打电话[dǎ diànhuà]--Making a phone call

This video was made in my Chinese class. The girl on the left is American. The girl on the right is Korean.

眼保健操[yán bǎojiàn cāo]--Eye Exercises

In China, students are required to do the Eye Exercises twice a day to protect their eyesight on school days.

Click here to see the TV news about the Eye Exercises for Chinese students.

The following video will teach you how to do the new version (2008) of Eye Exercises.

端午节[Duānwǔjié]--Dragon Boat Festival

The Chinese Dragon Boat Festival is a significant holiday celebrated in China, and the one with the longest history. The Dragon Boat Festival is celebrated by boat races in the shape of dragons. Competing teams row their boats forward to a drumbeat racing to reach the finish end first.

The boat races during the Dragon Boat Festival are traditional customs to attempts to rescue the patriotic poet Chu Yuan. Chu Yuan drowned on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month in 277 B.C. Chinese citizens now throw bamboo leaves filled with cooked rice into the water. Therefore the fish could eat the rice rather than the hero poet. This later on turned into the custom of eating tzungtzu and rice dumplings.

The celebration's is a time for protection from evil and disease for the rest of the year. It is done so by different practices such as hanging healthy herbs on the front door, drinking nutritious concoctions, and displaying portraits of evil's nemesis, Chung Kuei. If one manages to stand an egg on it's end at exactly 12:00 noon, the following year will be a lucky one.

Learn Chinese Language

Learning Chinese is like learning two languages: the written character form and the spoken form, nowadays written using the English alphabet (pinyin). Learning (and remembering) Chinese characters takes considerably longer than learning spoken Chinese and its notation. For this reason the following guide concentrates on spoken Chinese.

Please click here to learn the Chinese language.

Chinese Phonetics -- Chinese Pinyin

汉语拼音 Hànyǔ Pīnyīn
The Chinese Pinyin is a system for transliterating Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet, which is similar to annotating English pronunciations with the International Phonetic Alphabet. The Chinese Pinyin is pretty easy. Once you have mastered Pinyin, you will be able to master the pronunciation of Chinese characters on your own.

Please click here for the pronunciation of Chinese Pinyin.

Chinese language

Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) (汉语／漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语／華語 Huáyǔ; 中国话／中國話 Zhōngguóhuà; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees.[3] Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. Internal divisions of Chinese are usually perceived by their native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, rather than separate languages, although this identification is considered inappropriate by some linguists and Sinologists.[4]

Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue.

The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language (see Mandarin Chinese for more), this language can be referred to as 官话／官話 Guānhuà or 北方话／北方話 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia).

China Population

The Population Growth of the World's Largest Country

With just over 1.3 billion people (1,330,044,605 as of mid-2008), China is the world's largest and most populous country.

As the world's population is approximately 6.7 billion, China represents a full 20% of the world's population so one in every five people on the planet is a resident of China.

China's population growth has been somewhat slowed by the one child policy, in effect since 1979.

As recently as 1950, China's population was a mere 563 million. The population grew dramatically through the following decades to one billion in the early 1980s.

China's total fertility rate is 1.7, which means that, on average, each woman gives birth to 1.7 children throughout her life. The necessary total fertility rate for a stable population is 2.1; nonetheless, China's population is expected to grow over the next few decades. This can be attributed to immigration and a decrease in infant mortality and a decrease in death rate as national health improves.

By the late 2010s, China's population is expected to reach 1.4 billion. Around 2030, China's population is anticipated to peak and then slowly start dropping.

In the next few decades, India, the world's second most populous country is expected to surpass China in population. By 2040, India's population is expected to be 1.52 billion; that same year, China's will be 1.45 billion and India will become the world's most populous country. As of 2005, India has a total fertility rate of 2.8, well above replacement value, so it is growing much more quickly than China.