Click Here to Get Learn Chinese Characters Tips PDF Ebook

Click Here to Buy Easy Learning Chinese Characters PDF Ebook

With China’s economy growing at an unbelievable rate, anyone who can communicate in standard Chinese (Mandarin) is set to enjoy a huge advantage in the international world of business in the future. China is also a big country offering a wealth of exciting travel experiences, and if you know some Chinese it will help you get by and get more out of your trip.

The Chinese language — spoken by more people than any other language in the world — is the official language of the People’s Republic of China, and is one of the four official languages of Singapore.

The best way to learn any language is to have fun with it and to speak it in context - giving Chinese language learners the perfect excuse for an extended trip to China.

By immersing yourself in Chinese language and culture, you will absorb a lot more than you would by studying alone or on a language course in your home country.

Study options

In China you can study at top universities or at private language schools, with courses available for all levels from beginners to intermediate and advanced learners.

Some courses last just a few weeks, while others are far longer. Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU), for example, is the best-known university in China for teaching Chinese language and culture to foreign students. It offers short-term courses lasting 4 weeks, 5 weeks, 6 weeks, 8 weeks, 12 weeks or 20 weeks – plus long-term courses lasting either one or two academic years.

If you are keen to learn Chinese while you’re travelling, more for communication than for business, you could consider joining a study and travel programme, which usually combines language learning with travel and cultural activities, often pairing you with a ‘buddy’: a native Chinese college student who will give you plenty of opportunities to socialise with locals and immerse yourself in Chinese life.

Immerse yourself in the language

Wherever you choose to study in China, make sure that the course incorporates immersion teaching methodologies - where the majority of the classes are taught in Chinese in order to completely immerse you in the language from the start. The course should provide a balance of speaking, listening, reading and writing skills if you are serious about learning the language to a decent level, and class sizes should not be too large or you won’t get enough individual attention.

And after classes, when you’re not busy doing your homework, get out and about and visit local shops and markets to put your new language skills into use in everyday life.

Before you go

If you’re travelling to China, you will need to take out comprehensive travel insurance to cover you for your entire trip. Make sure you take out a policy with a reputable, well-established company such as travelinsurance.co.uk, which has more than 10 years of experience and insures more than two million customers each year.

The Chinese language, which is a communication system used by the Chinese people on a daily basis to accomplish various goals in life, unavoidably carries many features reflecting some of the commonly held social beliefs in their culture. Culture can be roughly defined as socially learned patterns of behavior and interpretive practices, in which language plays a most important part. In fact, the ways in which many Chinese words, idioms, popular sayings, metaphors, and neologisms are widely used among the Chinese correspond to the cultural beliefs and experiences that have shaped China as a country over the last three millennia.

Furthermore, the Chinese people, who have been in contact with many foreign cultures and languages throughout history, have also embraced and integrated into their own culture many foreign concepts and ideas. The structures of neologisms including many Chinese words of European origin and the morpheme–syllable Chinese writing system are examined together to show the importance of meaning in coining neologisms in Chinese. For example, the modern Chinese usage of culture representing culture was adopted from Japanese as it was first extensively used in Japan as a neologized lexical item representing the European word culture in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century the Japanese borrowed these two Chinese graphemes to create a new word to translate the European word culture into Japanese. Later, this neologized Japanese word was reintroduced into Chinese, or returned to China, to translate the same European word.

The Chinese character for “cloud” was written as in oracle-bone script and in bronze script, both of which have a curvy line in the bottom somewhat resembling a piece of floating cloud. However, after Chinese script was standardized after the Han dynasty, various Chinese graphemes can be analyzed in terms of strokes, i.e., lines, dots, and hooks that are draw non a piece of paper with a writing instrument, forming Chinese characters to codify words. For example, in standard script, the earlier undulant and angular lines were replaced by straighter and more regular lines that are more compatible with brushwork techniques. In so doing different kinds of strokes can be easily identified. A Chinese character is supposed to be written stroke by stroke. Chinese children are taught to write different strokes in each Chinese character by strictly following stroke order rules.

There are many practical reasons for students to learn these stroke-order rules. For example, writing is considered to be a form of art in Chinese culture. These rules may help students develop some necessary skills in placing various strokes proportionally to produce aesthetically acceptable Chinese characters. Moreover, one could not use many Chinese dictionaries effectively without knowing the order of strokes, as most dictionary index systems draw on stroke-order rules as a useful way to help users find the relevant entries of a given Chinese character. Even after the romanized spelling system was adopted, most Chinese dictionaries still provide an index relying on the number of strokes because there are many people who may not be familiar with either the romanized system adopted in a given dictionary or the pronunciation, or pronunciations, of a given Chinese character. For example, in the most widely used The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary in China, there is a two-step index system that is divided into two sections, “initial radical” and “radicals guide,” both of which depend heavily on the number of strokes. In this dictionary, that contains over 56,000 words, about 200 initial radicals are recognized. A user needs to count the number of strokes in the initial radical of a Chinese character, or the first Chinese character if the word has more than one Chinese character, to find the section that has all the Chinese characters with the same initial radical. Then, the user needs to count the number of strokes in the remainder of the Chinese character to find the page number where all the relevant entries beginning with the Chinese character will be listed.

The earliest fully developed Chinese writing that we know of today is the inscriptions on turtle shells and oxen shoulder blades, commonly known as oracle-bone script that appeared in the mid-second millennium BCE during the Late Shang dynasty.

Unlike a phonographic writing such as that of English where each letter of the alphabet encodes a phone, Chinese writing is a logographic system with each grapheme (or character) simultaneously encoding sounds and meaning at the level of the syllable. As a logographic system, Chinese writing has the great advantage that it is not necessary for a person who knows how to decode the writing system to learn to pronounce the characters in order to read the messages written in them.

Chinese writing is, nevertheless, not just a system of visual signs, or ideographs, representing various concepts or ideas totally divorced from pronunciation. A literary speaker of any Chinese dialect can immediately pronounce a Chinese character in her/his own dialect. The character, as a logographic form with a single-graph structure, does not represent any given phone within a word, but a syllable associated with a morpheme, Chinese writing as a system of morpheme–syllable representation is systematically phoneticized, i.e., the characters are readable.

In modern Chinese, graphemes, or characters, are known as hanzi, literally “Han-character” bearing the name of the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE). It was during the Han dynasty that Chinese writing was to a large extent standardized at a time when writing brushes, ink, ink stone and paper, wenfang sibao “four treasures in a study,” became the standard tools in Chinese writing.

Chinese Morphology is the study of words and word-making. Its goal is to understand the meaning in the relationships between words and the ways in which they are expressed, including how grammatical relationships are marked in different languages. For example, plurality is explicitly marked by an -s on English nouns, e.g., book as a singular noun and books as a plural noun. Furthermore, the relationships between words may require some morphological changes in different parts of a sentence. For instance, the verb form varies depending on the person and number of the subject noun phrase in an English sentence such as This book is very interesting vs. These books are very interesting in which the subjects and verbs have an agreement relationship, i.e., a third person singular, subjective noun corresponds to the copular verb is and a third person plural subjective noun to a different copular verb are.

Cross-linguistically, the minimal unit of meaning is commonly called a morpheme, and it is subdivided into two major types, bound and free. Bound morphemes primarily refer to affixes such as the English plural marker –s which only makes sense when attached to a nominal stem. Alternatively, a noun like book is called a free morpheme because it makes sense all by itself and refers to something in the real world, or is called a stem for an affix to be attached to.

Affixes are prefixes such as the English un- in unhappy and suffixes such as the English -able in laughable. Affixes can also be derivational or inflectional. In general, inflectional affixes refer to elements such as the plural marker –s in English and are fewer in number than derivational affixes as the former function to create forms of words with additional grammatical meaning such as plurality. Other inflectional morphemes in English include -ed indicating past tense, -ing progressive, -’s possessive, -er comparative, -est superlative, etc. Derivational morphemes such as -able in English tend to be more numerous than inflectional affixes in a language as they operate on a stem, or a root, like laugh resulting in a new word laughable. Other derivational affixes in English include re- in replay, -ment in establishment, -y in lucky, etc. Finally, not all bound morphemes are affixes, there are also bound roots such as –sist in English that constitutes the root, or stem, for derivational processes such as to generate words like resist, consist, subsist in spite of the fact that they cannot occur by themselves to make sense in a language, just like morphologically bound affixes. Although they are not free morphemes that make up most stems, they still provide a base form to shape new words with other derivational affixes in a language.

Compared to English, the boundary of a Chinese word is far from transparent, as many morphological markers like affixes are often non-existent because the Chinese language does not mark tense, or parts of speech, morphologically. The fluidity of the concept “word” in Chinese has even motivated some to claim (Hoosain 1992, Zhang 1992) that morphemes are more versatile in Chinese than other languages and more indeterminate with respect to their bound–free status. The notion of “word”, known as cı in Chinese, is neither a particularly intuitive concept nor easily defined. Furthermore, Chinese orthography requires no space between characters, regardless of their morphological status, i.e., no distinction is made in writing between free and bound morphemes, which obscures their existence in the speaker’s mindset. On the other hand, wenzı “characters” that are used to represent each morpheme syllable with a character regardless of its morphological status appear to be a more natural concept. Perhaps because of this reason, nearly all Chinese dictionaries list vocabularies through characters, instead of words. Thus dictionaries are most commonly referred to as zıdian, literally “character standards.”

Those with a grasp of (Mandarin) Chinese will have a cutting edge over others as China is one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and in the times to come, Mandarin will exert an influence that nobody will be able to ignore.

Language specialist ESL offers unparalleled opportunities for those who have a desire to Learn (Mandarin) Chinese in China. The beautiful monumental city of Beijing has two partner language schools of ESL: Language School Mandarin House and Language School Sprachcaffe.

Language School Mandarin House in Beijing is located in the China Central Place, where there is no dearth of ultramodern hostels, shops, banks international offices and all that. The school offers optimal conditions to Learn (Mandarin) Chinese in China. The school has peaceful, professional and pleasant environment. The building is equipped with all modern facilities well-equipped classrooms and café, where students can relax and chat with other students after their classes.

Housed in the Cultural Palace in the interior of the Tartar city of the Manchus, Language School Sprachcaffe also offers Junior Chinese (Mandarin) courses in China. It features bright and spacious classrooms, a cafeteria, and almost all modern facilities that allow students to learn Mandarin in an intensive way in a relaxed environment.

Language School International house in Qingdao offers high-quality Mandarin courses focused mainly on communication. This school is divided into two course centres: East and West. Both centres feature well-equipped, air-conditioned classrooms, Internet access, cafeterias, spacious lounge, where students can relax.

Language School Mandarin House in Shanghai, which is situated at the heart of the city centre, near to the pedestrian Nanjing Road, is one of the best language schools to Learn (Mandarin) Chinese in China. It is surrounded by restaurants, cafés and shops that cater to diverse needs of students. The school has a qualified, trained and dedicated teaching staff that is always ready to assist students. The school has 22 well-equipped classrooms, a multimedia room that offers free access to Internet and WiFi.

Language school International House in Xi’an also offers Junior Chinese (Mandarin) courses in China. This school is situated at the center of Xi’an- the Capital of the Chinese province of Shaanxi. International House in Xi’an is housed in a modern, two-storey building and features 16 well-equipped classrooms, a library, a student lounge, a kitchen,  a computer room with free Internet access.

The plethora of linguistic diversity of Chinese languages in the south and one unified Mandarin in the north might be related to the geographical characteristics of China’s north and south. “Mandarin dialects,” are spread across the Yellow Plain and the Loess Plateau which has a flat terrain that promotes travel and, consequently, easy contact among the people there. Ramsey observes that “this remarkable linguistic difference between a unified North and a fragmented South is a measure of how much life and society have been affected by geography.” As a result of this geography, a more uniform Northern Chinese area is created with mutually intelligible dialects. In contrast, mutually unintelligible dialects are spoken in the areas south of the Yangtze River because people there were barricaded by mountains and rivers.

The Northern dialects, with nearly 900 million speakers, are commonly subdivided into four major varieties: Northwestern, Northern proper, River, and Southwestern. The Northwestern variety refers to the dialects spoken around the Loess Plateau region with the ancient capital city Xi’an as its center. The Northern proper variety is spoken in the areas such as Hebei province, Shangdong province, and provinces in the northeast (Manchuria). This variety constitutes the basis of the standard dialect in modern China. The language was formed through large-scale immigration of the people residing in this area over the last several hundred years. Therefore, Northeastern dialects bear a strong resemblance to other Northern dialects as most migrants settling there originally moved from the Northern dialect area. The River variety spoken in the region north of the Yangtze River around the city of Nanjing was once considered the most prestigious dialect of the nation during and after the Ming dynasty. The Southwestern variety developed out of several waves of migrants settling in the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou from central China after the Ming dynasty.

During the late eighteenth century the Qing emperors dispatched troops to settle in these remote areas permanently with their families and encouraged large-scale immigration from Hubei and Hunan provinces to reclaim the land in southwestern China. Consequently, the Southwestern variety in many ways resembles the language spoken in Hubei province. Northern Chinese typically has fewer tones than Chinese dialects in the south. However, the most remarkable feature distinguishing Northern Chinese from the mutually unintelligible Southern Chinese dialects is perhaps the lack of stop endings that are prevalent in many Southern dialects like Wu, Yue, and Min.

Chinese, as a language name in English, refers to the Sinitic subgroup of Sino-Tibetan languages in Asia. But it can be translated into various Chinese nouns for the language encompassing many different ideas depending on the context.

First of all, Chinese can be translated as zhongwen generally referring to the language. Zhongwen is also the right term to use for the academic discipline in studying Chinese language and literature, such as zhongwenxi for the Chinese department in a university setting.

Second, the term hanyu “Han language” is used in the context contrasting the languages spoken by the Han nationality that makes up 92% of the 1.3 billion Chinese citizens of the People’s Republic with all of the non-Han languages spoken in China and the rest of the world. Therefore, foreign students who are now learning Chinese are said to be learning hanyu.

Third, as hanyu is a general term for the languages, many of which are mutually unintelligible among speakers of different varieties of Han language, it by default refers to the standard dialect of the country that is known as putonghua literally meaning “common language” in the People’s Republic. Putonghua is a constructed norm based upon the language, a variety of Northern Chinese, spoken in the capital city, Beijing. Moreover, Chinese corresponds to a number of Chinese equivalents depending on the given speech community.

Traditionally, Han-Chinese is divided into seven major dialect groups, Mandarin (or beifanghua Northern Chinese),Wu, Xiang, Gan, Kejia (Hakka), Yue (Cantonese), and Min. Though sharing a large number of cognates, or words of common origin, Chinese dialects vary most strikingly in their sound systems. All Chinese dialects have tones with different pitch contours for each syllable.

Many dialects are spoken in China. Mandarin is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken in most of the northern, central, and western parts of China. However, Mandarin, as it is known to the world, refers to standard Mandarin (or modern standard Chinese) which is based on the Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing. Standard Mandarin is the official spoken language known as Putonghua in China. Standard Mandarin is also one of the five official languages of the United Nations, and is used in many international organizations. Phonologic descriptions show that the structural pattern of a Mandarin syllable is an optional initial consonant followed by the vowel, and then optionally followed by a velar or alveolar nasal ending. Another component of the Mandarin syllable is the tone which mainly specifies the syllable’s pitch pattern. Technically, a syllable is presented in terms of its initial, final, and tone. Mandarin is a tonal language because the tones, just like consonants and vowels, are used to distinguish words from each other.

Chinese linguists have proposed various transcription systems for Mandarin. But the most popular ones are Hanyu Pinyin. Hanyu Pinyin was accepted as the official transcription system for the Chinese language in 1958 by the government of China. The transcription system is used in the input of Chinese characters in computer systems.

Today, there are two Chinese character sets used by Chinese-language users, i.e., the traditional Chinese characters and the simplified Chinese characters. The traditional Chinese characters have been used since the 5th century. This character set is still being used in some overseas Chinese communities today. The simplified Chinese characters originate from the official character simplification during 1950s and 1960s. Now, this set of simplified Chinese characters is the official writing system in China, and is accepted by the United Nations. In computer systems, different codes are used for these two character sets. The Guobiao code (GB) is a national standard character encoding in China. It refers to the GB 2312-80 set issued in 1981, or the GB 18030-2000 set issued in 2000. There are 6,763 Chinese characters in the GB 3212-80 code set.

Mandarin Chinese is referred to as monosyllabic because the majority of words are one syllable in length. This is true for classical Chinese, but no longer true for modern Chinese. A large number of polysyllabic words are used today in daily spoken Chinese. One syllable when uttered with different tones corresponds to different characters. A word in polysyllabic form is written with two or more characters. Since Chinese texts have no spacing between words, extra effort is required to segment a sentence into word-parts. Because of these particular characteristics, the design of Chinese language corpora needs extra considerations. Most of the Chinese spoken language processing systems developed recently deal with standard Mandarin. Few of them cater for other dialects, such as Cantonese, Min-nan, Hakka, Wu, etc.

Chinese is the language of over one billion speakers. Several dialect families of Chinese exist, each in turn consisting of many dialects. Although different dialect families are often mutually unintelligible, systematic correspondences (e.g., in lexicon and syntax) exist among them, making it easy for speakers of one dialect to pick up another relatively quickly. The largest dialect family is the Northern family, which consists of over 70% of all Chinese speakers. Standard or Mandarin Chinese is a member of the Northern family and is based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect. Interestingly, most speakers of Standard Chinese have another dialect as their first tongues and only less than one percent of them speak without some degree of accent.

There are 22 consonants in Mandarin Chinese. Compared with English, the distribution of consonants in Mandarin Chinese is more closely dependent on the syllable position, and the syllable structure is much simpler. There are two types of syllables - full and weak ones - in Mandarin Chinese. The former has intrinsic, underlying tone and is long, while the latter has no intrinsic tone and is short. A full syllable may change to a weak one, losing its intrinsic tone and undergoing syllable rime reduction and shortening (similar to syllable reduction in English).

In contrast to English which has over 10,000 (mono) syllables, Mandarin Chinese has only about 400 syllables excluding tones (and 1300 including tones). Relatively simple phonological constraints can sufficiently describe the way in which many available syllables are excluded as being valid ones in Mandarin Chinese.

The special characteristics in spoken Chinese signal properties consist of tonality and fundamental frequency variations that signal the lexical identity in the language in addition to paralinguistic information. Speech analysis techniques for fundamental frequency or pitch extraction are therefore more important for Chinese than for the non-tonal languages such as English. Recent research has provided both the production and perceptual accounts for tonal variations in spoken Chinese, where the articulatory constraint on the perception processing has been quantified.