It could seem impossible to learn Chinese but it is not!
Grammatically Chinese is very easy and there is a lot of logic in the language
and the Chinese Characters. In Chinese there is no tenses. Every Chinese word
can have only one form. Instead of learning hundred of tenses you learn a few
particles to add to words to tell what tens it is. Instead of big, bigger or
good better Chinese use an easy way of comparison. There is one word for comparison.
This word is used in every comparison. Better could be e.g. you compared to
me good = you are better than I am.
There is no alphabet in Chinese. Instead there are characters. A character could
be a word or a part of a word. Normally a word consists of two or more characters.
The Chinese characters have changed their forms during history but they are
probably around 8000 years old. 3500 years ago there where a more complex writing
system. Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language. It has nothing to do with Japanese.
In fact Japanese have no connection to any other language, even though they
have imported the Chinese characters.
In Chinese there is many different dialects. E.g. is Cantonese one of them.
People in e.g. Hong Kong speak Cantonese. In main land China they speak a dialect
called mandarin (putonghua). Everywhere in China the characters are the same.
Taiwan (China claims the rights to Taiwan) and Hong Kong still uses the old
Chinese Characters ( traditional Chinese Characters).
There are about 20.000 characters in a normal Chinese word processor. This does
not mean that you have to know all of those. Since 1988 the educational plan
states that the students have to learn 3500 up to senior high school. To be
able to read a normal book or newspaper you have to know about 2000 characters,
however if you learn the 1000 most frequent Chinese characters you can create
about 3000 Chinese words with them. This is normally enough to be able to read
a Chinese newspaper and understand most of its contents.
For a student in Chinese it is the first time that is the hardest. When you
have reached the first level of understanding of the language you will find
that you learn much faster and things feel easier. You will then feel that you
understand the characters, the grammar, how to use the characters in new words
and much more. When you have reach this point it is wonderful feeling. Then
it is really fun to study Chinese. Now you recognize many characters in new
words and can learn more characters a day than before.
Actually you can use western letters to write Chinese with. By using a transcribing
system called pinyin you write a character as it sound.
E.g. the character for big (
)
could be written like this 
.
What is over the "a" is a tone mark. Due to the tones in Chinese you have to
mark the western letters with the tone. In this case it is the 4:th tone which
is a tone starting from a high pitch and falling shortly to a low pitch.
Building up a Chinese
character
It
might seem like a Chinese character only consists of a bunch of lines with no
order, but that is wrong. Study this example for instance, every part
of it have a meaning. By combining those parts we construct a new character.
The first part ( top left in the picture ) is the character for field, next
part means earth, soil. By combining those two characters we have constructed
a new character with the meaning of " distance, village". Time was at this time
measured with sundial. To show a change in time the shadow had to move a small
distance. Next character, middle left row, is a radical with a pronunciation
that sounds much like our final character ( the radical is pronounces tong while
our final character is pronounced zhong ( sounds like djong )). The final row
to the left is a character for metal or gold. Clocks are often made of metals,
like gold. This character has been simplified in our final character. Now we
have a new Chinese character. By knowing something about the parts in the character
we can understand some about its meaning. We know how it probably is pronounced
and some about its meaning. Even if you haven´t seen the character before
you can understand some about it by using your knowledge about other Chinese
characters.
There are 6 different methods how the Chinese characters
are constructed. Those methods could be divided into three groups: group
A: reproductions, group B = compounds
and group C: invented
Reproductions
could be concrete or abstract.
From the beginning all characters where reproductions but today only 2-3
% are reproductions.
Concrete reproduction, e.g.: 
=
mountain 
=
Water
= field
=
mouth
Abstract reproduction, e.g.:
= under 
=
over = big
=middle
Compounds
could be, Associations or Phonetically compounds.
Associations
e.g.:
=
sun + 
= moon 
=
bright
= woman + 
= child, son 
= Good
Phonetically compounds, e.g.:
= woman 
= horse( pronounced ma ) 
=
mother (pronounced
ma, something female which pronounce ma = mother)
Mother is often written 
This
is because it otherwise sounds to "short". This is often made in Chinese.
Invented:
The invented characters could be characters with kindred
meaning or phonetic loans.
Phonetic loans: e.g. "arrive"
. In the beginning it had the same pronunciation as "wheat". The character
for wheat therefore comes to mean both wheat and arrive. Today it means
only arrive and wheat have been given a new character.
Kindred meaning: Characters
that are used to describe more than one thing. The character for "flash"
represents today often electricity as well as flash.
Most Chinese words consist of two or more characters.
This makes is much easier to learn Chinese since you often already has
learnt one of two of the characters in a new word.
che = carriage
qiche = car ( steam carriage )
gonggong qiche = bus ( public steam carriage )
huoche = train ( fire carriage )
dianche = electric carriage/buss
dianshi = TV
dianhua = telephone
tanhua = chat, talk
There are two sorts of Chinese characters in use today,
traditional and simplified. The Chinese characters had been more or less
unchanged for more than 200 years when the Chinese communist party during
the 1950:th decided to change them. They did also discuss if the should
remove all characters and start to use western letters instead. Luckily
they decided to simplify the characters instead. The reason they wanted
to simplify them was that China at that time had a great number of illiterates.
They wanted to educate everyone and to make that possible they needed to
make it easier to learn Chinese. After much work they come up with an idea
how to simplify the characters in accordance to some rules. The new characters
are called simplified and are in use all over Mainland China. In Hong Kong,
Taiwan etc. they still use the traditional characters. In some shop
signs, books, poetry, calligraphy etc. you can find the traditional characters
even in Mainland China. Many think that the traditional characters are
more beautiful than the simplified.
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|