ChineseClass101.com Blog

Today’s All About Chinese lesson focuses on the origins of written Chinese–the only writing system that has been in use continuously for over 3,000 years.

All characters are made up of smaller ‘picture’ elements within the character. Some of these smaller pictures within the character give a hint as to meaning and pronunciation (though not always). The first Chinese characters were simple objects like “human”, “hand”, “foot”, “mountain”, “sun”, “moon” and “tree”. Then logical combinations of the simple characters followed. These simple characters also sometimes serve as the root of a more complex character, and are called “radicals”.

Most linguists believe that writing was invented in China during the latter half of the 2nd millennium BC. The earliest recognizable examples of written Chinese date from 1500-950 BC (Shang dynasty).

The traditional form of Chinese characters was widely used up until the mid-20^th century. Most of the simplified Chinese characters in use today were the result of simplifications made by the government of China in the 1950s and 60s. The simplified characters have a lot less strokes and certain parts of some characters were completely eliminated. The simplified characters are also used in Singapore, but in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Malaysia the traditional characters are still used.

The workable literacy in the Chinese language only requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters.

Elements that make up a Chinese word
Chinese verbs and adjectives generally consist of one character (syllable) but nouns often consist of two, three or more characters (syllables).

When written on the page, each character is given exactly the same amount of space, no matter how complex it is or how many strokes it contains. There are no spaces between characters and the characters which make up compound words are not grouped together.
Pronunciation
Pinyin is a phonetic system used to teach standard pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese, to spell Chinese names in foreign publications and to enter Chinese characters on computers.

Initials and finals are the elements that make up a word in pinyin. Nearly each Chinese syllable are spelled with one initial sound followed by one final sound. There are only about 400 different combinations of initials and finals in Chinese, of course each Chinese character can also have four possible tones, so that adds to the amount of individual sounds.

Chinese Verbs

• Chinese verbs are not inflected… meaning that they don’t change form. Only one form of each verb exists; there is no conjugation.  It doesn’t matter who is talking, when they are talking about, or who they are talking to, the verb is the same.

Word Order

• Since there is no conjugation of verbs in Chinese, Word order is often your only clue to figuring out who is doing what. The good news is, in normal Chinese declarative sentences, word order is the same as that we use in normal English declarative sentences, being:subject - verb - object

Negation of Verbs

• Negation occurs before the verb and any prepositional phrase, just add a negation word, 不 ‘bu4′, in front of the verb.

Expressing Tense

• Chinese verbs don’t change ‘tense’.  Rather, we use time words to indicate whether something will happen tomorrow, is happening now, or happened yesterday.  The Chinese language relies heavily on the use of adverbs to communicate what English and many other languages do with different verb tenses.

Measure Words / Classifiers

• In Chinese measure or “counting” words must be used when objects are enumerated. Generally the format is number + measure word + object.  When the number is ‘1′, however, it’s OK to omit the number in that case.

Pronouns

• Chinese has 1st, 2nd and 3rd person pronouns.  They have singular (I, you, he, she and it) and plural forms (we, you, and they).  The same pronouns are used for subject, object, possession, etc.To make a pronoun plural, you simply add the suffix 们 (men) to the pronoun.

In today’s All About Chinese we take years of Chinese learning experience and China life experience and boil it down to bring you the top 5 reasons to learn Chinese.

There are numerous different reasons to learn Chinese, below some of the more important reasons are listed.

• Chinese is the language of nearly one-quarter of the world’s population. Speakers of Chinese are spread throughout the globe.

• Unlike most languages, Chinese has a unique writing system, which provides visual comprehensibility and is considered by some to be an art form.

• Chinese grammar is easy!

• When you learn Chinese you also learn how the Chinese think. The structure of Chinese is not only logical, but also pragmatic, and very related to the particular way of Chinese thinking. Learning Chinese opens up the culture of one of the world’s oldest civilizations. You are learning much more than just a language.

• China currently boasts the fastest growing economy in the world and is widely regarded as the potentially biggest global market in the twenty-first century. Proficient speakers of Mandarin Chinese will have more job opportunities in various fields such as business, government, international relations, information technology, tourism, education, translation and much, much more.

Below are some cultural insights into different aspects of Chinese linguistic Culture.

• Chinese is its own language family– About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language.

• China is the only country in the world whose literature has been written in one language for more than 3,000 consecutive years.

• Chinese is its own language family, and there are estimated to be 8,000 dialects of Chinese.

• Though there are tens of thousands of characters, Mandarin Chinese has only some than 400 syllables, or individual word sounds. As a result, a single sound can represent more than 100 different written characters. Tones and the use of compound syllables multiply the number of available word sounds.

How to Really Learn Chinese in Just Minutes a Day and Stick with it

The Myth

What if I told you mastering Italian wasn’t that hard. That actually learning the language itself is not nearly as difficult as you may have heard. And that the problem to progressing is an age old one…failure to execute.

The Real Issue

Said another way, “People don’t progress ’cause they don’t do! If you don’t do the work, you won’t reach your goals.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Chinese Students,

Today we’re pleased to announce the launch of ChineseClass101.com. This is a joint project between Popup Chinese and the folks at Innovative Language Learning.

If you’re familiar with the Innovative Language approach to teaching, you’ll know the strength of their materials has always been tight, step-by-step progressive lessons for beginners. At Popup Chinese, we’ve historically geared our materials towards more advanced students, so when we had the chance to cooperate with the Innovative team and work together to build something that could take advantage of the powerful system they’ve already built we leapt at the chance, and began work designing a focused and stepwise program for Mandarin instruction.

Although a few hints leaked out (*ahem*), for the past few months we’ve worked somewhat stealthily to build the best team possible for the task. You’ll find our progressive beginner lessons hosted by none other than the famous Frank Fradella. Other big names on our roster are Amber Scorah and of course everyone on our existing team like Echo Yao and Brendan O’Kane. This is a great team and I can say with confidence I’ve never worked with a stronger one. With more than 100 lessons on the new site, our content is off to a good start too. As Frank said once after a marathon recording session, “our first twenty lessons here teach more than I learned in a whole year studying elsewhere.”

We think this is a great step forward and look forward to hearing your feedback and thoughts as well. It is definitely a major step forward for Chinese language education online. There’s never been a better time to learn Chinese, or a better way to learn it online. Regardless of whether you’re an advanced independent learner or a total newbie, we hope you’ll enjoy the work we’ll be doing both here and at ChineseClass101. Thanks for your support, and 加油 everyone!

Best from Beijing,

David Lancashire

Best from New York,

Amber Scorah