Purposive without Foresight

Introduction

Before Dirk knew me, he already got a few books about/on the Chinese language from Singapore, just for fun. I read the Chinese language books he collected and didn’t really feel comfortable with them. They are either overwhelmingly difficult for foreigners from lesson one or not really efficient enough. Since my job is not teaching language, at first I didn’t intend to write a tutorial because I thought teaching a language must require some formal and systematic training. One day when we were traveling in the train from Düsseldorf to Eindhoven, Dirk asked for a Chinese lesson. We reviewed what he had learnt from me in the past several months and learnt a lot of new things. At the end of the trip he said, “So macht das Lernen Spass. (This way, the learning is fun)” and said what he learnt during the 2 hours was more than what he learnt during 2 years in French classes when he was in middle school. I was encouraged and wanted to record the courses for Dirk to review and hopefully it would be useful to other people who want to learn Chinese too. I believe my lessons have some special view points and methodologies which are not used anywhere else so far. Computer geeks might feel at home here but the content is also accessible to those who don’t write software. I focus on the most general and useful structures and vocabularies in the Chinese language and get you start to speak and understand Chinese as soon as possible. And I try to reveal the logic in the Chinese language whenever there appears any in the lessons.

All the content in this tutorial are created by copyrighted by Ellen Ning Zhao and Dirk Farin. All rights reserved. You may read it freely, but no part of this tutorial may be reporduced or transmitted in any form or by any means. Please write to ellen_zhao@web.de for a permission if you want to use this tutorial not for personal use. Thanks.

Lesson Zero: Chinese is Simple

Let’s ignore the written characters of Chinese just for now. If you can speak Chinese well, chances are that there’s no problem for you to communicate in Chinese. Grammatically, Chinese is simple and logical. Simpler than English and way more logical than the logical German. Each verb has only one form. There is no tense. Let’s look at a group of sentence:

• Yesterday you learnt English.
• Today he learns Latin.
• Tomorrow they are going to learn Chinese.

In these sentences, “yesterday”, “today”, “tomorrow” already tell the time and “you”, “he”, “they” already tell the subject. Thinking in information entropy, the change applied to the verb “learn” is really a redundancy. The Chinese language doesn’t have these redundancies. The semantics packed in a Chinese word is extremely modular, highly encapsulated (which means independent from the form of subject, time, and others. To express this information, there are other words which define just that), highly reusable. Your brain cells won’t die for memorizing the 72 forms of a verb which in fact all mean the same thing (for English, 72 forms might be exaggeration but try French….). A Chinese sentence is like a beautifully crafted mini object-oriented computer program. Now let’s have a look at the three sentences written in the Chinese way:

• Yesterday you learn English.
• Today he learn Latin.
• Tomorrow they learn Chinese.

You don’t need to fear about “There is no grammar in the Chinese language at all! How do I learn?” Yes, there surely is grammar. For example, there are more rules for the order of words in a Chinese sentence than in German. The German sentences:

Hunde mag er nicht. == Er mag Hunde nicht. == He doesn’t like dogs.

But in Chinese, since there is no other form of “he” and no other form of “like”, so, “Hunde mag er nicht” is “Dogs like he not”; “Er mag Hunde nicht” is “He like dogs not”. As you may have guessed, the meanings are totally different. For beginners there is a rule which never goes wrong: Always put the subject at the beginning of a sentence. When there is no other form of nouns and verbs which delivers the necessary information, there is the ordering of the words to rescue. The rules of ordering are hardly more than 15 in Chinese and they are enough for expressing very complicated semantics. In my opinion, binding the information to the structure of sentences is much easier for human to memorize than binding the information to the individual words.

And don’t be scared by the tonalities of the Chinese words. Most of the time, when you’ve built a sentence, there has been enough context for each word in the sentence and chances are that Chinese people can understand your sentence whatsoever.

Last but not the least, the infamously “difficult” Chinese characters are not complex in fact. Every character is built using some basic strokes and there are no more than 15 basic strokes which are often used. And some seemingly complex Chinese characters are assembled with some patterns and the patterns can be again dis assembled into basic strokes. Once you’ve memorized the basic strokes and got familiar with some frequent patterns, recognizing Chinese characters is quite fun and believe me, anything but difficult.

I’m not nagging about general overview of the Chinese languagues any longer here. Let’s get started.

Lesson One: Say Hello and Introduce Yourself in Chinese.

In last lesson I said most of the time, the tones of an individual word is not that critical to the semantic of a sentence. However I do need to explain the four tones in standard Chinese in short so that you won’t feel strange when see the “1″, “2″, “3″ or “4″ beside a Pingyin word. Yes there are four tones in the standard Chinese. Tone 1 is flat, tone 2 is ascending, tone 3 is first descending then ascending, tone 4 is descending. Chinese people often use the 5th tone, which is also called “light tone”. It is usually for the last syllable of a sentence or the last syllable of a word. You don’t need to emphasize the original tone of the word when you apply “light tone”, just speak it lightly and quickly. That’s it. I wish I could upload some sound files to demonstrate the four tones as the tutorial goes on.

Now let’s have a look how to say hello in Chinese:

Hello == Ni3 Hao3.

If you cannot speak the tones correctly for now, you can simply ignore the numbers in the word. Just speak “Ni Hao” in the way you feel most comfortable and any Chinese people will understand you are actually saying “Ni3 Hao3″. The “N” and “H” in “Ni Hao” sounds the same like the “N” and “H” in English words when they are put at the beginning of an English word. The Pingyin letter “i” sounds like the stand alone “e” in English and stand alone “i” in German. The combination of “ao” in Pingyin sounds like the “ou” in the English “bounce” and like the “au” in German word “Kauf”. And this “ao” combination is always spoken like that, there is never an exception and there is no other combination in Pingyin sounds the same. Pingyin “Ni” sounds like “Knee” in English and “Nie” in German. “Hao3″ sounds like “How” in English. Ni3 means you and Hao3 literally means good, well. But Ni3 Hao3 together means hello.

Now please introduce yourself in Chinese:

I am John Smith. == Wo3 Shi4 John Smith.

Again, if you haven’t learnt how to speak the tones you can just ignore the tones, just say “Wo Shi John Smith” in the way you feel most comfortable. Here the “W” in the “Wo” sounds like the “W” in English words “What”, “Where”, but _not_ like the “W” in German word “Wissen”. The difference is subtle but Chinese people are sensitive to it. The “o” in the “Wo” sounds exactly like the stand alone “o” in German. In English the equivalent is the “aw” in the word “awsome”, please proununce it in British way but not the American way. (It’s not that I’m being snobbish here, but it’s all about the correctness). Now try the Chinese pronunciation: Wo.

The “Sh” in the “Shi” is quite Chinese-specific. I haven’t found any exact match but some combinations in English or German are surely quite close. You can speak it like the “Sh” in English word “Ship” or the “Sch” in German word “Schneiden”. I guess I’ve heard some really excellent similarities in Dutch, in which the tip of the tongue are rolling. If you can speak Dutch please use your imagination. The “i” has been explained in the syllables “Ni Hao” above. As for the foreign names, you can pronounce it as it is, usually there is no need to map the pronunciation to the exact Chinese.

Wo3 means “I”. Please notice there is no other form for “Wo3″ in Chinese. Shi4 is one of the most important verbs in Chinese. In English it is “be” and in German it is “sein”. And “Shi4″ is also the only form for the verb “be” in Chinese.

It is clear that in the simple sentence, “Wo3″ as the subject comes first, “Shi4″ the verb “be” comes tightly at the second. There isn’t any odd in this ordering.

Congratulations, now you can already say “Hello, I am John Smith” in Chinese:

Hello, I am John Smith. == Ni3 Hao3. Wo3 Shi4 John Smith.

In the next lesson, we are going to expand the vocabulary based on what we’ve learnt in this lesson and put them into daily use.

Tags: China, Chinese, language