Introduction to chinese
- 1. Welcome to China 中国欢迎你 The Chinese Language and Culture 中国，和中文
- 2. About Chinese, and China China-World’s most populated country (1,338,299,500 people) Chinese-Not a single language. (Many dialects) All Chinese dialects are spoken differently, but use the same characters. We will be learning Mandarin Chinese, which is the most spoken dialect, and the most spoken first language in the world. (836 million speakers) Chinese isn’t difficult, IT’S JUST DIFFERENT!
- 3. About Chinese Characters Chinese is written with a system of symbols or characters, instead of an alphabet like English There are around 50,000 characters total, used to write Chinese, however many of these are ancient, and no longer used, and many are created by companies for a specific purpose, and are also rarely used. Around 2,000 characters are needed for basic proficiency. A well educated adult is expected to know 5,000-10,000 characters. There are two basic types of Chinese characters used today, traditional and simplified. They are each used in different areas. In the Chinese program, you will be taught simplified characters. There are advantages to both. Simplified characters are much easier to write, though traditional characters are more pictographic.
- 4. Simplified Vs. Traditional Characters
- 5. Chinese Character Development Every Chinese Character, can trace it’s history back to a pictograph from ancient China Shan (mountain) Knowing the original pictograph can be a great strategy for remembering Chinese characters
- 6. Other types of Chinese characters. Radicals-Radicals are part of a character, and are used to symbolize an entire category of words. Often radicals are combined with a component that shows pronunciation. =Speech Radical Ex. 说话语 =Water radical Ex. 汁冰游泳 Ex. 妈, ma ＝ mother. This character contains the component 女, which means female, and the component 马, which is pronounced ma. Abstract Characters - Some characters are abstractly represented, or symbolized. Ex. 一二三 ＝1，2，3，or 上 and 下=, above and below Combinations- Sometimes certain simple characters combine, and also combine their meanings. Ex. 明＝Sun＋moon (Bright) , or 森＝tree + tree + tree (forest) 休， rest- 人, (man) + 术, tree
- 7. Tones Tones are used in Chinese, and many other languages, but not in English. When using tones, we pronounce the word the same, but change the way we inflect it. There are four tones in Chinese High tone 妈-ma (mother) Rising Tone 麻-ma (rough) Low Tone 马-ma (horse) Falling Tone 骂-ma (scold)
- 8. Pinyin Pinyin is the Chinese romanization system, or how we write Chinese with English letters. In the beginning of the Chinese program we will be using a lot of pinyin, along with characters, before more characters are introduced. There are a very limited number of Pinyin syllables Pinyin is also used for typing Chinese on the computer. When writing pinyin, tone marks are also often used. There are a very limited number of syllables in Chinese, (around 400). If you multiply this by 4, for the tones, you get a little over 1200 syllables, which is a very small number considering this is an entire language. This means many syllables have multiple meanings. It is preferred to use characters, because each character only has one meaning.
- 10. Sentence Structure The Chinese sentence structure is very different from that of English. 我今天早上十点，去图书馆看书跟我妈妈。 I today morning ten o’clock, go library look books, with my mom. The sentence structure is also very simple compared to English in many cases. Chinese has very few extra words. 我要去上点。This literally means, I want go store. If we wanted to say this in English, It would read I want to go to the store. There are a lot of small extra words in that sentence that aren’t used in Chinese.
- 11. Thank You For Watching! 感谢你的收看！ We hope you will take Chinese with us next year at Bethlehem Central Middle School. 你们明年应该上中文课！