Learn Mandarin Chinese - MyChineseLearning

Survey shows China's '60s, '70s generations enjoy life the most

The outcome of a survey shows that Chinese people born in the 1960s and 1970s are most enthusiastic about life.

This so called "sociability survey" was carried on various major portal Web sites such as Sina.com.cn, qq.com and renren.com, attracting more than one million participants from all over China.

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Chinese Idioms or are short sayings usually consisting of  some characters. It's one thing to learn to understand such expressions in Chinese text, but a completely different thing to actively use them in your own phrases. If you don't know a large number of Chinese idioms, it can be difficult to spontaneously find suitable expressions for different occasions. We present you the Chinese idioms with English explanations, pinyin, audios and examples.

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Kids love songs and nursery rhymes. The words are usually simple and easy to be memorized. The rhyme of the music helps children to learn the song without much effort. For children,the easiest way to learn any foreign language probabaly is through learning the songs and nursery rhymes. Here is a collection of the Chinese children's songs and some nursery rhymes. Some of the songs have the words in Chinese and Mandarin Pinyin. A couple have the Enlgish meanings as well.

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China is the appellation of our country given by foreigners.

The porcelain china is the transliteration of the place name Changnan, which was the old name for the porcelain town of today's Jingdezhen (Jingde Town). In the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220), people built their cave-houses and cut logs to make pottery. And in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), people combined the advantages of celadon from the southern Yue kiln and white porcelains from the northern Xing kiln, and with the high-quality earth of the Gaoling Mountain in Changnan Town they produced a kind of white & green porcelain. This porcelain was smooth and bright, and hence earned another name of artificial jade. It became famous both home and abroad and exported to Europe in large quantities since people there did not know how to make porcelain before the 18th century.

The temple fair (miào huì 庙会) is a kind of social activity in China. Legend has it that it originated in ancient times when people offered sacrifices to the village god, which later gradually evolved into a marketplace for people to exchange products and a place for cultural performance. Temple fair in old China had a unique status in ordinary people’s life. It is the time to worship gods, pray for the blessing. It is also a great time to have fun. All the traditional shows went on at the temple fairs, talk shows (xiàng sheng 相声), banner shows (wǔ qí 舞旗), kongfu shows (wǔ shù 武术), lion shows (wǔ shī 舞狮), etc. It became a paradise for the kids. Fortunately this century old tradition is still preserved today.