Mandarin Chinese - Part 1 - Intro & Characters

(If your computer does not view the Chinese characters written between these brackets [你好嗎] you can enable Chinese from Control Panel > Language Options > Languages > Tick the “east asian languages” box > Click OK…I will be using some Chinese characters as demonstrations in this and later posts)

The Chinese language has many dialects. These dialects are sometimes considered different languages because of the great difference among them. The main two Chinese languages spoken are:

• Mandarin Chinese: spoken by more than 90% of Chinese, spoken in Taiwan and Singapore
• Cantonese Chinese: spoken mainly in Hong Kong and Macau

Mandarin Chinese is spoken by more than a billion people. This makes around 1/6 of the world population.  It is the most-spoken language by population. Yet English is still the most spread and is the language of globalization and technology. Hindi, Arabic and Spanish often join Mandarin Chinese and English on the lists of top 5 spoken languages. Mandarin Chinese is what we are learning and is what I will be posting about.

Along with Japanese and similar languages, Chinese is so different than other common languages because it is not alphabetical based. There is no fixed 26 or 27 letters that can form different words. It is based on pictorial characters which have corresponding sounds associated with them. For example, a cross sign “十” means “ten” and is pronounced as “shí”. The cross sign is the evolved form of what the Chinese thousands of years back used as sign to mark the number 10. The following picture shows the evolution of some Chinese characters with time. This part of the language is the toughest yet the most interesting since it relates things to pictorial characters. It is the toughest because there are thousands of different characters, and the meaning of a combination of characters does not necessarily have to do with either of the characters standing alone.

Evolution of Chinese Characters. Notice how pictorial they were initially

Characters are based on number of “strokes.” Some characters are a mix between more than one simpler character.Chinese dictionaries are arranged either according to number of strokes in the characters or according to the ‘alphabetical’ pronunciation of the word (referred to as Pinyin).

The core of Chinese language is composed of 3 basic elements that form its infrastructure:

• Pinyin
• Tone
• Characters (described above)

The bad news is that in Chinese, ‘listening and speaking’ is totally different from ‘writing and reading’. It is as if you have to learn 2 languages to speak Chinese. This is because of its non-alphabetical base.

The good news is that you do not need to know the ‘characters’ to listen and speak Chinese.

Characters are only needed to read and write.

Characters are described above, and I will post about Pinyin and Tone separately which are the base of listening and speaking Chinese.