Dragon Head Raising Festival

The Dragon-Head-Raising Festival is also known as 龙抬头long2 tai2 tou2 - Check out the pronunciation in the audio pinyin chart, which comes on Feb. 2^nd in Chinese lunar calendar, soon after Spring Festival and Lantern Festival. In Chinese astrology, people use 28 constellations to represent the position of the moon, sun and stars. On February 2^nd, the constellation looks like the body of the dragon. That’s how the name comes for this festival.

As you can tell from the name, the Longtaitou Festival is related to dragon. In the tradition of Chinese culture, the dragon is believed to be a very auspicious animal. It is also believed to be in charge of bringing rains, and both of these are important factors in ancient agricultural society. Today, however, it's lesser related to agriculture as  China steps into a more industrial country.

However, the ways to celebrate Dragon-Head-Raising Festival remains the unchanged. Today, Longtaitou Festival is celebrated in various ways. One of the most weird customs is to get a new haircut or an entirely new hairstyle. But it is quite popular and common a custom to have a new haircut on this day. It is said to bring luck to the coming New Year and it’s a symbol of a brand new year. On this day, there are many other traditional customs, like eating pancakes, noodles, fried peas and steam buns. The eating of the pea, noodles and dumplings signified eating the eye, beard and ear of the lazy dragon. It was believed that these practices would stimulate the lazy dragon to finish his work.

Green in Chinese culture

In Chinese learning, color learning is an important part. In Chinese culture, colors have deeper meanings under the visible appearance. When we learnmandarin online, we should know the meaning of different colors. For example, you are not supposed to present a green hat as a gift to your Chinese friends. Why? Let’s learn colors in Chinese culture.

The color green is a very special color in Chinese learning. In English, green means new, young or freshman. In Chinese, there is a saying called “wear a green hat”. If  “他被带了绿帽子” or he is wearing a green hat, it means he was betrayed by his wife or girlfriend.

Why is this saying? It comes from a story.

The story says: Long time ago, the husband often went on business trip, leaving his wife at home. She was so lonely and empty that she dated her neighbor and unluckily they were caught being together when the husband returned. The husband forgave them, but they were still in contact. One day, they came up a plan: The wife will let the husband wear a green hat to fight cold, and when the husband went out, her lover would come and date her. Thus, wearing a green hat means someone is betrayed by his wife or girl friend.

Are you interested in this story? 

The color green has other meanings. In China, 绿色食品 or Green Food means food which causes no damage to the environment. Besides the color green, there are a lot of colors that have very different meanings from the ones in English. 

Learn Chinese characters

For beginners who learn Chinese language, it is always more difficult to learn Chinese characters than anything else. However there is a way out. It’s been proven by many learners that learning Chinese characters by category will help them better learning mandarin.

How? Let’s take a look at the following group of Chinese characters as an example: “X 光”(guāng)", “可口可乐”(coca cola) , “麦克风”(microphone), “比基尼”(bikini), “超市”(supermarket). This group of characters didn’t exist in the Chinese language because they come from English. We can this group of characters wai4 lai2 ci2, words coming from other country or language. Foreign as they are, they have been existing in Chinese publications and people’s daily life now.

It means to substitute the foreign morpheme with the same or similar native morpheme, only borrowing the foreign meaning. In Chinese school, this means a shift in the meaning of some established native Chinese Characters, so as to accommodate the meaning of English words. That is, the word has already existed in Chinese language, when borrowing the same word from English, people assimilated some of its meaning in English which are new to Chinese, and then the meaning of this word in Chinese has been extended. Sometimes, the work is accomplished through an intermediary. And English “zhuan jie ci” in Chinese mainly comes from Japanese.

Does this article help you some in learning mandarin? Write to me if you have any question concerning mandarin study.

Learn Chinese Online

Are you struggling in bed in the morning because you have to get up early to lean Chinese at Chinese school? Are you driving more than 1 hour to meet the Chinese class? Are you… You don’t have to learn Chinese this way!

In this fast-pace modern life, people from every walk of life are being increasingly busy, so how to save time consumed at school or improve the efficiency has been much more urgent, especially for those who want to learn Chinese but have to waste a lot of time on the roads.

The development of Internet technology has enabled online learning possible. Learning mandarin online saves you on tuition fees, book costs and system completion. You can spend less on it than the traditional study way. Meanwhile, it is more convenient .It can offer the same educational and academic benefits while removing many of the hardships and difficulties often associated with attending schools offline. You can study wherever you are and whatever the time is.

Online school is a hot topic nowadays. As for learning mandarin online, I’d like to recommend this online Chinese school. iChineseLearning provides the best Chinese language education service worldwide. Students from all across the world, no matter time or place can get the most enjoyable and fruitful Chinese learning experience.

Now are you ready to learn mandarin online?