Chinese Vocabulary

Addressing people by their title is very important in Chinese. In English you will be used to addressing people by their first name, however Chinese is more formal. With the exception of colleagues, friends and family, you should generally address people by their title.

In this post I provide the Chinese words for common fruit and vegetables as well as the classifiers (measure words) that you should use. I recommend you learn the names of popular fruit and vegetables, but committing to memory the Chinese names of fruit could be, well, fruitless.

If you ever visit a Chinese Website or take a holiday in China, you may be confused how discounting works, with signs giving a number, sometimes with a decimal point, followed by the character 折. 9折 for example doesn’t mean a 9% discount, nor does it mean a 90% discount, what it actually means is a 10% discount.

This is a list of colours in Chinese. I have added some vocabulary for patterns to make this complete. Each colour in Chinese has it’s own character and is followed by (sè), which means colour. Thus for example when you say blue, the character is (lán), however you would say (lán sè), or literally “blue …

How to say Colours and Patterns in Chinese Read More »

In this post I will provide Chinese clothing and footwear vocabulary. How to say Small, Medium and Large clothes sizes in Chinese To say Chinese clothes sizes, simply state the size and add (hào). For example is size 12. For small, medium and large sizes simply uses the (small), or characters followed by . This …

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If you are going shopping in a Chinese speaking country or perhaps shopping online on a Chinese Language site, below is a Chinese vocabulary list for clothing and footwear: English Chinese Pronunciation (Pinyin) apron pídài baseball cap bàngqiú mào belt pídài bikini bǐjīní yǒngzhuāng blazer xīzhuāng wàitào blouse chènshān boots xuēzi high boots gāo tǒng …

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