Showing posts with label Cantonese. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cantonese. Show all posts

Sunday, July 19, 2026

MEotW: jī‐tóng‐yā‐jiǎng

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

What are some factors affecting whether or not Mandarin field language learners know certain basic truths about the Chinese languages?


Chart: Languages by First-Language Speakers—2019

Allowing various untruths to continue to divert and bog down the language-learning efforts of those who come to help in the worldwide Mandarin field can have incalculable overall negative effects on the preaching work in this enormous field.


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Sunday, December 21, 2025

MEotW: gòngtōng

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

Are Chinese characters really more universal than alphabetic writing systems are?


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Sunday, June 29, 2025

MEotW: Zhōngwén

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

How do human language experts and God’s Word disagree with traditional Chinese culture regarding what aspect of Mandarin should be the primary focus of Mandarin field language learners?


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Saturday, June 07, 2025

MEotW: fāngyán

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

What does the Mandarin word often mistranslated as “dialect” actually mean?



List of different Chinese languages in which publications are available on jw.org as of 2025-06-02

List of different Chinese languages in which publications are available on jw.org as of 2025-06-02


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Friday, May 23, 2025

MEotW: yǔzú

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

How closely—or distantly—related are Mandarin and Cantonese? Are Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. just dialects of “Chinese”?


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Saturday, June 22, 2024

MEotW:

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

How important is talent with music or languages when it comes to learning Mandarin? What else is important for learning Mandarin?


2024 convention song “‘Hǎo Xiāoxi’!” (music+_Pīnyīn_), on iPhone (landscape orientation)

The 2024 convention song “‘Hǎo Xiāoxi’!” (music+Pīnyīn), on an iPhone (landscape orientation)


Chart showing the relative changes in pitch for the four tones of Mandarin Chinese

Chart showing the relative changes in pitch for the four tones of Mandarin Chinese
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License logo Wereon


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Friday, April 19, 2024

MEotW: Yuèyǔ

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

Is Cantonese just a dialect of “Chinese”? Is Cantonese just a spoken language?


Chinese varieties on jw.org as of 2024-04-14

Publications are now available on jw.org that are written in these Chinese varieties.


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Tuesday, June 20, 2023

MEotW: xuānchuán

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

What worldly propaganda about the Chinese languages should we Mandarin field language learners beware of?


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Wednesday, June 14, 2023

MEotW: cì’ěr

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

How can we avoid being a “clashing cymbal” in the Mandarin field?


Screenshot of “cì’ěr” in 1 Co. 13:1 (nwtsty, CHS+_Pīnyīn_ WOL)


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Friday, March 17, 2023

“Worship with…Truth”

Wednesday, March 08, 2023

MEotW: fā yǔyīn

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

What does the popularity among WeChat users of sending voice messages tell us about Chinese characters?


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Sunday, December 25, 2022

Stuck in the Middle

Tuesday, November 01, 2022

MEotW: zhízhèng

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

Besides the fact that David was a king, what connection is there between the Mandarin words for “psalmist” and “hold political power”?


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Wednesday, September 21, 2022

MEotW: jī‐tóng‐yā‐jiǎng

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

What can help us to avoid ‘feeling like an idiot’ in the Chinese fields? 🐓 🦆


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Monday, November 23, 2020

MEotW: Hànzì

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

What is the Korean connection? Do the Chinese languages need to be written using the extraordinarily complex Chinese characters? Will we be tourists or missionaries?

漢字 汉字

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Monday, November 16, 2020

MEotW: fāngyán

The Mandarin Expression of the Week is:

Are Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. just dialects of “Chinese”? What‘s the difference between a dialect and a language? Why does it matter?


List of different Chinese languages in which publications are available on jw.org


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Tuesday, October 03, 2017

“God’s Love” Bk. 3-Line Material Up to Ch. 5 Checked

Starting on December 18, 2017, Mandarin Congregation Bible Study meetings are scheduled to start using the “God’s Love” book. (Interestingly, on that date, Cantonese Congregation Bible Study meetings are instead apparently scheduled to start using the Teach Us book. As far as I can recall, this will be the first time that the Mandarin and Cantonese CBS meetings use different publications.)


While 3-line material exists for the entire “God’s Love” book, it was produced many years ago, so it was not based on the current official 2017-02 Mandarin version. As of this writing, the existing 3-line material has been checked up to the end of Chapter 5, and so far, no differences have been found compared to the text of the current official 2017-02 Mandarin version.


However, during this checking, some errors were found in the existing 3-line material. The affected PDF files available for download at the below links have been revised with annotations indicating the errors that were found:

Unfortunately, some less advanced PDF-viewing apps such as iBooks do not fully support PDF annotations, but PDF annotations are well supported in modern PDF-viewing apps such as GoodReader, Documents, Adobe Acrobat Reader, etc.


Further checking will be done as time allows.


Thursday, August 10, 2017

Official Cantonese Yale Romanization PDFs Now Available

Official Cantonese PDF files that use the Yale romanization of Cantonese have begun to become available for download on jw.org. Apparently, going forward, new official romanized Cantonese files will be using the Yale romanization of Cantonese, instead of the Sidney Lau romanization that had been used since the first official romanized Cantonese files began appearing.


A fairly up-to-date list of links to available official Cantonese files with Yale romanization can be found on the RTE site at this link:

Interestingly, among the links listed is one to the official Cantonese Yale PDF for the new “Sing Out Joyfully” (sjj) songbook, even though the official Pīnyīn file for that publication is not yet available. Historically, the official Pīnyīn file for a publication would generally become available before the official Cantonese romanization file for it does. Hopefully, the official Pīnyīn file for the “Sing Out Joyfully” (sjj) songbook will soon become available as well.


homenet.org No Longer in Operation, Short Link Pages Refreshed

homenet.org, which had been used to direct people to the Referenced Theocratic Expressions (RTE) and Pīnyīn/Sidney Lau WOL resources, is no longer in operation. Thus, new redirects to those resources have been created, and the URLs (web addresses) in the affected tiandi.info short link pages, e.g. Referenced Theocratic Expressions (RTE) Links (tiandi.info/rte), Good News Brochure Links (tiandi.info/fg), etc., have been updated.


While I was at it, I took the opportunity to refresh the information in and the formatting of the tiandi.info short link pages.


Tuesday, February 24, 2015

New Short Link: Teacher Book Links

A new short link has been created for links related to resources for the Teacher book:

(In case it’s not clear, the above link ends with lowercase “LR”, since lr is the organization’s code for the Learn From the Great Teacher book.)


The following short link pages have been updated accordingly: