Chinese Words

◆What is Chinese characters

Chinese characters are logograms utilized in the composing of Chinese (in which they could be named hanzi; "Han character") and Japanese (kanji). This kind of characters are also utilized, albeit less frequently, in Korean (hanja), and have been formerly used in Vietnamese, in addition to in a amount of other languages. Chinese characters constitute the oldest constantly utilized system of composing all over the world. There are tens of thousands Chinese characters, though most of them are minor graphic variants only encountered in historical texts. Studies carried out in China have proven that practical literacy needs the knowledge between three and four thousand characters. In Chinese orthography, the characters are largely morphosyllabic, each of them corresponding to a spoken syllable having a distinct meaning. Nonetheless, the majority of Chinese words today include two or more characters. About 10 percent of native words have two syllables with no separate meanings, however they are nonetheless written with two characters. Some characters, usually ligatures, represent polysyllabic words or even phrases, although this is the exception and is generally informal.

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Common Knowledge of Chinese Characters

◆How to learn Chinese

"When some one is learning a foreign language, he needs to use the foreign language." In this way, he could use many languages. A saying goes, "Practice makes perfect." When we learn Chinese, we ought to read more, practise more, and pay more attention to Chinese on occasion. We should not be afraid of making mistakes. Only in this way can we study it well. I believe the simplest way to learn Chinese well, is to understand and use Chinese frequently. Do not be afraid of being laughed at. We'd better do a good deal of listening, speaking, reading and composing. If you're able to form the habit of contemplating and composing in Chinese all day, you will be certain to grasp the spirit of Chinese and can be capable of read works in Chinese in a quick period of time. Given that Chinese may be the language must be much more educated to listen to far more speakers, used by as much as possible. Daily adhere to spend 1-3 minutes to learn Chinese. Learning Chinese is really a long process, the training should be as much as possible and you should develop an interest in mastering it. Also your memory need to strengthen, because Chinese is really hard to remember. Nowadays more and more foreigners begin to learn Chinese and Chinese is becoming more and more popular in the world. So hurry up, let’s learn Chinese together.

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Is Chinese Really So Hard to Learn as a Second Language?

Pronunciation tips
Chinese seems designed to defeat romanizers-- there’s no system that suggests pronunciations to English speakers without explanations. The pinyin romanization used in the above list shouldn’t be read as if it were English. It would take pages and sound clips to teach really correct pronunciation; but you can use these rules as a starting point: Consonants

• The sounds b d g don’t differ from p t k by voicing; rather, the latter series are aspirated, the first aren’t. Technically, the b in běn is an unaspirated p, like our p in spend, as opposed to the aspirated p in pen. If that doesn’t make much sense to you, English b d g aren’t terribly wrong.
• h is a velar fricative, like German ch in Bach.
• As a first approximation, ch zh q j can all be pronounced like English ch. However, ch zh are retroflex, while q j are palatalized. And zh j are unaspirated. Don’t pronounce j like a French j.
• Also as a first approximation, sh x can be pronounced like English sh. In fact sh is retroflexed and x is palatalized.
• Pronounce c z as ts. The z is unaspirated.
• Initial r- is retroflex, though to me it sounds assibilated, like a cross between American English r and zh.

• a: "ah" as in father, arm
• e: "uh" as in were, fur
• i: (after z, c, s, zh, ch, sh and r) "er" as in sir, otherwise "ee" as in we, tea
• o: "or" as in bore, snore
• u: "oo" as in who, too

• z: "ds" as in zoo, but zh is pronounced "j" as in job
• j: "g" as in get
• q: "ch" as in cheek
• x: "sh" as in shy

• First tone (mā) is just a high pitch: a word in first tone should be noticeably higher than your normal tone of voice.
• Second tone (má) is a rising pitch, much as we’d use in the initial syllable in “Ma? You there?”
• Third tone (mǎ), in isolation, drops from a neutral pitch, then rises again ; in connected speech, it just drops. Think “Ma, are you listening?”
• Fourth tone (mà) drops from a high pitch. “Ma! Stop that!”

• Other useful Chinese phrases and words

• A few hard to pronounce Chinese pinyin letters