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From Wikipedia: There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing a language from a dialect. My hunch is that in general Chinese politics favors unity, whereas European politics favors separation, thus speakers of Dutch and German would hate to think that they were speaking dialects of the same language. Conversely in general it is useful ...

There are many different dialects in China, for many special words in dialects, the "correct" character may not be found (the character has been abandoned in Mandarin), or may be a character but with a different pronunciation from Mandarin, or even can't be found. In fact, the average Chinese person can't tell you what the "correct" character in the dialect ...

I agree with your friend. I think the correct version is "什么来着". You can find the word"来着",but you can't find the word"来的“ in the dictionary. I think it's popular in northern area(such as 北京，天津，河北，辽宁). I have heard of "什么来着" on the TV and I can understand it, though I have never used "什么来着", either in mandarin or in my dialect. (Not applicable) Of course ...

Although I don't speak Hakka (one of my PhD advisors studied a Hong Kong Hakka dialect, so I have a vague idea about it) I live surrounded by Hakka people, in Guangdong, and I go frequently to Taiwan for work. In Taiwan, I noticed that the HSR announcements in Hakka sounded very different from the "regular" Hakka I can hear in Guangdong. There's a bunch of ...

As a form of Southwestern Mandarin, you can approach the Chongqing dialect with resources designed for Sichuanese in general. The English Wikipedia gives a lot of resources on "Si4cuan1hua4", including a good overview of the phonology, and a introduction to Sichuanese Pinyin. The Chinese Wikipedia gives a little more detail on the Chengdu-Chongqing dialect. ...

As answered concisely by StarCub, 齷齪 龌龊 is the Hanzi representation for Shanghainese o co. Yet IMHO to call this word "the Mandarin equivalent" of o co is a bit inappropriate, since from my understanding you are just asking for a Hanzi representation for a dialectal word, yet not its "equivalent" (or synonym, IMHO). A common mistake is to neglect the fact ...

In this case, I think the quote "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" best describes the situation. Since the mainland government considers linguistic unity to be in favor of their ruling, they will consider any spoken variety of Chinese to be a dialect, no matter how different it is from Mandarin (excluding minority languages).

No, they're not completely different, but similar in some ways. You should know, all dialects are different. Mandarin Chinese is not a natural language. It grabs pronunciation from Beijing dialect, vocabulary from all the northern dialects, grammar from the articles written by great writers during the New Culture Movement. Modern dialects have only one ...

I find two meanings of "indecisive" in the dictionary. To hover between different choices and can't make a decision in a short while. Not specified, undefined. I think you are asking a word for the first meaning, and then the words are: 犹豫不决 优柔寡断 没主见* 徘徊不定 犹豫 There are some other words related to this meaning, in different ...

I am from the south and I only use 什么来着 (never heard of 什么来的）. My friends use 什么来着 all the time, usually in the following situation: 你给上次来我们公司的律师打个电话。Call the lawyer that came to our company last time. 那个人叫什么来着？What's his name? I think there are two reasons you might have seen misleading search results regarding 什么来的. Some have asked questions ...

I guess it's Teochew (潮汕话 / 潮州话), a southern language in Guangdong and Taiwan. There're actually many Teochew people living in HK. HKers call them Chiuchow people (潮州人). You can ask the local friends to know more about them and their language. :)

Shenzhen is the United Nation of China -- take the subway and in any car you will hear a dozen languages and dialects. The whole of China is represented there -- from Guangdong people, of course (not all of them being fluent in Cantonese, there's a whole bunch of Guangdong-born Hakka and Chaozhou people in Shenzhen) to neighboring Guangxi (lots of them in ...

It depends on your purpose of learning Chinese, it is a tool or a research. Learning different dialects enables you learning the trend of Chinese pronunciation history. Also to quickly join local society, foreign people who speaks dialect is considered more friendly. Actually standardized Mandarin (普通话) is a combination of dialects that are used by ...

While I am not aware of any studies, I would add this: From my own experience of trying to learn other dialects beyond Mandarin (Taiwanese, Cantonese), as well as simplified along with traditional characters, I'd tend to agree with the previous paradigm. The reason is that there is so much to learn in a single dialect that starting on another one would ...

I don't know anything about 磨. :( Note that those terms listed by Huang refer to a state instead of describing someone's characteristics. They have some subtle differences between the states described by them. I'll let Huang to explain the differences between the 4 character terms. 没主见 basically means "no opinion". I'd say "他常常都犹豫不决" or "他常常都不能决定的" to ...

Your supposition about the "来的" is undoubtedly right! I am a native living in Guangzhou. It's very "normal" to say "这 是 什么 来的" to mean "What is it" in the Cantonese-speaking area due to the influence of the Cantonese construction "呢個 係 乜嘢 嚟嘅".You could say "来的" is a Cantonese-Mandarin粤式普通话. "来着" is a northern colloquial functional word to imply old ...

I started to use "来着" after I came to Beijing from Henan. I use "来着" when I should know something, but I cannot remember. e.g. 他叫什么来着？让我想想。 "I should know who he is, but I just cannot recall his name. Let me think for a while." Ask when the listener seems to have forgotten something. e.g. 昨天我说什么来着？我说了xxxx "You must have forgotten what I said yesterday. I ...