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Notes on China

ishanjmukherjee.github.io · 1,788 words · saved by 1 readers

This year, I read Linda Jaivin’s The Shortest History of China — a pretty good condensed history of the massive country! This post collects some of the more surprising and/or useful things I learned from the book.

This year, I read Linda Jaivin’s The Shortest History of China — a pretty good condensed history of the massive country! This post collects some of the more surprising and/or useful things I learned from the book. Notes on pronouncing Pinyin (the government’s official romanization of Chinese phonetics): “X (as in Xi Jinping) is pronounced like the sh in ‘she’; C (as in Cáo Cāo) is pronounced like the ts in ‘its’; Q (as in the Qin dynasty) is pronounced like the ch in ‘cheese’; Zh (as in Zhōu Ēnlái) is pronounced like a j, but with the tongue curled almost to the roof of the mouth; and Z (as…

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