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In the People's Republic of China, other languages in addition
to Chinese- the language of the Han people, the original Chinese
are spoken in the regions where the national minorities are settled,
including Tibetan, Mongolian, Zhuang or Uygur. But everywhere in
China, standard Chinese, also called Mandarin, is more or less understood
or spoken. Regardless of whether you are in Guangzhou or in Heilongjiang,
in Tibet or in Xinjiang, you can get along with standard Chinese. |
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| The Chinese language is divided into
several groups of dialects. For instance, a native of Guangzhou or
Hong Kong can not understand someone from Beijing or vice versa, unless
both speak standard Chinese. The different dialects have, however,
the same grammar and vocabulary, but the writing is the same. It is
the pronunciation that differs. The pronunciation may differ, but
the written symbols can be understood by all literate Chinese. Thus,
a native of Guangzhou and a Beijing citizen can understand each other
by simply writing the symbols.
Since the 1950s, all schools in China teach standard Chinese or
Mandarin-also called common language. It is also used on radio and
television. Young Chinese people, particularly, know standard Chinese.
Consequently, one can manage throughout China by using standard
Chinese. |
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| Standard Chinese is based on the
pronunciation of the northern dialects, particularly the Beijing dialect.
There is an officially approved roman writing of standard Chinese,
called Hanyu Pinyin (the phonetic transcription of the language of
the Han people). Pinyin is used throughout China; many public transportation
facilities show places and street names both in symbols and in the
Romanised transcription.
In modern Chinese, most words are made up of two or three syllable symbols, sometimes more. |
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| Chinese generally lacks syllables;
there are only 420 in Mandarin to represent all symbols in sounds
or tones. The tones are used to differentiate a specifically Chinese
practice, which often makes it very difficult for foreigners when
first learning the Chinese language. Each syllable has a specific
sound. These sounds often represent different meanings.
Mandarin has four tones and a fifth, " soundless" sound. The first tone is spoken high pitched and even, the second rising, the third falling and then rising, and the fourth sound falling. The Chinese sentence structure is simple: subject, predicate and
object. The simplest way of forming a question is to add the question
particle "ma" to a sentence. It is usually not possible
to note from a Chinese word whether it is a noun, adjective or another
form, singular or plural. This depends on the context. |
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| The Chinese language is a language
of symbols or images. Each symbol represents a one-syllable world.
There are in total more than 47,000 symbols, though modern Chinese
only use a part of these. For a daily newspaper, between 3,000 and
4,000 symbols are sufficient. Scholars know between 5,000 and 6,000.
Many symbols used to be quite complicated. After 1949, several reforms
in the written language were introduced in China in order to simplify
the written language. Today, the simplified symbols are used throughout
mainland China.
Useful Chinese Phrases: Hello...................................ni hao. |
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