Introduction to the Chinese language

Chinese is spoken by more people than any other language in the world. Chinese has more than twice the number of speakers of English. Chinese has been an official language of the United Nations since the founding of the organization in 1945.

Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) is the official language of the People’s Republic of China. Mandarin, based on the pronunciation of Beijing,  is spoken by about two-thirds of the population. The other major dialects are (I) Wu, spoken in Shanghai and Zhejiang; (2) Cantonese, spoken in Guangdong and Guangxi; (3) Fukienese, or Min, in Fujian, Amoy Island, and Taiwan; (4) Hakka, spoken in the northeast of Guangdong and southern Jiangxi; (5) Xiang, spoken in Hunan. In addition the Fukienese dialects are widely spoken in Malaysia and Singapore, while Cantonese is also spoken in Hong Kong and on the Southeast Asia mainland, Many overseas Chinese speak Cantonese.

Pinyin

The Romanized phonetic spelling system created in 1950s for Standard Chinese is called Pinyin. Pinyin adopts the Latin alphabet to transcribe Chinese sounds, and four tone marks to indicate the different tones of Chinese characters. Pinyin is now widely used for the study of Chinese language, and has helped the popularization of standard Chinese (Putonghua).  It uses 25 letters in English except “V”.
The Pinyin system is also used as a basis of many Chinese input methods, which are required when typing Chinese characters into computers.

Initials list

b      p     m    f     d     t      n     l     g      k     h      j       q       x     zh     ch     sh      r      z      c     s      y     w

There are 23 initials. Some people regard “y” and “w” as semi-vowels

Finals list

 a      o      e      -i      -i      er    ai     ei      ao      ou     an      en         ang       eng     ong     i       a          iao          ie         iu    ian      in     iang       ing       iong       u     ua     uo      uai      ui     uan    un     uang     ueng      ü       üe      üan       ün
            
Single vowels and compound vowels amount to 38 finals

Four tones

Tone1    55     Tone2    35     Tone3    214     Tone4    51

Characters (Hanzi)

Although different Chinese dialects exist, the written language is a common form of communication, which is Hanzi. Primarily Chinese in China uses simplified characters. It is taught in Mandarin-Chinese classes internationally as well. These characters are simpler, i.e., have less strokes than traditional Chinese characters. Each Chinese character corresponds to one syllable. A syllable is usually consisted of an initial, a final and a tone.

Chinese characters are often criticised for being overly complex. One reason for the added complexity is the different information content of the characters. Roman letters give relatively precise information on pronunciation, but less information on meaning. In contrast, Chinese characters give less precise (and sometimes no) pronunciation information, but do give information on meaning.

However, learning Chinese characters is not as difficult as one would think. Firstly, because the majority of Chinese characters are Phonetic Complexes, learning to pronounce them is not so difficult. Secondly, because all characters are derived from a couple hundred simple pictographs and ideographs in ways that are usually quite logical and easy to remember, learning to recognise and write them is not that hard either.

Basic strokes:

An individual stroke follows the pattern of moving from left to right and from top to bottom.  Characters seldom look properly proportioned if the stroke order is wrong, so it is important to learn the standard stroke order for each character and stick with it. You will also master a character more quickly if you use the same stroke order every time you write it. Also, by intoning the pronunciation of a new character out loud a few times while writing it, you can hasten the time when you have forged a strong link in your memory between the pronunciation of a character and its graphical appearance.

Though some dictionaries include tens of thousands of characters, only a few thousand characters are commonly used, and only 3,000 of them are used for everyday purposes.

Chinese words

Most characters are words, most Chinese words are not just a single character, but rather are composed of at least two characters. Chinese has many hundreds of thousands of words, most of which are created by combining just a few thousand characters. Multiple-character words are created by several methods. A typical one is that the two or more characters composing a word might each contribute meaning which in combination indicates the word's meaning. While this pattern is most common, in some cases two characters with essentially identical meanings are combined to form a word, not surprisingly, with the same sense.

The written Chinese does not mark word boundaries. Instead, each Chinese character is written one after the other without spaces.

Grammar

Chinese grammar is very simple.

1. Nouns in Chinese are neither singular nor plural. Thus you say ‘one person’ and ‘ten person’. 

2. There are measure words to be used between numbers and nouns. Different measure words are used for different nouns. For instance, three cars in Chinese would be . "Three" is represented by . "Cars" is , and is the measure word for vehicles. (You can't say leaving out the measure word.)

3. Verbs have only one form.  You love China, ‘He love China’ as well.

4. Verbs don’t indicate past, present or future. Tenses are indicted by extra particles, time phrases or context.

5.  Prepositions such as ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘at’ with their objects occur before the verb. Say,, literally, it is ‘I after 3 years go to China.’

6. The largest unit of time or places comes first and then the large, small, smaller, smallest unit. See the following: