I’ve been learning Chinese for some time. Most people know three things about Chinese: it’s a tonal language, it’s hard to read all those pictogram thingies, and it must be really complicated.
Well, the first two of those things are true. But partially due to the writing system, which is not capable of small incremental changes, the language itself is simple in many ways. For example, verbs don’t decline like English (and all other European languages) and, in particular, there are therefore no irregular verbs; there are no tenses. There is no gender like in French or Spanish and therefore no need for adjectives to agree with nouns. Noun endings don’t change like in German, there’s not even an equivalent of adding an “s” to make plurals because there aren’t really any. For simple sentences the word order is the same as English: subject verb object.
There is a standard way of writing Chinese using our regular alphabet, called Pinyin. Created in the late 1950s, it became widespread by the 1970s (and finally became the official Romanization in Taiwan on January 1st this year). That is the reason that what we used to call Peking became Beijing. If you ever fly there, though, you’ll notice that the three-letter airport code is still PEK!
Not all the letters sound like they do in English. So even learning Pinyin is not completely straightforward. And you’ll need a native speaker to teach you the difference between some consonants. Say “jug” and “chug” to yourself in English and then imagine trying to explain the difference to a foreigner. Chinese has several consonants that sound almost like that: “zh”, “j”, “c”, “ch”, “sh”, “z”, “s”, “q” often sound much the same when you first hear them. The Chinese for “please come in” is “qǐng jìn” but when I first heard it on a CD I couldn’t understand how it was the same word twice like the Italian toast “chin-chin” (or strictly “cin-cin” since “ch” is hard in Italian).
In Chinese the tones distinguish meaning of words that are otherwise spoken identically (although with different characters). You probably have heard that the word for mother and horse are the same “ma” in Chinese but with different tones. Even the tones are not that hard once you realize that we use tones in English sometimes, although we use them to express mood or emotion. Think of how you would say, “It’s a full moon” as a statement versus a question. You vary the tone of “moon.” In fact one habit that it is hard to get out of is putting English emotional tones onto spoken Chinese and inadvertently changing the meaning, especially the last word of a sentence. In Pinyin, the four tones in Chinese are represented with accents with the tone following the direction of the accent (level, rising etc). So Beijing is really written Běijīng.
Once you know the Chinese word for something then you know all about how to use it. You probably know that the everyday Chinese greeting is “nǐ hǎo”. This actually means “you good”. So now you know the word for “you” and the word for “good”. Here’s another simple thing. If you put “ma” on the end of a statement it changes it into a yes/no question. So “nǐ hǎo ma?” means “you good?” or “how are you?” And yes, that “ma” is the same “ma” as means both mother and horse but with a different (in fact no) tone. You might think that the answer to a “yes/no” question would be either “yes” or “no” but Chinese doesn’t really have words for “yes” and “no”. It’s like that party game where you have to avoid saying “yes” or “no” (“your name is Paul?” “it is”). So the possible answers to “nǐ hǎo ma?” are “hǎo” (good) or “bù hǎo” (not good), although, as in English, “how are you?” wasn’t a question expecting a literal answer. And you’ve learned another word “bù” meaning not, which can be used to negate almost anything.
Here’s a verb. The Chinese for “want” is “yào”. And the great thing is that it never changes. It never declines. It never changes tense. If you’ve ever learned a European foreign language (or English as a foreign language) all the common verbs tend to be irregular, so almost every verb you actually use is irregular, making for a steep learning curve. There is none of that in Chinese. “Do you want tea?” is just “nǐ yào chá ma?” And “I don’t want tea” is “wǒ bù yào chá.”
It’s like Legos for a language. It’s a shame the pictures on the blocks are so complicated.
再见. Zài jiàn. Again meet. That is to say, goodbye.