Ni Hao Claudia,
Allow me to illucidate something about the Chinese language.
Many, many words in the Chinese language sound the same and even
have the same tone, yet their meaning is different, like in your example
zhū pig zhū and spider. This is very common and the cause of many confusions and jokes in Chinese (Isn’t that so Benny?). Especially in old Chinese where each
word consisted out of only one character.
(A Chines joke for example was … wàn suì 万 岁 wich means live for 10000 years,
a phrase used for Emperors was written as 万 税 wàn shuì wich means 10000 tax and sounded almost the same!)
So how do you distinguish between the two? By learnig their characters, because each character is unique 猪 pig and 蛛 spider both are pronounced zhū but their charaters are quite differend (In fact pig starts with the radical for 犭mamals like dogs and spider with the radical 虫 for worms.)
So hearing almost any word in isolation is almost always ambigious. You have to hear it in context, zài yī sī lán jiào guó jiā rén chī zhū shì bèi jìn zhǐ de
在 伊 斯 兰 教 国 家， 人 吃 猪 是 被 禁 止 的
In Islamic countries people are forbidden to eat pig.
Here zhū can also mean spider, but in the context it must clearly mean pig.
Further more, like Benny said, most modern Chinese words exists out of two characters, so zhī zhū 蜘 蛛 means spider, and zhū 猪 on its one means pig.
But spoken Chinese remains higly ambigious, Chinese people them selves always ask, “zhī zhū de zhū?” meaning the zhū of zhī zhū. Or they extend their hand so the other can write the character of the word they mean.
Hope this might help you to understand Chinese ….
Succes
万事如意
学习顺利
陆蓝克
Lulanke Roland Parijs
