How2Say.Com — Learn to Speak Chinese and more

CantonesePod.com beta was launched in July, 2008.

It is updated weekly with lots of how to say entries and weekly podcast short lessons (easy to follow and pick the Cantonese language.)

http://CantonesePod.com/

Learn Some Basic Cantonese at ChineseBay!
Check it out!

For both Mandarin and Cantonese text2speech demo (pretty quick):
http://www.iflytek.com/speech%20shows.asp

For Cantonese only:

Dogs are our friends so I do not eat dogs any more. ( I used to live in a place where people raised dogs as food just like cows or pigs).

There is a Chinese saying to describe those ungrateful guys as “Trusted aides are eliminated when they have outlived their usefulness.”

兔死狗烹 tu4 si2 gou3 peng1 (Click the Chinese to go to the Yahoo dictionary for the sound of this Chinese idiom.

When I was a little boy, I was deeply touched by a story about a loyal hound who died of exhaustion after saving its master from drowning in the river. Some day, I really want to keep a dog for myself, because I believe it will be my best friend. No, I’ll never cook it. I’m a civilized person now

White Radish, or Daikon(Japanese), 白蘿蔔(萝卜)bai2luo2bo2(Chinese)
Cantonese use it in White Radish cake 蘿蔔糕(萝卜糕)luo2bo2gao1, one of their Dim Sum(Dian3xin) 點心(点心).

[photopress:luobo.jpg,thumb,centered]
(credit: photo from wikipedia.com click here to read more about this vegetable and the name daikon )

Are you interested in all other Chinese food? We started a new category for Chinese Food here.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” —- Martin Luther King, Jr

I really love the great speeches like this above. You can find the full text of it here or listen to the mp3 of his address here: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/Ihaveadream.htm

His speeches are so dynamic that you should listen to them from time to time to learn how to speak. Go to his official site for more. (Listen to the speech in its Flash introduction and enjoy.)

At whitehouse.gov, you can find lots of President’s Radio Addresses with audio and scripts which are really good materials to learn good English: Bush’s radio address on Jan 7th, 2006 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060107.html
His address on Christmas Eve. And other addresses in archives.

Dictionary and Reference books:

(type in a strange word, and you may get the pronunciation and definitions in many languages, including English, Japanese, Chinese, etc. and much more..)

Free Desktop Tools:

( great dictioanary for your desktop. Remember to set a good hotkey and then after you run it, highlight the word you need to lookup and press the hot key. I set Ctrl+Q as my hot key and it works well)

Free Resources To Learn English:

We will update this page from time to time.

Chinese computer has become easier and easier as companies such as Microsoft and Linux developers contribute lots of free tools and resources.

Chinese Fonts can be found at
Microsoft Unicode font download search

And you can read a very helpful article about Unicode for Chinese pinyin at Prof. Xie’s page:
Unicode Pinyin Fonts

This site is in Unicode, so it is very easy to use pinyin fonts:
ā á ǎ à ō ó ǒ ò ē é ě è ī í ǐ ì ū ú ǔ ù ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ ü Ā Á Ǎ À Ō Ó Ǒ Ò Ē É Ě È using the html font tag … font FACE=”Arial, Helvetica”…

ā á ǎ à ō ó ǒ ò
ē é ě è ī í ǐ ì
ū ú ǔ ù ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ ü
Ā Á Ǎ À Ō Ó Ǒ Ò
Ē É Ě È
Lucida Sans Unicode:
ā á ǎ à ō ó ǒ ò ē é ě è ī í ǐ ì ū ú ǔ ù ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ ü Ā Á Ǎ À Ō Ó Ǒ Ò Ē É Ě È
Courier New
ā á ǎ à ō ó ǒ ò ē é ě è ī í ǐ ì ū ú ǔ ù ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ ü Ā Á Ǎ À Ō Ó Ǒ Ò Ē É Ě È

Most of the Hong Kong stars’ name cannot match word by word, which creates lots of difficulties in translation.

Let’s start with the following:

張曼玉 zhang1man4yu Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk
劉嘉玲 liu2jia1ling2 Carina Lau Ka-Ling
周潤發 zhou1run4fa1 Chow Yun-fat
周星馳 zhou1xing1chi2 Stephen Chow
成龍 Jackie Chan
陳德森 Teddy Chen
曾志偉 Eric Tsang
徐若瑄 Vivian Hsu
金玟 Kim Min Jeong (Korean)
吳興國 Wu Hsing-kuo
張達明 ? Cheung Tat-ming,
? Alfred Cheung
夏萍? Ha Ping
? Vincent Kuk

抛磚引玉 This is only a start, so you can help to put in more and more…
I’ll add more to the above if you can give us more in your comments..

They are called “Terracotta warriors”, but more correctly:
The Terracotta Army (兵馬俑;
pinyin: bīng mǎ yōng or bing1ma3yong3 , literal meaning: “Soldier and Horse Figures”), inside the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor (秦始皇陵; pinyin: qín shǐ huáng líng ), was discovered in March 1974 during the sinking of wells for farmland irrigation construction near Xi’an, Shaanxi province, People’s Republic of China.

So They should be army (including warriors and horses) instead of just warriors.

More about Terracotta warriors/Army

[photopress:XianCavalryman.jpg,thumb,centered]