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LESSON 1

INTRODUCTION ABOUT CHINESE LANGUAGE

About the Standard Chinese Language

The Chinese language (Zhōngwén, Huáyǔ or Pǔtōnghuà) is the
chief language of China, and also one of the most popular and
developed languages in the world.
China is a country consisting of 56 nationalities, and has a
population of 1.3 billion. Before China opened its door to the outside
world in the late 1970s, many people in the West believed (some still
believe today) that Chinese is one language or Chinese language is
Cantonese. In fact, Chinese is not just one language, but a family of
languages and Cantonese is just one of the seven major dialects of the
Chinese language. Although different dialects differ immensely in
pronunciation, they share the same written form. The seven modern
languages of China known as dialects are growing on the branches of
the Chinese family cultural tree deeply rooted in the land of Confucius.
They share as strong a family resemblance as do English, German,
French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and are about as different from
one another.
The Standard Chinese spoken nationally is based on the
pronunciation of the Northern dialect which is spoken by over 70
percent of the population. It is known as Pǔtōnghuà (普通话), which
literally means Common Speech in the People’s Republic of China;
Guóyǔ ( 国 语 ) or Huáyǔ ( 华 语 ), which literally means National
Language in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and other overseas
Chinese communities, and Mandarin Chinese in English speaking
countries. Many Chinese use the term to describe the Chinese
language as Zhōngwén (Chinese 中文) or Hànyǔ (Hàn language 汉语
-Han is the largest of the 56 nationalities in China consisting of more
than 90 percent of the population). Both Zhōngwén and Hànyǔ are
literarily interchangeable and are more often used by native Chinese
speakers than P ǔ tōnghuà or Mandarin when they ask non-native
speakers if they speak Chinese. Pǔtōnghuà, based primarily on the
Beijing dialect but takes elements from other Chinese languages, is
taught in schools and spoken by television and radio broadcasters
throughout China, and it is the spoken language which is most
understood by Chinese speakers. However, it is often spoken with
some concessions to local speech and accent, particularly in

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pronunciation.
Compared to the other six Chinese languages, P ǔ tōnghuà has
fewer tones and fewer final consonants (Cantonese has 8 tones
compared to only 4 in Standard Chinese P ǔ tōnghuà ). These six
Chinese languages, known as six major Chinese dialects, are mainly
used in regions south of the Yangtze River valley. They are, the Wú
language (吴语) which includes the Shanghai dialect; Hunanese which
is officially known as Xiāng language(湘语); the Gàn language (赣语)
which is mainly spoken in Jiangxi Province; Cantonese/Guǎngdōng
language (粤语) which is the language of Guangdong Province, Hong
Kong, Macau and also is widely spoken in Chinese communities in the
United States, Europe and other Asian and Southeast Asian countries;
Fujianese, which is officially known as Mǐn language (闽语) and is
spoken by people of Fujian Province and Taiwan (in Fujian it is called
Fujian dialect, in Taiwan, it is called Taiwan dialect, both from the
same Mǐn dialect); and Hakka/Kèjiā, which is officially known as Kèjiā
dialect and is spoken by people living in a region north and northwest
of Guangdong Province as well as by a minority in Taiwan. The last
three mentioned dialects, Cantonese, Mǐnnán and Kèjiā, are all widely
spoken throughout Southeast Asia.
Apart from these seven major Chinese languages, there are also
some non-Chinese languages spoken by Chinese ethnic minorities,
e.g. Tibetan, Mongolian, which do not belong to the Chinese language
family and are not related to the seven Chinese languages discussed
above.

Chinese Grammar and Word Order

The Standard Chinese grammar is relatively simple compared to
the grammar of Germanic and Romance languages. Learners will
find it much easier to learn Chinese upon knowing that there are no
conjugations in Chinese such as are found in other languages.
Chinese verbs have fewer forms than English verbs, and nowhere
near as many irregularities. A simple verb form applies to anybody,
singular or plural; and also applies to any time range: past, present or
future. Chinese grammar relies heavily on word order which is quite
fixed. The word order of a statement sentence is mostly the same as
word order in English. The common patterns are
Subject+Verb+Object, e.g. “I speak Chinese”, “Wǒ (I) shuō (speak)
Zhōngwén (Chinese) 我说中文”. In English, when asking a question,
the question word is always placed in the beginning of the question
sentence and reverses the order of the predicate verb and the subject

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noun, e.g. “What do you speak ?” Whereas in Chinese, both a
statement sentence and a question sentence keep the same word
order. In Chinese, “What do you speak” is structured as “You speak
what ?” / “Nǐ (you) shuō (speak) shénme (what)你说什么?”
In English, the most important information or the topic or theme
of a sentence is usually placed at the end of a sentence e.g. “It is
very important to master Chinese tones.” In Chinese, however, the
most important information or the topic of a sentence usually comes
first, e.g. “To master Chinese tones is very important Jīngtōng
Zhōngwén de shēngdiào hěn zhòngyào 精通中文的声调很重要。”
In English, all adverbial phrases such as time, place, manner and
purpose of doing things, with whom one does something, etc. are
mostly placed at the end of a sentence, e.g. “I’ll come tomorrow”;
“I’m going to study Chinese in Beijing”; “I like to speak Chinese with
Chinese people”. In Chinese, these adverbial phrases are always
placed after the subject and before the verb, with time phrases as an
exception, which can occur either at the beginning of a sentence or
after the subject and before the verb, depending on the degree of
emphasis of the time phrase in the sentence, e.g. “I tomorrow come”
or “Tomorrow I come”; “I in Beijing study Chinese”; “I with Chinese
people speak Chinese”. These are just a few examples of differences
between English and Chinese word order. In spite of these
differences, many learners of Standard Chinese find that Chinese,
especially standard spoken Chinese, is not as hard for a non-native
speaker to learn as one might imagined.
Although many people believe that Standard Chinese grammar is
relatively simple compared to grammars of other languages, it is still
in the process of being perfected and learners need be payig special
attention to some rules that are different from English and other
Germanic and Romance Families of languages.
The following are a few things that learners of Standard Chinese
need toknow before they start learning the language:
(1) Chinese nouns always keep one form and there are
neither singular nor plural forms.
(2) Chinese verbs, likewise, have only one form, which is just
as you say “I be Chinese”, “You be American”, “He be
French”, “I speak Chinese”, “He speak Chinese”, etc.
(3) Standard Chinese is not a tense language and thus
Chinese verbs do not indicate past, present or future.
Tenses are expressed by using additional grammar words
that are called particles, time adverbial phrases or simply

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the context. The grammar word indicating a completion
of an action or past event can be placed at the end of a
sentence if the object in the sentence is a simple or single
one without any modifiers. However, the grammar
particle has to be placed right after the verb in a sentence
if the object in the sentence is no long simple or single
where there are one or more modifiers before it. (The
grammar word le also has other functions, such as
indicating a change of situation, status or condition, etc.)
(4) Prepositions such as “at”, “in”, “on” are normally not used
before Chinese time adverbial phrases, e.g. “My friend
this weekend arrive”; “They morning 10:00 o’clock have
Chinese class.”
(5) The largest time or place unit always precedes the smaller
one, e.g. “He 2004 March 25, Thursday afternoon 5:00
o’clock arrive”; “He in USA, Oregon, Portland, PSU, MIM
study Chinese”, etc.
(6) There must always be a measure word or classifier between a
number and a noun (two+běn 本+dictionary; two+ge 个+student;
this+ běn 本+dictionary), between a demonstrative pronoun and
a noun (that+ ge 个+student; which+ běn 本+dictionary; which+
ge 个+student, etc.)

Chinese Written Characters

Chinese written characters are symbols which stand for the
meaningful syllables of the spoken language. Most languages in the
world are written with an alphabet. Although the letters can be
different from those of English or Pinyin, yet the principle is all the
same: one letter stands more or less for each consonant or vowel
sound. Chinese, however, is written with characters (Hànzì 汉
字 )which stand for the whole syllable. There are about thirteen
hundred phonetically distinct syllables in everyday use. Chinese
characters are often referred to as “ideographs,” which suggests that
they stand directly for ideas. This is misleading. It is better to think
of the characters as standing for the meaningful syllables of the
spoken language.
It is widely believed that Chinese written characters, which are
now in current use, are the world’s oldest written language with a
history of 3,500 years. They began as pictures carved in oracle
bones, widely known as pictographs. They are also known as
“square characters” because they are square-formed characters

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consisting of strokes, with their structures becoming systemized and
simpler.
Different from the alphabetic script which is spelled out in letters,
Chinese characters are written in various strokes. Out of the thirty
odd strokes, only eight are basic ones and all the others are their
variants. The strokes in a character are written according to some
fixed rules. Once the basic strokes and the rules of stroke-order are
grasped, the writing of characters will become easy. Structurally,
Chinese characters consist mostly of two or more basic structural
components while some other character components stand by
themselves. In the single-component characters, the strokes are
written or arranged as a compact integral, but most of the characters
are compound ones which are composed of two or more components.
Some of the components are used as RADICALS in Chinese
dictionaries. So it is of key importance to know the components or
RADICALS before you learn how to use a Chinese dictionary. These
character components, just like the 26 English letters, are limited in
number and the basic strokes that form these components are
relatively even more limited. A stroke can be defined as one single
unbroken line drawn by the writer from the time the pen touches the
paper until the pen lifts off the paper. Writing characters in the
correct order is essential for the character to look correct.
Minimal literacy in Chinese calls for knowing about one thousand
characters. These thousand characters, in combination of phrased
and grouping words, give a reading vocabulary of several thousand
words. Full literacy calls for knowing some three thousand
characters. In order to reduce the amount of time needed to learn
Chinese characters, a group of Chinese linguists started reforming
Chinese language by 1) changing the phonetic symbols into Pīnyīn
Romanization; 2) reducing the average number of strokes per
character by half-simplifying Chinese characters. According to a
statistics, the language reform in the People’s Republic of China in late
1950s resulted in simplifying altogether 515 characters along with
around 1,500 characters that share certain simplified radicals. Today,
simplified Chinese characters (also known as short-formed characters)
are used in the People’s Republic of China whereas the traditional
characters (also known as traditional or long-formed characters) are
used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau and by some overseas
Chinese.
One reason often provided for the retention of Chinese characters
is that they can be read, with the local pronunciation, by speakers of

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all the seven Chinese languages. This is because the Chinese
characters help to keep alive distinctions of meaning between words,
which are fading in the spoken language.

Pronunciation and Pinyin Romanization

Ever since China adopted its official Pīnyīn Romanization system-
a standard form of pronouncing Chinese written characters and a tool
to reach the correct pronunciation of speaking the standard
Pǔtōnghuà – it has become one of the most popular spoken languages
in the world. It is often said that Chinese language is a monosyllabic
language, the notion of which contains a great deal of truth in it. On
average, every other word in ordinary conversation is a single-syllable
word. Although most words in dictionaries have two or even more
syllables, one can almost always break them down into single-syllable
units in meaning, and many can stand alone as words themselves.
Standard Pǔtōnghuà is a vowel-dominated language. A syllable
can be a single vowel, a compound vowel or a vowel preceded by a
consonant. A traditional syllable is divided into two parts: the initial
called shēngmǔ is the beginning consonant, and the final called yùnmǔ
follows the initial or stands by itself. Every syllable is represented by
a Chinese character. For example, in shān(山/mountain) sh is the
initial and an is the final, whereas in ān (安/peace), there is no initial
and the final stands by itself to constitute a single vowel syllable.
The initial consists of only one consonant and the final may consist of
one, two or three single vowels and a consonant (-n or –ng).
Most, if not all, business Chinese learners are adults. One of the
advantages an adult has over a child in learning Chinese is the ability
to make good use of a written representation of it. In this textbook
the students will learn the Pīnyīn Romanization system at the same
time they are learning the sound system of Standard Chinese while
the non-alphabetic system of written characters is provided as a
separate component of the textbook.

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