone information that nobody uses, except the HK government did when choosing all official, romanized place names, personal names, and so on. Oops. So neither system is good for reading romanized signs, maps et c!

I'd recommend learning and using Jyutping over Yale, for the following reaons:

It's recommended by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, who invented it. (Not a huge reason, but noteworthy.)
It is based on pinyin and uses the same letters for the same sounds. I think this is good for a Cantonese romanization system: many, many, many more people know pinyin, thus Cantonese becomes more accessible by being compatible with it and avoiding confusion.
Jyutping distinguishes more sounds and is more accurate.
Jyutping gets tones right, being straight-forward and consistent. It doesn't  mix tone information and "spelling", like Yale (which sometimes uses double a:s or h:s to mark tones). It doesn't ignore tones entirely like the "government system". And there are only 6 tones, unlike the 9-tone model responsible for the linguistic urban myth of "look Cantonese has 9 tones, it's sooo hard to learn".

Yes, it's takes a bit of work to get used to those 6 tones, but tones aren't optional. It's much more frustrating when you eventually speak the language somewhat well, you're trying to read signs with unfamiliar Chinese characters and the romanized text totally lacks tone data! What are you supposed to do, read all permutations and ask a native which one makes sense?

If you learn Jyutping you can use it to input characters especially in Linux-systems, but also in Windows and perhaps Mac OS X, I think, by using commercial software.


Something I came across in a movie 你说它真它就真说它假

你说它真它就真，说它假它就假， 它是真真假假假假真真谁也弄不明白.

You claim it's true and as truth it is.
You declare it's faulty as falsehood is should be.
Is it true or false, go figure!

One not so elegant translation would be

if you say A, and I supposed to believe it as A and when you say about
the same thing but this time it is B, and I supposed to believe it is
B, so is it A or B???? what do I know???

The concept is quite similar to an old saying "to swear black is white." Or you can use the biblical reference on Mark 11:24 "Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you."  Or if you stretch this more, "Cogito ergo sum," which is the Latin philosophical proposition by René Descartes, as in English "I think, therefore I am."

It’s the true pseudo-profound bullshit! ref: Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549–563
http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf


Is this one of the cases where two characters just remove ambiguity?

Yes, Since each Chinese character has its own meaning or meanings. A single character, usually cannot clearly express a specific meaning, therefore two characters would combine into a specific word, and two words may combine into one specific phase.(see my other post How to determine if character can be used separetely?)
In the case of 肥 and 胖. both can be an adjective for "fat", however 肥 also has other meanings:

肥 http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/188/
[1] [adj] fat; plump; chubby | [antonym] 瘦
[2] [adj] greasy; oily; fatty
[3] [adj] fertile; rich; luxuriant
[4] [n] fertilizer; manure
[5] [adj] profitable; lucrative; affluent

Combine 肥 and 胖 into 肥胖 make it a specific term for "fat /obese ". Since it is a specific term, it is also more formal.
Beside being an adjective for "fat",  肥胖 can also be a noun for "obesity"


What kind of resources should a beginner look for to help with similarly pronounced words?

Have you had problems noticing the difference between "sheer" and "cheer", or "jeep" and "cheap"? If not, then your problem is solved. For European people, it is strongly recommended that they read articles with Pinyin (literally "Spelled Pronunciation").
Why characters are not relevant to their pronunciations? Chinese has so LONG a history that pronunciations have been changed for dozens (if not hundreds) of times. Even a Chinese can't figure out why 工(gong, "work") represents the pronunciation of 江(jiang, "river"). Logically it should be, but it is not! Then Pinyin was invented to represent the pronunciation of characters. We only need to accept the fact and remember it. Leave the questions to linguists.
One more thing: You can find quite a lot of texts with Pinyin in children's books. Chinese textbooks of Grade 1 or 2 in primary schools also help. (Confucius said, you should not feel ashamed to learn from people inferior to you. ;-))
EDIT:  I mean the difference of consonants, not vowels. Vowels in Mandarin Chinese is quite easy to distinguish.


If it was Cantonese, it would obviously be 冚家剷 (entire family die)

Since it was Mandarin,  the only common phrases that curse someone's entire family I can think of are:

絕子絕孫 (no male descendants, the family line ends)
男盜女娼 (one's male descendants will be thieves and female descendants will be prostitutes)

Or it can be any cursing phrase with '你全家' before it. For example "你全家不得好死" (all of your family members will die a horrible death)


Outside the IT world, 1兆 is 10^12, or 1万 x 1亿. But you won't see this use very much now.

Inside the IT world, (when you talk about the size of hard disk, memory, etc ...) 1兆 is 1M, which is 1024k, approximately 10^6. The might be the more common use nowadays.

Edit:

When used in SI unit, 兆 mean 10^6 in mainland China and 10^12 in Taiwan. The use in IT world actually comes from this usage, with an altered value. It is actually part of the unit, not the number.


How to use a question word in a statement that isn't a question?

"If you have an English speaking friend" should be translated to 如果你有一个讲英语的朋友.

Here, 能讲英语的朋友 a friend who can speak English  is much different from 讲英语的朋友 an English speaking friend, since there is a 能 which literally means can.

"I don't know when I should go" should be translated to 我不知道我应什么时候去.

Notice that 我不认识 usually means I don't know (who he/she is)

I'll try to both directly and natively translate your six sentences:

“She's the one who owns this car" 她是（这辆）车的主人
"He told me what you said" 他告诉了我你说了什么 他告诉了我你所说的话
"I will decide when I leave" 我将决定我什么时候离开 我将决定我离开的时间
"He will tell you where to go" 他将会告诉你（应该）去哪
"This is why I arrive early everyday" 这就是为什么我每天早到 这就是我每天早到的原因
"This is how I use my phone" 这就是我用自己手机的方式 我就是**这么**（accent）用手机的

Attributive clause or other forms of clauses exist in Chinese but are much different from English, they could be more implicit, differently structured. You can read this article: How to Translate English Attributive Clauses
As a native Chinese speaker, I did not learn much Chinese grammar, so I suggest you find more in a textbook.


Is there a distinction between 空港 (kōnggǎng) and 机场 (jīchǎng) which both mean airport?

空港 is Japanese; 机场 is Chinese.

Japanese learned Chinese characters from China in ancient times. They called those Chinese characters 'Kanji'. Most Chinese terms retained their original Chinese meaning in Japanese. But the Japanese also coined some unique terms with Kanji that are not being used in Chinese.

The 空港 sign you saw in China was reverse imported from Japanese.

  https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hant/漢語中的日語借詞

  和製漢語
  由於漢語也是因為19世紀時急迫需要翻譯西文，而大量從日本輸入新詞，大部分進入漢語的日語借詞都是日語中的「和製漢語」。舉凡「電話」、「幹部」、「藝術」、「否定」、「肯定」、「假設[2]」、「海拔」、「直接」、「警察」、「雜誌」、「防疫」、「法人」、「航空母艦」都是屬於和製漢語日語借詞。[3]。 要注意的是，並不是所有日語中的「和製漢語」都在現代漢語中通用，如「介錯」、「怪我」、「油斷」這類和製漢語詞都沒有進入漢語。

空港(airport) was in the group of 'Japan coined Chinese' that are not in Chinese vocabulary - until now.


How to say "What am I going to do with you" in Chinese?

Yes, there is a Chinese expression that almost perfectly matches the English one:

我该拿你怎么办

And it is used endearingly, or critically by superiors on inferiors. This also seems to match the English usage.

I don't know about its etymology; from its close match against English and its contemporaneity (Ngram Viewer shows it appeared in the 80's and began to spike from the 90's) I suspect it is highly influenced by the English expression.


What is the term little meatballs (referring to spoiled kids)?

From my life experience, there's no such phrase as "Little Meatballs".

What children (or even some adults) use to make fun of overweight kids is "小胖墩". "小胖墩" literally means "Little Fat Chunk", and of course, it is a slang word. And here, it is more likely "小胖墩" is used to represent children been spoiled with foods since s/he is the only child.


有(一)点 as a set can use to mean "a little too...". See this Chinese Grammar Wiki page.
Some examples from the page:

我 有点 饿 。
I'm a little hungry.
这个 菜 有点 辣 。
This dish is a little too spicy.
昨天 有一点 热 。
Yesterday it was a little too hot.

是 does not have this usage, so 他是一点儿严厉 is wrong.
However, you can say 他是有一点儿严厉, where 是 is used for emphasis.


Example of stress or tone on a consonant

Taking the character 呣 for instance, we can have things like:

m̄

  叹词, 表示疑问。如：呣, 你说什么？(汉语大词典)

ḿ

  歎詞﹐用法同嗯﹐表示疑問﹑不以為然或出乎意外：呣﹐他去幹甚麼？(Longman’s)

m̀

  歎詞﹐用法同嗯﹐表示答應﹑應諾：呣﹐我這就去。(Longman’s)

There is also record of a neutral toned 呣:

m

  叹词, 表示应诺。如：呣, 我知道了。(汉语大词典)

——

嗯 similarly can give us things like:

ń
ň
ǹ


It could well be an alternative, dialectal pronunciation of 这么. See this answer:
https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/19261/2508


Is the use of a conjunction between the second-last and last word in a list (A、B和C) a natural Chinese construction?

現在我身兼數職 will make people feel you are so proud, so people don't use it a lot.

現在我兼任..seems like you are  taking responsibility for your stressful work, it's more modest than above.

Forgive my grammar mistakes, I am a college student of China and learning English now.


I don't think we can translate the two phrases word by word, as they are delivering an artistic message through singing.
The songwriter is trying to draw a vivid scenery in the listener's mind - at a star-covered evening standing on the hill looking down on the mountain surrounded village below, the scattered lights are glowing; alongside the village, the lazy water is slowly flowing in the river, so calm and peacefully beauty.
Wish this makes sense.


How does the Chinese translation of an English name get established?

First of all, I'm a native speaker. I know this well but my English is not as good as you. so I hope it would not bother you, thank you.
Basically, what Chinese people would do is just to translate the name by its pronunciation and use some similar sounded Chinese characters to write it down.

For example, "Rufus Gainey" will be translated to "鲁福斯 · 甘利"(Lu Fu Si | Gan li).

However, because there are a lot of Chinese characters which have the same pronunciation（ 鲁福斯 · 甘利, 鲁服斯 · 干立， 鲁服思 · 肝力... they sound the same), it is important to choose the "nice" characters.

"鲁服思 · 肝力" is not good because "肝力" means "liver power", weird！
“干立” is also bad because it means "standing there and do nothing".
"甘利" is quiet good because "甘" means "sweet" and "利" means "good".

And also there are some "conventional translations" here like Tom -> 汤姆, Jim -> 吉姆... Because they are quite common in English so there are common Chinese version of them.

There are also some interesting translation here.

Example 1: first name

Girls and boys tend to have different first names, right?
We all know that Tom is a boy name and Ann is a girl name. However, "Tracy" can be used both by a girl or boy. So:

Tracy McGrady: He is my favorite NBA star. We often translate his name as "特雷西"

However, if Tracy is a girl, I think "翠茜" is a good translation because this two characters are quite female-style.

Example 2: family name

Family names have no gender, right?

Marilyn Monroe -> 玛丽莲·梦露

Jim Monroe -> 吉姆·门罗

You can find here the same "Monroe" are translated to different characters. This is because 梦露 is quite girl-like name and it is quite good to represent the beauty and sexy of Marilyn Monroe. However I don't think a boy Jim will like this translation for him. So what I'm trying to say here is that some Chinese characters or word have strong genders so we can use them to translate the family name differently for boys and girls.

Example 3:

Irvin and Owen will both be translated to "欧文". The reason is that if you let my grandpa(he know nothing about English) tell the difference between these two names. He would say there is no difference. Because there is no pronunciation like "Irvin" in Chinese. So we treat it as "欧文".

BTW, Steve is 史蒂夫 in Chinese.


shénmo pronounced as homophone of 什麼 shénme

The word 什麼 being pronounced as shénmo is not Standard Chinese (although it should be readily understandable). Therefore, the answer to

  In what contexts is this true?

is almost never, unless one is specifically transcribing a topolectical variation of Mandarin.

That being said,

Shénmo is probably a more accurate reflection of how it's pronounced among Southern Chinese speakers of Mandarin.
麼 always had another pronunciation with Pinyin mo
什麼 is quite an old word, with

Many variant pronunciations

Many variant spellings

so expect many topolectical variations!


What is a good technique for remembering tones?

There is a technique I started to use and actually, I've seen it also in other dictionaries, so maybe I wasn't that original...

But anyway, the answer is colors! When you're studying new Hanzi or vocabulary, just color each character according to the tone... It's very helpful to remember the tones, because after a while, you visualize the tones in your head through the colors. For example:

The tones obviously indicate the tones of the single characters1, it doesn't take into account the tone changes in spoken Mandarin2.

Obviously these tones are just mine, which means you can change the colors according to your taste. This technique is very useful for the computers, since you can use the colors. Concerning something handwritten, I can suggest using colored flashcards for each tone, for example, or using different pen colors.

For color blind people an alternative solution is needed. For single Hanzi on actual flashcards (not digital ones), a good idea would be the shape of the paper. Or the border style. For example an undulated border for the first tone and so on.

For expressions instead you could add a symbol below each Hanzi. I know that it sounds too complicated, but right now I don't have a better idea.

1: dictionary tones
2: tone sandhi


How to translate the parts of Chinese university

As discussed in this question, the university system in China is organized somewhat differently than the United States:
Chinese Universities (please offer corrections)

At the top level, there is a 大学, which is usually translated as University.

There are groupings of related departments called 学院. Because this is not always similar to US universities, the translations vary. In order to translate X学院 I've seen:

institute of X
X school (especially "Business School" and "Law School")
college of X

Individual departments (which may have one or more related majors) are 系.

Courses of study towards a degree are called 专业, translated as major.

US Universities and Colleges

At the top level you have either University or College (both show up as 大学). Universities are bigger than Colleges and have more administrative subdivisions..

Universities (but not colleges) may be subdivided into various schools or colleges.

Professional schools (business, law, medicine) are basically always a separate "school" from undergraduate programs. For instance, Harvard University includes the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Law School. Admissions for professional schools are always separate from admissions for undergraduate programs.

Undergraduate programs in a university might all be lumped into a single "college" (e.g., UT-Austin College of Undergraduate Studies), or there may be several "colleges" for related degrees. Generally, admission as an undergraduate into a University entitles you to take courses in any department or "school" that teaches undergraduates. For instance, you could start studying art and decide to study chemistry instead. If a student's major is part of some "college" or "school" within the university, they might not even know which one it is.

Sometimes graduate (Masters, PhD) programs are in their own "schools", and other times their part of the same "school" as related majors at the undergraduate level. For instance, UW-Madison has the College of Letters & Sciences which includes many undergraduate majors and graduate programs in humanitites, social sciences, and sciences. Admissions for graduate programs are separate from undergraduate programs.

Music programs are sometimes in a separate "school" within the university called a "conservatory". Admissions might be separate from general undergraduate studies or require auditions.

With a college or school, there are departments, which may offer one or more courses of study, generally called majors.

Second Question
国家保密学院 is a "School for the protection of state secrets". The Chinese government has a bureau dedicated to this.


Literally, 如 means "like" and 此 means "this".

如此 as a verb means 是这样, (something) to be the case.


How do I understand Ni (you) character correctly?

Outlier

  FORM
  你 consists of 尔 (a shorthand form of 爾 “you”), and 亻 (person), indicating the original meaning “you.” 尔 also gives the sound.
  [Reference, p. 1253]

  COMPONENTS
   亻
  In 你, 亻“person” is a meaning component, indicating “having to do with people.”
   尔
  In 你 nǐ, 尔 ěr is both a meaning component and a sound component. It is shorthand for 爾, an ancient character that meant “you” (among other things). The sound connection between 你 nǐ and 尔 ěr is not obvious in modern Mandarin.