Mandarin Chinese - Part 2 - Pinyin & Tone

As mentioned earlier, the following 3 are the basic elements of the Chinese language:

• Characters (Described in the previous post, not needed for speaking and listening, only needed for reading and writing)
• Pinyin
• Tones

Pinyin: It is a form of “Latinizing” the Chinese language by writing the language in Latin letters. This is what I have been using to give examples of how to pronounce Chinese words. We do the same in Arabic by writing "keefak” and so. The difference is that Pinyin is an official part of the Chinese language. It was developed in the 1950’s to make the Chinese language compatible with the modern “English-based” technology and globalized media and industry.

When I came to China I thought that keyboards will be all in Chinese but no, it is all in English – there are no Chinese keyboards. To write Chinese you type in pinyin and the computer will give you options of corresponding Chinese characters to input. When you enable the Chinese language on your computer, you can add the Mandarin Chinese (PRC) keyboard and you will be able to type Chinese. Google’s pinyin program is better for typing Chinese.

Tone: There are 4 main tones in Chinese. The same word with different tones has different meanings. It looks like the Arabic diacritics (harakat/حركات) but it is a totally different concept. In Chinese tone is literally a musical tone.

tā        Flat tone     (as the sound the doctor asks you to do when inspecting your throat)

ní       Ascending    (same as tone of asking a question…as saying WHAT?)

nì       Descending  (same as tone of saying an answer….as saying YES in an affirmative tone)

nǐ       Descending then Ascending like a parabola

There are also words with ‘no tone’ that will sound as if you are just saying it neutrally in English, and there is a tone that is represented by ‘double dots’ which is not widely considered a major tone (it sounds like saying ‘eww’ when you are discusted from something).

A complication in relating Pinyin to Characters is that in Chinese, the same Pinyin word can have different Characters with different meanings. The first word ‘tā’ can mean he/she/it. Although the pinyin word and tone are the same, the characters representing each of he/she/it are different.

tā       he     他

tā    she    她

tā     it        它

Fortunately when speaking and listening to other, you need to only know “tā” which will be understood due to the context of the speech.

To listen and speak Chinese, Pinyin and tone are enough – no need for Characters. If you know Pinyin and Tone you can start learning Chinese. That is what we are doing; we started with Pinyin and Tone then with forming basic sentences. By knowing Pinyin you can still type on the computer with any Pinyin input program.

Saeed found the following YouTube lessons which are extremely helpful. The lady is teaching what is supposed to be taught to who do not know any Chinese at all. This was our starting point of learning Chinese.

YouTube Video Links (click on the Lessons #’s below to view, or search for ‘7 Days Mandarin Lesson’ in YouTube):

7 Days Mandarin Chinese – Lesson 1 2 3 4 5 6 7