Onomatopoeia
The word onomatopoeia is a jumble of vowels and is probably the most difficult English word to pronounce. It is pronounced [on-uh-mat-uh–pee–uh], and it defines a word that imitates a sound. The –poeia suffix is pronounced [pee–uh].
As a mentor for learning English in China, there have been many students that I have encountered that have difficulty pronouncing words such as “the”, “Vietnam”, “that”, “vet”, and “world”. This problem arises from the fact that Mandarin (and their dialects) do not have words that include the sounds “th”, “v” and “rl”.
The longest Chinese word is the character Biáng. The character consists of 58 strokes in traditional form and 42 strokes in simplified Chinese. The word refers to a particular style of noodles, made thick and flat like a belt.
Pinyin's c- initial is simply a "ts" sound. It's like the "ts" you hear in the English words "cats" and "Watson" and "robots".
If obscure or little-used characters count, then one could make a case for zhé, an obsolete character of 64 strokes, that, appropriately enough, meant "verbose." This character however, is just one single character (for long or "dragon") written four times.
what3words can be used in China via a dedicated China-specific app and online map that are configured to work with the Chinese coordinate system. Our online map and 三词地址 Android app use maps provided by AutoNavi, while the 三词地址 iOS app uses Apple Maps.
Cusses, curses, and swears are some of the most fun things to learn when you begin studying a new language. Mandarin Chinese has a wide range of bad words and vicious insults ranging from calling someone a “stupid egg” to cursing their entire ancestral line going back eighteen generations.
Most major foreign apps are banned in China, including Google, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, and Twitter.
Given its long history and the isolation of the region in which it is spoken, Wenzhounese is so unusual in its phonology that it has the reputation of being the least comprehensible dialect for an average Mandarin speaker.
The shortest word is a. Some might wonder about the word I since it consists of one letter, too. In sound, a is shorter because it is a monophthong (consists of one vowel), while I is a diphthong. Both do consist of one letter in the English writing system, and in most fonts I is the narrowest letter.
三 (sān) — three.
“Three” is used in particularly sappy examples of internet slang, often as a stand-in for 生 (shēng) — life.
Most estimates say that modern Chinese has about 100,000 words which are made from various combinations of around 7,000 characters. For comparison, the Oxford English Dictionary has about 170,000 words and English has 26 standard letters.
Linguists have split Chinese into somewhere between seven and ten main language groups—the largest being Mandarin (also known as Northern), Wu, Min, and Yue—and each group also has a number of sub-dialects.
There are many variations of the character for biáng, but the most widely accepted version is made up of 58 strokes in its traditional form (42 in simplified Chinese). It is one of the most complex Chinese characters in modern usage, although it is not found in modern dictionaries or even in the Kangxi dictionary.
The "biang" character is onomatopoeic, meant to mimic the sound of dough hitting a counter. It is also more complex to write than any character in the Chinese language, with a whopping 58 strokes (though, depending on whom you ask, this number may vary slightly).
The letter "g" comes close to following a phonics rule similar to the one for the letter "c." For example, it is always pronounced /g/ unless it is followed by an "e," "i" or "y." Thus, we have game, got, and gum, as well as glad, grand, and rugby.
Cause. In English, the linguistic controversy stems partly from the fact that there is no general rule for how the letter sequence gi is to be pronounced; the hard g prevails in words such as gift, while the soft g is used in others, such as ginger.