If you are anything like me, then you have probably heard Chinese being spoken at some point in your life or have seen it written somewhere and said to yourself, "How in the world do people speak and understand this?!" Well lucky for you, this post will shed some light on the mystery that is the Chinese language.
The first thing you have to know is that Chinese is a tonal language, which means that the way a word is accented affects its meaning. There are four tones in Mandarin Chinese. Almost every Chinese word is said with one or more of the four tones. (I say almost every word because some have no tone at all). This is a picture of how you say each of the four tones.
And here is a video of what each tone sounds like! You can hear how each tone matches the above picture and how each tone mark corresponds to the sound. The official way to write Chinese with Arabic letters is called Pinyin, which is what is used in the video. That is why there are English letters instead of characters.
These is no such thing as "tense" in Chinese like there is in English and other languages. Instead, a specific time is usually specified, and the verb does not change form. Word order is pretty simple: Subject+Time+Verb+Object. So "I will watch a movie this weekend" is "Wǒ(I) zhè(this) zhōumò(weekend) kàn(watch) diànyǐng(movie)∘" In characters, this sentence is 我这周末看电影。Chinese also does not have any articles such as "a", "an", or "the". An interesting (and difficult) thing about Chinese is that if you have not memorized what word matches with what character, there is no way to read the sentence. You cannot "sound out" words like English and know what they mean. For me this has been the hardest part of learning Chinese - character memorization.
Well that's all for this mini Chinese lesson! To quote my Chinese professor, "See! Chinese is easy!"
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