Pre-Lesson 2: Background Information about Chinese Language

Students Reading:

(Show Peter’s picture with Pinyin saying: Shénmė shì zhōngwén? Hànyǚ? )

The Chinese language you are learning is Hànyǚ or Zhōngwén, sometimes it is called Pŭtōnghùa or Mandarin Chinese. How can it have 4 different names?

Hànyǚ means the language used by Han people, the majority of Chinese. China is slightly smaller than U.S. in total area but close to 5 times of the U.S. population! There are total 56 ethnic groups. All ethnic groups have their own language. Can you imaging how confusing it will be if everyone can only speak their own ethnic language? In order to communicate efficiently, Hànyǚ, the ethnic language of Han tribe, is the official Chinese language. About 90% of Chinese population is Han people. So it makes sense to go with the language that most people use. The term Pŭtōnghùa means a common language. Then, what about Zhōngwén or Mandarin Chinese? Zhōngwén basically means the language spoken by people in Zhōnggúo (China in Chinese). Mandarin Chinese is the Mandarin dialect spoken by northern and southwestern Chinese. Isn’t it amazing? All these 4 names apply to the Chinese language you are learning.

Currently, some people outside of mainland China also use Zhōngwén, such as people in Taiwan, Singapore, and China towns all over the world. In the ancient time, many nations in Asia used Chinese characters as written language, such as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Today Japanese still use kanji originated from Chinese characters in part of their writing. As for modern Korean and Vietnamese language, they’ve developed their own spelling systems and no longer using Chinese characters. About one fifth of the world population speaks Hànyǚ. Mandarin Chinese is also one of the six official language used by the United Nation along with Arabic, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Based on the trend of language learning in schools around the world, there will be more people using this language when we grow up.

(A world map, marking areas with people speaking Chinese.)

(A bar graph comparing the amount of people speaking major languages in the world, adapted from the data in 2007 World Almanac)

Are you curious about how other languages work? When I first came to the U.S., I had to learn English from the very beginning. That was really difficult for me because in my own language, Chinese, there is no gender, no tense, no singular nor plural form of nouns, and no need to conjugate verbs. It took me sometime to get use to all these changes needed in English. Melissa told me Spanish have even more of these changes than in English. So, I think learning speaking Chinese probably will be easy for you especially after you mastered the pīnyīn and tones.

But, Chinese language has no spelling. Pīnyīn is only a tool to teach you how to pronounce the sound. The written form of Chinese is roughly square-shaped graphic design called character. According to the legend, Chāng Jíe, an official recorder of the Yellow Emperor, created Chinese characters over five thousand years ago. Gradually, these characters evolved into symbols called Oracle Bone Script carved on bones and tortoise shells around thirty three thousand years ago. By 221 B.C., Qínshĭhuángdì, The First Emperor of China, unified all the kingdoms and ordered everyone to write Chinese characters in the same style. Starting then, written Chinese changed little in shape. However, new characters have been added over the years. The fist dictionary – Shūo Wén Jǐe Zì written during the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 A.D.) contains 9,000 characters. There are about 86,000 characters listed in a dictionary published in 1994! Hey, don’t faint! Actually, only about 3,500 characters are used in daily life. Some characters are used more frequently than others. When learning Chinese, teacher always starts from teaching the most frequently used words to make learning efficient for us. A well-educated Chinese person masters about 6,000 to 7,000 characters. What about the others 80,000 characters? You will not see them unless you do study ancient text. WOW! What a relief!

How did Chinese people create all these characters? There are 6 basic ways to create characters. It started from drawing the basic shape of things. This type of character is xiàng xíng zì (pictograph). For example: 木, 人, 水, and 口. Can you match these four characters with these meanings: wood, people, water and mouth? Besides xiàng xíng zì, Zhǐ shì is a way to create pictograph with an indicative sign added, like adding a line close to the root of the 木 to indicate the original, 本. On the contrary, Hùi yì is to create characters by combining existing characters to create a new meaning. For example, the sun character, 日, combined with the moon character, 月, become bright, 明. Xíng shēng is combining existing characters indicating meaning with another character using its sound. Let’s take a look how the character for father is created. The meaning of dad, 父, combined with the sound symbol of ba, 巴 , to create the character of 爸. Can you imaging how Chinese pronounce爸? Now you know why Chinese call daddy Bàbȧ, right? About 90% of the Chinese characters are Xíng shēng zì. There are two other ways to create characters. Zhuǎn zhù is to change parts of character for new meaning. For example, changing the test, 考, to the character of old, 老. Do you see how the lower half of the character been changed? The last type is Jĭa jìe, borrowing characters for other meaning. Fortunately not too many words are in this category.

Every single Chinese character has only one syllable. A very unique situation about Chinese characters is that many different characters may sound exactly the same. There fore it is necessary to combine characters into a term to make the meaning clear. Like the character for store is diàn, 店, and the character for electricity is also diàn, 電. In order to make things easier to understand, business store is shāngdiàn, 商店 and telephone is diànhùa (electric talk), 電話. A store that sells phones is電話商店. When you learn Chinese characters you’ll see your vocabulary increases quickly because of the different ways of combining them into terms.

(Make more examples of xiangxing zi, zhi shi zi, hui yi zi and xing sheng zi.)

(Make more examples of combined vocabulary.)

I always think Chinese characters are similar to individual Lego pieces, when you link them together, you can build many things. So when you link the Chinese characters together, in the right order of course, you can make sentences or questions. The right order means arranging the English sentence “I study Chinese in school this year.” as “I this year in school study Chinese.” The time and place need to be placed before the action. If you want to ask some one a question like “Do you study Chinese in school this year?” All you have to do is add a mȧ sound at the end of a straight statement of “You this year in school study Chinese. It sounds like this: Nĭ jīn nián zài xúexiào xúe Zhōngwén mȧ? If you like to ask whether he or she studies Chinese in school this year, the only thing you have to change is to switch nĭ with tā. Tā jīn nián zài xúexiào xúe Zhōngwén mȧ? How about that? You don’t have to change study to studies! What if you want to say “Did you study Chinese in school before?” Simply replace the term this year with gùoqǜ, meaning in the past. Nĭ gùoqǜ zài xúexiào xúe Zhōngwén mȧ? Yeah! You got it! Oh, if you want to ask things about the future, just tell the time when it is going to happen. How about next year, míngnían? Do you know what to do? Nĭ míngnían zài xúexiào xúe Zhōngwén mȧ? What does this mean? Will you study Chinese in school next year? Yeah! You got it again! Is it easy or not?

Now, you are ready to go into the adventure of MAGIC CHINESE with us. Let the fun begin!