Basic Facts about Learning Chinese

1. Basic Facts about Learning Chinese 学习中文基本咨询 Adam Ross

2. Which Chinese to Learn? • Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua 普通话 or Guoyu 国语) is the national language of both the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. • Cantonese, though widely spoken in North America, is rarely taught outside of South China • There are other regional dialects of Chinese, such as Taiwanese and Shanghainese, which are often spoken in local regional communities. • All of these dialects are mutually unintelligible when spoken, but their written forms are generally the same.

3. The Bad News about Learning Chinese • Chinese is a TFL (“Truly Foreign Language”) and takes up to four times as long for English speakers to master than other European languages like French or Spanish. • Chinese is a tonal language, and students need to have much drill and practice to master this aspect of Chinese pronunciation. • Chinese is a character-based language, and students must eventually master 1000s of characters

4. The four tones of Standard ChineseImage from Chinesepod: http://chinesepod.com/images/pronu_tones.gif

5. In written “pinyin,” these tones are represented with these diacritics:

6. Now, the Good News! • Chinese grammar is almost ridiculously easy – there are no tenses, irregular verbs, conjugations, declensions or other tricky parts of speech that plague students in Western languages. • Students can put together very comprehensible speech pretty easily once they’ve mastered basic pronunciation issues. • Learning characters has a certain “cachet,” and students are often drawn by the artistic element of writing in characters.

7. Chinese Writing • Chinese can be written in simplified characters (used in mainland China) or traditional characters (used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and in overseas Chinese communities) • Most Chinese programs choose to teach one form or another, but some opt to teach both

8. Various forms of Chinese charactersImage from http://www.orbitchinese.com/image/symbol.gif

9. Learning Chinese Sounds • Chinese sounds can be represented by a variety of systems. Most programs teach HanyuPinyin (or simply Pinyin for short), which was developed in the PRC in the 1950s. • Pinyin is the Romanization system used in virtually all Western media to represent Chinese names and sounds. • Other common system (often used by teachers from Taiwan) include Tongyong Pinyin and ZhuyinFuhao (Bo-Po-Mo-Fo)

10. Standards for Chinese Testing • The Chinese SAT II as well as the AP Chinese Exam are available in both simplified and traditional characters. • The Chinese AP is administered on computers, and testees input characters on their keyboard, selecting characters they input via Hanyu Pinyin. • STAMP and NOELLA are new proficiency tests administered online. These tests were developed in a partnership between Avant Assessment and the University of Oregon. • For more advanced students, the HSK (汉语水平考试“HanyuShuipingKaoshi” or “Test of Chinese Language Proficiency”) is offered annually at Seattle University.