This document introduces learning Chinese and provides tips for memorizing Chinese words. It notes that over 1 billion people speak Chinese and that knowing Chinese will help with international business. It explains that Chinese words have characters, pronunciation using pinyin, and tones. Different character types like pictographs and semantic-phonetic compounds are described. While Chinese has many characters, becoming literate requires learning about 3,000 characters which could be done in under a year by learning 10 characters daily. Pinyin is also introduced as a romanization system to help with pronunciation.
2. Why Chinese?
• About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one
billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their
native language.
• Chinese has more speakers in the world than any
other language.
• China is known as “factory to the world” for its huge
export market. Knowing Chinese and China’s culture
will help anyone wanting to do international business.
3. 3 Elements to Memorizing
a Chinese Word
Character(s)
Pronunciation
Tone(s)
4. Character Types
Some Chinese characters developed from
pictures.
•Pictures drawn of an object (pictographs)
•Or pictures drawn to represent an idea
(ideographs).
5. Shan 山 developed from a drawing of a
mountain (pictograph).
ZHONG 中 Represents the idea of
middle/center (ideograph/ideogram).
hao 好 is made from a picture of a
woman and a baby. It means “good,”
which comes from the idea that goodness is
a mother with her son
(ideographic/ideogrammic compound).
6. Semantic-Phonetic Compounds
• In 100 CE, a famous scholar, Xǚ Shèn studied characters and found that
only 4% were pictographs, while many were related to sound.
• Examples of characters related by sound (phoenetics).
• Horse: 马 mǎ
• Mother: 妈 mā woman 女 + 马
• Yell at/scold: 骂 mà 2 mouths 口 + 马
• Ant: 蚂 mǎ bug 虫 + 马
• Headboard: 杩 mà wood 木 + 马
7. Read Chinese in One Year!?
• There are over 40,000 characters in a large dictionary, but less
than 10,000 are commonly used.
• Well-educated Chinese recognize about 6,000-7,000 characters,
but if you can learn 3,000 characters, you can read a newspaper and be
considered literate.
• If you learned 10 characters a day, you could theoretically read
Chinese in less than 1 year!
8. Pronunciation
• People who aren’t educated in China (such as
yourselves), can’t read characters.
• To address this problem, and to increase literacy in
China as well, the P.R.C. adopted Hanyu Pinyin in
1958.
• Most Americans and Europeans learn Chinese
through Pinyin, and Chinese parents also use it to
teach their children proper pronunciation of new words.
• Chinese Sounds in English
9. Pinyin 汉语拼 音
• Pinyin has three parts:
• Initials (like American consonants, except no “V”)
• Finals (like American vowels, can also end with “n” or
“ng” or “r”)
• Tones (4 main, 1 neutral)
• http://www.quickmandarin.com/chinesepinyintable/
Good Pinyin Chart
10. •This great chart to practice your pinyin pronunciation can be found
at ChinesePod.com, as well as many other free and fee-based
resources for studying Chinese.
11. Have you mastered English Spelling?
Chinese will be a breeze!
Pinyin has only about 400 different sounds.
English has over 4,000.
English spells the same sound o in at least ten different ways:
so, sow, sew, oh, owe, dough, doe, beau, soak, soul.
It uses the same letter o to represent at least 8 different sounds in
so, to, on, honey, horse, woman, borough
(DeFrancis 1984a:112).
The number of different spellings for the 40 English phonemes has been variously estimated at
600 (Zachrisson 1931:4), 1,120-1,768 (Nyikos 1988; see 298 below), and 2,000 (Alisjahbana
1965:530; Daniels 1985:34).
http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/index.html
by John DeFrancis
Statistics compiled by Gao and Yin show about 430 (not counting tones) spoken syllables for
standard Mandarin compared to 4,030 for English (1983:70).
12. Tones Demo
• Practice the four tones
• http://www.newconceptmandarin.com/support/Intro_Pinyi
n.asp
13. Conclusion
• Learning Chinese may seem much more difficult than
learning English, but several elements make oral Chinese,
in fact, easier! (consistent spelling in the pinyin system, less
sound combinations)
• To learn Chinese words, you need to master three
components: character, pronunciation, and tone.
• Chinese characters may be composed of smaller
components, called “radicals” which can represent a sound
or a meaning. There are several types of characters,
including but not limited to pictographs, ideographs, and
semantic-phonetic compounds.
• Learning Chinese can help you in future business/job
prospects, can give you a better understanding of your own
language and culture, and can enable you to communicate
with the majority of the world’s population!
