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Hello guys how are you?

3 Days ago i took part in #fivefacts challenge and wrote that i had practiced Shaolin Gong Fu and not Kung Fu and that i would make a post explaining what's the difference. The time has come and i am read yo explain are you?

For anyone reading this and wanna know more about the fivefacts challenge you can check my post here. I CHALLENGE YOU ALL TO TAKE PART IN THIS FIVEFACTS CHALLENGE!

Introduction

We all have heard about Kung Fu, saw it at movies and obsessed by it. Especially with Jackie Chan's and Jet lee's movies we got pretty deep into this world and maybe even tried out some of these moves (*without happy ending :P*). Probably watching the movies we can really tell what kind of style of Kung Fu they really use except when they saying out loud! Also you might haven't noticed yet that others call it Kung Fu, Gong Fu or Gung Fu, but what's really the difference and where it came from?

Mandarin vs Cantonese 

Probably the first thing anyone would think of is that China is a vast land with many dialects so Kung Fu and Gong Fu is just a another dialect. Well...... No. China have a bunch of dialects with most popular ones being the Mandarin and Cantonese which may sound like a British lad talking with an American man or better with someone from Texas. Although the pronunciation of some words will be really different the writing will be the same. Like this the Chinese character for Kung Fu is 功 夫 and the unique part is that it pronounced the same in Mandarin and Cantonese!

English vs Chinese

Now that we cleared the dialect part let's move this investigation a little further. In English every word is based on 26 letters the so called alphabet something that in Chinese doesn't exist as they use characters and because mostly no ''westerner'' could speak Chinese especially 20+ years ago where Gong Fu started out as a ''thing'' something had to be done about spelling it and writing down with the English Alphabet.

The answer to this came from Wade Giles and Pinyin system. Basically those are Romanization systems to make our life easier. WG was completed by 1892 and even till 1979 while PY developed at 1950 is more simplified, have tones and was quickly became the most popular one. Below i have some quick differences in order to get it better and realize for yourselves why they preferred the second one

WG Syllables begin with TS HS

PY Syllables begin with B G Q D X Z

Now let's take the 功 夫 and see the differences between WG and PY Romanization

WG: Kung Fu

PY: Gong Fu &  Gōng Fū (with tones)

Conclusion

The outcome is that either way it's really the same so anyway you read or write you will have no problem at all, but Kung Fu prevailed cause people get more used to it. If you wanna know exactly how to pronounce it ''Kung''can be pronounced like ''song'' but instead of ''s'' put a ''g'' and for ''Fu'' like the word ''Food'' but without a ''d''.

I hoped i solved that riddle, let me know in the comments if you knew about it and i repeat if you wanna take part in #fivefacts challenge check my post here for what to write and the rules and one last thing 

I CHALLENGE YOU ALL

images and gifs 1 2 3 

sources  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade%E2%80%93Giles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/difference.html