A Beginner's Guide to the Chinese Language

If you want to learn a new language, tackling something like Chinese is one of the harder languages around. But, since almost one-fifth of the world's population speak Chinese it's worth learning - or maybe finding access to a Chinese translation service.

We should start with spoken Chinese as most people learn to talk before they learn to read or write. Spoken Chinese is difficult. Arguably one of the hardest parts is mastering the tonal aspect of Chinese. For example, the sound "ma" has four different sounds depending on pitch: mā means mother, má means hemp, mÇ? is for horse or mà is to scold. To begin with, a native English speaker may have trouble even distinguishing the tones, let alone reproducing them to any proficiency. Then there's stringing them into sentences once you have mastered putting them into words.

There is also a distinction between spoken (hua) and written (zi) Chinese. There are a variety of spoken languages or dialects that differ, the most prominent of which are Mandarin and Cantonese. One saving grace for a beginner is that there's only one written script - although there is also simplified Chinese which was adopted by the People's Republic in the 1950s and 60s, but it's based on the same characters.

As Chinese has its own written script (what could be called an alphabet), this brings its own demands, as most native English speakers may not have had much exposure to it. So the best course of action for the beginner learning Chinese is to start with the task of learning some of the more common characters. Even knowing 2,000 characters may not mean you can read a Chinese newspaper, so the more characters you know the better. If you compare this with English, which has just 26 letters to learn and memorise before you can start trying to pronounce and read words phonetically, it really is a large undertaking.

Phonetically, reading written Chinese aloud is a little bit of a jungle too. Compared with English, Chinese is not very phonetic at all. If you want to say the word mother in English, you can spell it out and then say it, assuming you have learnt the 6 of the 26 letters of the alphabet which appear in the word. However, reading the word mother in Chinese assumes you have seen the word before and know how to say it. Some characters give no clue as to their pronunciation. Unfortunately, you can't rely on cognates (words that are similar or the same as your mother tongue) either, as Chinese has none.

Because many of these things simply take time, learning Chinese has a lot to do with patience; the patience to keep learning the tones accurately and then patiently adding them together to form sentences. Then you need the patience taken to memorise Chinese characters, and learn to draw (or at least type) them.

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