Hey guys, welcome back to our channel. This is a video I have been hesitant to make because
we are not a language channel. I don’t study Chinese or Linguistics. But there have been
a few events, questions and comments that make me think, maybe this is a good topic
to talk about.
The other day, Phil and I were watching a Chinese movie on Netflix, and I asked Phil
to put on the Chinese subtitle because I couldn’t really understand what they were saying. The
volume was fine, I knew they were speaking Mandarin, and I wasn’t drunk or anything.
I simply had no idea what they were saying.
Sometimes we have people suggest that we should mark tones when I use pinyin, otherwise it
can’t be called pinyin. I also heard people talking about how hard it is to translate
or understand ancient Chinese texts because it’s so ancient it’s open to different
people’s interpretations. Once, we were talking about qing cha during Sunday Tea Book.
Qing Cha means oolong tea. A friend mentioned that qing, as a word to describe the color,
whether it’s greenish-blue or blue-green is still controversial.
So now, here I am, making a video about the Chinese language. But don’t worry, I’m
not gonna teach you how to speak Chinese, we are still a tea channel. As mentioned,
I’m no expert on this topic, but I’d like to share what I know with you. So if anything
I say ends up being wrong, please don’t hesitate to correct me by commenting below.
Or, if you have something to add, we’d love to hear from you too. We all learn from each
other.
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so that you won’t miss any of our future videos. And if you think our content is interesting
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It will really help our channel out.
Pinyin is a tool to help people learn Mandarin pronunciation. It’s also a standard to spell
out names or terms when Chinese characters can’t be used. In ancient times, we used
other Chinese characters to facilitate the pronunciation of difficult or obscure characters.
Since the early 17th-century spelling Chinese pronunciations with letters has been an endeavor
for many. In early times, it was mostly western priests who wanted to improve communication
for their missions. Later on, it was those seeking to help China ‘catch up’ and the
character-based language was considered part of the problem. Now, Mandarin Chinese is the
most spoken language, making mandarin pinyin the most popular way of spelling Chinese.
That’s why we mostly use pinyin on our website, social media, and other platforms. And I totally
agree that tones are a big part of pinyin. When we learned pinyin in school, if the tones
were wrong then it’s wrong, and pinyin without tones is obviously incomplete (aka wrong).
When I started out, I simply followed the most common usages I saw here in the US and
Canada, in newspapers, official documents, and whatnot, pinyin spelling without tones.
For example, Beijing, Yunan. After hearing the suggestions about adding the tones, I
thought it through and still decided to not use tone accents with pinyin. Sorry... but
here are my reasons. First of all, pinyin is a tool for Chinese pronunciation. It’s
not Chinese. The basic Chinese unit is the character, characters go together to form
words. One pronunciation isn’t locked down to one character, for example, cha2, it would
be tea, it could also be many other different characters. When it’s a pronunciation for
a whole word, it still isn’t locked down to the exact characters, and therefore meanings.
For example, cha2ye4 could be like this, which means tea or tea leaf. It could also be like
this, which means the whole tea industry. Or it could also be like this, a totally different
set of characters, meaning night inspection. And all of those share the same identical
pinyin spelling and tones. Though this is not something new or secret, I didn’t fully,
consciously realize this difference between Chinese and English till Phil and I were watching
the Chinese fantasy movie and I needed Chinese subtitles to understand it fully. And I guess
this is also one of the reasons most of our TV shows include subtitles. I appreciate the
suggestions about tones a lot because it made me think and since then I have been trying
to make sure that when I use this 50% pinyin, I put the Chinese characters too. Because
with the correct pinyin and tones, you are very likely to end up with the wrong words
because they are tea terms, less common, less used, pinyin input won’t suggest it to you
at all. But with the Chinese characters, you are set on the right track for googling and
further reading. Another consideration is ease of pronunciation for English speakers.
Many people are hesitant to pronounce Chinese tea names because they are afraid to pronounce
them wrong. With the tones on top of those letters, they would be thinking “what does
this mean? Now I’m for sure gonna messed this up”. This becomes even more discouraging.
I think the purpose of using letters instead of Chinese characters is for easy reading
and speaking for those who speak Latin letter-based languages. And of course, tones are difficult
to type on my Canadian keyboard. I know it’s a lame excuse, but it is also a reason for
me too.
Chinese character Some of you become interested in Chinese culture
and language because of tea. That’s so wonderful. So if you are not learning Chinese simply
for utility, I strongly suggest you learn Chinese characters. Each one of every character
is its own individual, full of story that is fun to learn about. 2000 years ago, the
scholars of Han Dynasty summarized 6 different ways of how Chinese characters were created
and since then, any new characters have been developed under this guide. Some characters
are pictograms, such as ri/sun, yue/moon, and Phil’s favorite character shan/mountain.
It literally looks like a mountain or mountain range. Some are ideogrammic compounds. For
example mu/tree, two trees become lin/a field of trees, three trees become sen/a vast field
of trees. Let’s stack more trees, 6 trees, yan4, 8 trees sha1. What if we put these two
together, five trees, that’s a lot of trees, sen lin, forest. Every character has its meanings,
some could have over 30 different meanings. But when characters put together to form a
word, their meanings become clear. For example, the character qing, it can be used to describe
color. So is it green color or blue color? Well it depends on the words this character
and other character or characters form. For example, qing cao/ green grass. It means green.
Qing tian/blue sky. It means blue. Dian qing, it refers to indigo shade. Qing yi/black clothes.
Now it means black. Same with words, a word could have different meanings depending on
the sentence and the context it is in. Though an individual character or word could have
multiple meanings, when it’s used in context, the meaning becomes clear and unambiguous.
Chinese characters also could have multiple pronunciations, 2-3 is very common, some have
up to 8 different ways to pronounce it depending on how the character is used, and it doesn’t
necessarily mean that they have different meanings. Language is also alive. It changes
and evolves. Sometimes it adapts. When most people pronounce it wrong, it gradually becomes
right. For example. Liu Bao Cha, the character bao when used as a place name, should be pronounced
as pu4. But it’s too obscure now. So liu bao cha it is. Another similar instance is
Liu An Gua Pian, a well known green tea, the only Chinese green tea that uses exclusively
leaves and no buds. Liu is the same character as the number six. So most people call it
Liu An Gua Pian, and certain recent dictionaries follow the trend and marked the place as Liu
An. However, it had been pronounced Lu An for over 2000 years, named by Emperor Han
Wu Di, and today locals still think it’s Lu An and not Liu An. Shu in Shu Pu Er, you
will see sometimes people pronounce and spell as shou pu er. Well, in the dictionary, the
character when used alone is pronounced as shou, when used to form a word, it is pronounced
as shu. For example, to say “this peach is ripe” 桃子熟了 in Chinese, here pronounces
“shou”. However, if I say “a ripe peach”熟桃子 in Chinese, we say shu. In daily use, people
are loose with these pronunciation rules, so it’s common you hear both sounds used
interchangeably. It’s now mostly about speaking habits, rather than right or wrong. Interestingly,
shou in English pronounces the same as shu in pinyin. Furthermore, shu has multiple meanings,
two of which are cooked, and ripe. So is it ripe pu’er or cooked pu’er. Strictly speaking,
it's neither. Shu in Pu’er means it’s further processed, similar to shu tie (wrought
iron). Ripe Pu’er is metaphorically acceptable, but cooked pu’er is simply wrong.
I know this might make you feel dizzy by now. I just wanted to point out little details
about the Chinese language that I just realized recently and you might not have thought about
or noticed. Echoing the point I keep mentioning during our Sunday Tea Book, language differences
are more than words themself. Language affects the way of thinking, the way of talking and
more. You probably noticed that besides my accent and sloppy grammar, the way I talk
is weird too. For example, I like to use metaphors to explain things. This is very Chinese and
based on my observation, not something that is used that often in English. It’s a habit
of talking in Chinese, in sayings, or explaining things, we like to compare or use metaphors
to make a complicated idea simple. However, I often found it works the opposite way when
I'm speaking English but using this Chinese way. People might think like “we are talking
about this issue and why are you mentioning something totally irrelevant”. I also try
to avoid using “you” too often unless I really mean you specifically. In the Chinese
habit of talking, we often use “you” to mean people in general. For example, when
we talk about cleaning teaware. Out of habit, I would say “you should clean up the gaiwan
after use so that you won’t get it stained”. It means in general people should do this.
But somehow when it’s spoken in English, it sounds a bit rude and straight at someone
(you). So I try to replace “you” with “people” or “we”, making it sound
less condescending or direct in English. I know little things like these still slip out,
especially during a live session, as I’m just talking casually. Well, I really appreciate
you putting up with me and I’ll keep working on it, and the accent, and the grammar too.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, when China was in a miserable situation, many scholars
and writers deemed the difficulty of learning Chinese characters as the root reason why
China fell behind the west and proposed discontinuing the use of Chinese characters and only using
letters to catch up to the machine age. I’m so glad it didn’t end up happening that
way. For thousands of years, the lineage of the Chinese written language has never been
interrupted. It’s the base of Chinese culture, with incredible depth and breadth. About 3500
years ago (Shang dynasty), we had 甲骨文(Oracle bone script), 金文 (Chinese bronze inscriptions),
which evolved into 隶书 (Clerical script) during the Han Dynasty, an archaic style of
Chinese calligraphy which most of us today could still read easily. During this long
history, many peoples and cultures built their written language based on Chinese characters.
Some of them disappeared forever, such as 西夏文 (Tangut script), 契丹文 (khitan
script), 女真文 (Jurchen script). Some are still in use and thrive like Korean and
Japanese.
So if you ever consider learning Chinese, or are interested in knowing more about Chinese
culture, because of your love for tea. Don’t stop at pinyin. Use it to open the fascinating
world of the Chinese language, and go beyond it. The purpose of this video is just to share
some of my thoughts on this topic. You guys are the inspiration for many, many of our
videos. Your participation and enthusiasm on various topics and discussions make our
channel a beautiful place. We always welcome different ideas and suggestions so that we
can all learn and improve.
I hope this video is not too nerdy and it provides you some insights into the Chinese
language. If you found this video helpful, please don’t hesitate to give me a thumbs-up,
and maybe share this video with your friends who are also interested in this topic. Please
consider subscribing to our channel if you haven’t already, hit the notification bell.
Until next time, keep steeping!