Even with the Olympics over, Wukesong is worth visiting (at least for expats living here); plus sundry comments one of Mandarin's mysteries

Yes, if you're just visiting the city and won't be here very long, then you should go to other better known places in Beijing. However, expats living in the capital might consider visiting this place from late spring through early autumn to savor its tall and beautiful old trees.

The Mandarin word for “old tree” is 古树/古老树. 古 is a falling/rising tone “gu”, 老 is a falling/rising tone lao, while 树 is falling tone "shu." 古 means “ancient,” while 老 means old, and the latter character appears in the Chinese word for “teacher”, 老师 (that second character is a flat tone “shi”).

In addition to the trees in the photo above, Wukesong has some very pretty flowers, which are shown in the photos below.

Best of all, unlike Beijing's larger and more well-known parks, this place is not very crowded. I went there one late afternoon just before the mid-September mid-Autumn Festival holiday. I was meeting a Chinese friend, Flora Lu, who works nearby in an Australian sports and events planning firm as a translator, for dinner that evening and spent an hour or so strolling about and taking pictures. As the photographs make clear, hardly anyone else was there.

Wukesong is right beside the Nr. 1 subway line Wukesong subway station, or three stops west of the Military Museum subway station. The name in Chinese characters is 五棵松, which means “Five Pines.” 五 is a falling/rising “wu” and means “five”, 棵 is a falling tone “ke” and is the measure word for 松, or “pine,” which is a flat tone “song.”

This name provides a good segway for introducing one of the many reasons why Mandarin is such a hard language to learn. Practically every Chinese noun has a so-called “measure word” that goes in front of it when preceded by some numerical quantity or an article, like “this” (这, a falling tone “zhe”) or that (那, a falling tone “na/nei)—there is no equivalent to the English definite article, “the,” in the Chinese language.

So while an English speaker would just say “that tree/this tree,” Chinese speakers have to say “这棵树/那棵树,” or insert the measure word for tree, 棵, between the article and the noun. And the same goes for saying “five pines”—hence the place is named 五棵松, not五松. About the only exception to this rule are nouns that are themselves measure words, such as “year:” like English speakers, Chinese speakers just say “five years,” 五年 (the second character is a rising tone “nian”).

Of course the English language also has measure words. For example, we don't say, “our company ordered five irons;” we instead say, “Our company ordered five sheets of iron.” However, such nouns are fairly exceptional.

Fortunately, for us laowai struggling to learn Mandarin, there are some simple and easy to remember rules regarding Chinese measure words. For example, the measure word for any long and narrow object, like road (路, falling tone “lu”) or river (河, rising tone “he”), is 条, which is a rising tone “tiao.” And the measure word for any flat paper object, like a ticket (票, falling tone “piao”), is 张, which is a flat tone “zhang.”

And there's further good news here. Since Chinese is a character based language, very few have a plural form (the character based writing system pretty much rules that out). So the character for tree, 树, stays the same when one is talking about “this tree,” 这棵树, or “five trees,” 五棵树. No wonder so many Chinese people learning English have trouble with plural form of English nouns!!