Mandarin Quotes

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

I want do a Mandarin language movie. It`ll probably be the next movie I do after the one I do next.

(The Pillow Book) The film has written and spoken dialogue in twenty-five languages - English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Latin, Hebrew, necrotic Egyptian ... and it has written calligraphic text on paper, wood, and flesh, on flat and curved surfaces, vertically and horizontally, on both living and dead flesh, in neon, on screens, in projection, as sub-title, inter-title, and sur-title, as High Art and low art, as advertisement and banker`s check and registration plate, on photograph, on blackboard, as letter correspondence, as photocopy facsimile, and spoken, chanted, and sung, with and without music ... a mocking challenge. You want text? Cinema wants text? Cinema pretends to eschew text? Then we can give you text to mock that smug suggestion that cinema thinks it is pictures.

How sad it will be if in three or four centuries all that is spoken in the world is English, Hindi, Mandarin, Russian, Japanese and a handful of European languages, ... We will also lose much healing knowledge and much conservation knowledge embedded in indigenous cultures.

(He also managed to squeeze in some sightseeing: visiting the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square and the Great Wall. Still, most of his energy was expended in the classroom, where he learned how to read and write Mandarin.) After awhile, I gave up writing, ... But I still could comprehend the characters.

My first roommate was from Hong Kong and spoke perfect English. He also spoke Mandarin and Cantonese but wanted to learn business and legal terms, ... My second roommate was from Northern Ireland. He had taught English in Japan for two years but wanted to work in China.

You might be saying, `I love you` to your girlfriend in Cantonese, but it will still sound like you`re fighting. It`s just our tone. We always sound like we`re in a shouting match. Mandarin is so mellow. Cantonese is strong and edgy.

Honduran cooks learn Mandarin. Mexican clerks learn Korean. Most often, people learn Spanish.

We have to think carefully about which languages those are. French, for example, is declining as an international language, but Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic are all languages of the future. Ethnic minority groups in the UK may well prove to be a major asset in this effort.