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Each day, I’ll have one of these images to accompany the new word. The image is comprised of five parts

1. The (traditional) Chinese character in red
2. The stroke order the character is written in, in white
3. The mandarin phonetic symbols for the word
4. The romanisation for the word, using my own system
5. The English translation of the word

Here’s a method that might help you learn each word

1. Write it
2. Say it
3. Translate it
4. Repeat the above 20 times

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Along with other regular things like a regular job and regular creative output, I’ll be posting a new Chinese word every day. I’m not the kind of person who finds routines easy, so I apologise in advance if I skip a day or two. I promise to try my utmost to not let this happen though…

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This is going to be a short post…

Now that you know how to to pronounce mandarin correctly, it’s time to do something practical with your sparkling new language skills. We’ll start by learning how to say ‘Hello’ in mandarin. “Huh?” you may wonder. “Didn’t we already do that?”. Yes, you did, sort of. You learnt that ‘knee how’ is how to say ‘hello’. But actually, ‘k-n-e-e h-o-w’ is not how we’re going to write Chinese on this blog. We’ll be using the combination of bopomo symbols and my own pinyin system detailed in the previous post. Using this system the Chinese word for “hello” (你好) is pronounced as follows:

ㄋㄧ nee
ㄏㄠ how

Literally, “ㄋㄧ nee” means “you”, and “ㄏㄠ how” means “good”, so saying “hello” in Chinese is more like asking “how are you” or “you good?”. I guess this is the reason that Chinese people seldom ask “How are you?” after saying “hello”, as it’s kind of like saying the same thing twice.

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Please see part one of this lesson for an introduction to Mandarin phonetics.

So, without further ado, here are the 37 Mandarin phonetic symbols, my version of the ‘Pinyin’ system and an example of an existing English word using the sound.

For instance, the first Mandarin phonetic symbol is ‘ㄅ’, and is pronounced ‘buh’, which is the ‘ba’ in the word ‘BAnana’. I think you’ll get the hang of it.

1. ㄅ b - BAnana
2. ㄆ p - PUb
3. ㄇ m - MAchine
4. ㄈ f - FUnny

5. ㄉ d - DUck
6. ㄊ t - TUmble
7. ㄋ n - NUdge
8. ㄌ l - LUcky

9. ㄍ g - GUn (Be careful! ‘Gun’, when said with force, is an offensive word in Mandarin)
10. ㄎ k - CUb
11. ㄏ h - HUnter

12. ㄐ jee - JEAns
13. ㄑ chee - CHEAter
14. ㄒ shee - SHEEp

Now we come to some sounds which really don’t have an English equivalent. However, I think the English phonetic equivalent is similar-sounding enough to give you some idea of the sound.

Sounds 15-18 use a kind of ‘paralysed r’ or ‘curled toungue’. To make this sound, simply say the word ‘Red’. Now, say ‘Re’. Now just say ‘R’ and hold that shape in your mouth while making the sound in the front of the phonetic.
The last one, ‘r’ is basically just the word ‘Red’ with the ‘ed’ removed.

15. ㄓ jr
16. ㄔ chr
17. ㄕ shr
18. ㄖ r

19. ㄗ dz (The sound electric clippers make. Sort of…)
20. ㄘ ts (The sound of frying bacon!)
21. ㄙ ss (Just a long, hard ‘S’ sound.)

22. ㄧ ee - swEEt
23. ㄨ oo - mOO, said the cow (Oops, another potentially offensive word. Don’t say ‘cow’. Ever.). Think of how a British choir would sing ‘truth’. That’s the deep ‘oo’ sound we want.
24. ㄩ ui - This is probably the trickiest sound to get right. It’s halfway between an ‘oo’ and ‘ee’ sound. That’s probably the best way I can describe it without giving an audio demo. To make the sound, say ‘oo’ and slowly change to ‘ee’. When you’re halfway there, stop. That’s the sound we’re after.

25. ㄚ ah - The sound your doctor makes you say when he’s checking your throat.
26. ㄛ aw - rAW
27. ㄜ uh - pAW
28. ㄝ eh - mEnd

29. ㄞ eye - rIGHt
30. ㄟ aye - mAke
31. ㄠ ow - nOW
32. ㄡ oh - mOment

33. ㄢ un - UNder
34. ㄣ uhn - wINdow
35. ㄤ ung - hUNG
36. ㄥ uhng - The final unusual sound. This one sounds like a combination of ‘in’ from ‘wINdow’ with the ‘ng’ sound of ‘huNG’. Sorry I can’t make it simpler than that

37. ㄦ er - stIR

So what’s the point of all these symbols and phonetics? Well, if you can pronounce all of them, congratulations! You can now speak Chinese, and be understood.

By the way, I’ll be using this scheme on all Chinese tutorials from now on, so you might want to download the Printable Mandarin Phonetic ‘Cheat Sheet’ (.pdf, 44 Kb) with all the symbols and examples above.

Update!
Listen to the sounds on About.com’s The sounds of Mandarin page. Thanks for the free resource, About.com!

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Just like any language, Chinese has a set of phonetics, or ’sounds’. According to Antimoon.com’s The sounds of English and the International Phonetic Alphabet page, English has 44 distinct sounds. Chinese, with only 37 sounds, should be easier to pronounce than English (well, perhaps not, but we’ll tackle the difficult stuff later). Fortunately for English speakers, Chinese shares many of the same phonetic sounds with English, making the pronunciation of many Mandarin words really simple. Where English speakers have the International Phonetic Alphabet, Chinese speakers have the ‘bopomo’ system of Mandarin Phonetic symbols. These 37 symbols cover all the possible sounds of Mandarin Chinese. Once you can pronounce them all, you can, in theory, pronounce any Chinese word, too.

There are actually two systems for representing Chinese phonetics. The ‘bopomo’ system I just mentioned, uses special simple Chinese characters to represent the sounds of Mandarin. The ‘pinyin’ system tries to do the same thing, using the Roman alphabet (which is the normal A-Z alphabet Westerners are used to). ‘pinyin’ and ‘bopomo’ both have their fans, and there is a bit of a ‘holy war’ among Chinese students as to which system is better. I’m a fan of the ‘bopomo’ system, because I found that the strange new symbols really allowed my brain to switch into ‘Chinese mode’ and not apply any English phonetic rules to the new language I was learning.

However, I realise that learning 37 sounds and symbols isn’t easy (it took me quite a while), and because this blog is focussed on simple, practical Chinese, I won’t expect anyone to be familiar with the 37 bopomo symbols. What I will do instead is include the bopomo symbols, and my own version of ‘Pinyin’ because I’ve always felt that the current version is absolutely useless, and unnecessarily difficult.

So.. next up, the 37 sounds of Mandarin Chinese in an easy to learn format…

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In English, you use the letters c, h, i, n, e and s. That’s a Western way of doing things. Chinese doesn’t use the alphabet as English speaking people know it. In fact, Chinese doesn’t have any alphabet at all! Chinese uses characters or ‘ideograms’ to represent words. Each word in Chinese is written (or typed) as one character. That means there are thousands of thousands of unique characters to learn, making Chinese one of the most difficult languages in the world to become fluent in. However it’s also one of the most beautiful written languages in the world. Whether you choose to learn to write and read the language, or to simply listen and speak it is, of course, up to you. However, knowing a little bit about the written language should be useful for anyone with an interest in Chinese. So here goes…

Like all languages, Chinese has gone through many changes over the years in both the written and spoken form. The characters have evolved from simple drawings of objects to combinations of symbols with rich meanings attached to them. Have a look at this really excellent article on chinese characters from Wikipedia to see this evolution of characters.

Modern Chinese exists in two written forms: Traditional and Simplified characters. Traditional characters are older and more complex than simplified, but simplified characters have lost a lot of the meaning of the older characters. The simplified form of characters was developed mainly to improve literacy, by making the language easier to learn. Having lived in Taiwan, I’m familiar with the Traditional characters, and these are what I’ll be using on this blog.

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Now that you know the answer to the question ‘what is Chinese?’, you’re ready to learn how to use it. Obviously the first thing you want to know how to say to anybody, in any language is ‘Hello’. While saying hello in many languages can be a tongue twisting (and if you’re an alien, a finger contorting - see picture) affair, in Mandarin it is simple:

“Knee how.”

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This is my first Chinese micro tutorial. I hope it’s useful (if it helps just one person, that will be great). Note that I’m speaking about Mandarin Chinese here. Chinese people from the Chinese Mainland (PRC), Taiwan, Singapore, Malasia and other SE Asian countries speak Mandarin. People from Hong Kong mainly speak Cantonese, which is a different language, and one that I cannot speak at all. Confusingly, both are referred to as ‘Chinese’ and both use the same characters (although I’m over simplifying things here).

According to this useful chart from Saint Ignatius High School, Mandarin Chinese is the most widely-spoken language in the world, with about 1.1 billion people able to speak it. That’s more than double the number of English speakers worldwide. Mandarin is definitely a useful language to know!

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Hi! Welcome to this blog, my Chinese learning log.

After a dismal start on my previous blog, I’m back (with a vengeance, I hope) and I’ll be doing my best to post something here at least once a week. Most of the content will be stuff I’ve learned that I’m going to pass on (they say you don’t really know something until you’ve taught it), but there will also be the occasional news post relating to China, Taiwan, or the Chinese language, and I’ll share any good online links I discover. You can also find resources for learning Chinese in the ‘links of interest’ section below.

I hope this is of benefit (or amusement) to someone. Whether it is, or isn’t, I want to know, so please post comments, or get in touch. I’d love to hear from you.