Learn Chinese language: Some Facts about Mandarin

The Chinese syllabic alphabet is made up of combinations of 5 vowel sounds, 15 compound vowels (combinations of the five basic sounds), and 23 consonants (21 if you discount "y" and "w," which the Chinese A consider variations of and "u"). These are combined in sound patterns that are repeated over and over, making the learning and pronunciation of the 405 syllables much less formidable than they might first appear. To make this challenge even less intimidating in both appearance and reality, the following blog articles have included a poeticized pronunciation guide that lists all of the Chinese syllables in a format that shows their phonetic relationship to each other.



Grammatically, Chinese is easier than English. The sentence order is generally subject, verb, object, just as it is in English; and adjectives come before nouns, just as they do in English. But, in Chinese, there are no plurals, no articles (the, a, or an), and no verb conjugations.



Other key features of Chinese include the following;



1. The subject of sentences (I, he, she, they, it) is generally not expressed when it is obvious from the context.



2. In addition to the usual way of forming questions (using interrogative words and a questioning tone), adding the special interrogative word ma (吗mah) at the end of a sentence turns it into a question.



3. Possession is shown by using the word de (duh) between the pronoun and noun.



4. A "measure word" is always used between the number and noun when referring to a number or quantity of people or things. There are different measure words for various types of people and things. There is one special measure word, ge (个guh), that is more or less universal and can be used when referring to any category of people or things. Although it is not technically correct in all cases and would not be used universally by fluent speakers, it never the- less makes the meaning clear and is acceptable if ‘ you don’t know the proper term.



5. The Chinese language does not have precise words for "yes" and "no." Although there are terms that have similar meanings, the Chinese generally use the negative or positive of the appropriate verb or adjective to express these concepts. For example, in answering the question, dai? (are you going to eat?), the normal response is chi(吃), which literally means "eat" and figuratively means, "Yes, I’m going to eat." Buchi(不吃"No eat" or "No, I’m not going to eat") is used in a negative reponse. Puttingbu(不) in front of verbs and adjective makes them negative, but bu (不)is not used by itself. There is another negative indicator, mei(没), that has its own special uses.

As mentioned above, Chinese verbs do not conjugate. Chi remains the same, whatever tense of the verb is intended.

There are, however, modifiers (le and guo) that are added to sentences to indicate the past tense. Le (了)indicates the immediate past and guo signifies the distant past. Modifiers (ycio and jiang) are also used to indicate the future tense. Yao, placed after the subject, means "will" or "want to." For example,



I go (or I am going) wo qu (waw chu) 我去

I went wo qu le (waw chu luh) 我去了

I will go wojiang qu ( waw jee-ahng chu) 我将去




Chinese is made up of 405 basic syllables, many of which have different tonal pronunciations, for a total of some 1,277 "building blocks." At first glance, this large number of syllables and building blocks makes Chinese appear extraordinarily complex. By comparison, the English language has only 44 basic sounds. But those 44 sounds are used to make up several thousand syllables, and, in that sense, English is far more complicated than Chinese.