Your First Encounter with Chinese

Welcome to the exciting world of Chinese! If this is your first time reading anything about Chinese, here is a brief overview to get started.

There are two main forms of Chinese: Mandarin and Cantonese. Mandarin, also known as Putonghua, is the official language of China and is the most spoken language in the world (with over 1 billion speakers). Cantonese has firmly secured its place as the second most widely known and influential form of Chinese. It is spoken in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, and Macau. I will be using “Chinese” and “Mandarin” interchangeably on this website.

Pronunciation

Mandarin is characterized by a prevalence of vowels, with each syllable comprising a single vowel, a composite vowel or a vowel that is preceded by a consonant. A composite vowel can either consist of two vowels or a vowel with a nasal sound, which is treated as a single unit. This is why Chinese refers to consonants as “initials” and vowels as “finals“.

Chinese is a tonal language, which means that the tone of a word can change its meaning. There are four tones in Mandarin Chinese as well as a neutral tone. It’s important to master the correct tones for each word, or you may end up saying something completely different than what you intended.

To help with learning pronunciation, Pinyin, a system of Romanized spelling, is used to represent the pronunciation of Chinese characters. Pinyin uses the Roman alphabet and diacritic marks (for indicating tones). This is what pinyin looks like for the numbers 1-5: “yī èr sān sì wǔ”.

Characters

Chinese characters are one of the oldest forms of writing still in use today and they are fascinating to study. A Chinese character consists of one syllable. A character can be considered a word when it has meaning on its own, while others must be combined with other characters to create words. For example, 我 means “I” on its own, while 的 on its own holds no meaning. However, when combined with 我, 我的 means “my” or “mine.” Chinese words can range in length from a single character to multiple characters.

Grammar

While Chinese characters can be challenging to remember, one aspect of Chinese that is easy to learn is grammar. What makes Chinese grammar straightforward and simple is that it does not have tenses or plural forms, and the main sentence structure is subject-verb-object.