Learn Chinese Lauguage

The official language of the PRC is the dialect spoken in Běijīng. It is usually referred to in the west as ‘Mandarin’, but the Chinese call it Putonghua – common speech. Putonghua is variously referred to as hànyŭ(the Han language), zhōngwén or zhōngguóhuà (simply ‘Chinese’).

MANDARIN Pinyin

PINYIN In 1958 the Chinese adopted a system of writing their language using the Roman alphabet. It’s known as pīnyīn. The original idea was to eventually do away with characters. However, tradition dies hard, and the idea has been abandoned. Pinyin is often used on shop fronts, street signs and advertising billboards. Don’t expect Chinese people to be able to use Pinyin, however. There are indications that the use of the Pinyin system is diminishing. In the countryside and the smaller towns you may not see a single Pinyin sign anywhere, so unless you speak Chinese you’ll need a phrasebook with Chinese characters. Since 1979 all translated texts of Chinese diplomatic documents, as well as Chinese magazines published in foreign languages, have used the Pinyin system for spelling names and places. Pinyin replaces the old Wade-Giles and Lessing systems of Romanising Chinese script. Thus under Pinyin, ‘Mao Tse-tung’ becomes Mao Zedong; ‘Chou En-lai’ becomes Zhou Enlai; and ‘Peking’ becomes Běijīng. The name of the country remains as it has been written most often: ‘China’ in English and German, and ‘Chine’ in French. In Pinyin it’s correctly written as Zhōngguó. Now that Hong Kong (a Romanisation of the Cantonese for ‘fragrant harbour’) has gone over to China, many think it will only be a matter of time before it gets renamed Xiānggǎng.

GRAMMAR

Chinese grammar is much simpler than that of European languages. There are no articles (a/the), no tenses and no plurals. The basic point to bear in mind is that, like English, Chinese word order is subject-verb-object. In other words, a basic English sentence like ‘I (subject) love (verb) you (object)’ is constructed in exactly the same way in Chinese. The catch is mastering the tones.  

Tones

Chinese is a language with a large number of words with the same pronunciation but a different meaning; what distinguishes these ‘homophones’ is their ‘tonal’ quality – the raising and lowering of pitch on certain syllables. Mandarin has four tones – high, rising, falling-rising and falling, plus a fifth ‘neutral’ tone which you can all but ignore. To illustrate the importance of getting tones right, look at the word ma, which has four different meanings according to tone:  

• high tone mā (mother)
• rising tone má (hemp, numb)
• falling-rising tone mǎ (horse)
• falling tone mà (scold, swear)  

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