Chinese Language

This article will focus on Mandarin Chinese, the most widely-spoken language in China. There is another article on the other languages/dialects, including Cantonese.

Mandarin is generally considered a 'difficult' language for Westerners to learn. There are a number of factors behind this, but one of the primary reasons is probably the writing system, which has a large number of characters in comparison with most other languages. These are known as 汉字/漢字 hànzì^[1], literally meaning "Han characters", or "characters of the Han people", the Han being the largest ethnic group within China (and, indeed, the world). There are two main variants on the character set, the "simplified" set used in Mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore, and the "traditional" ones, used in Taiwan. (These differences are covered in more detail later in the page, suffice it to say, choosing the appropriate set to use can become Serious Business.) On this page, characters which differ between the two are presented with the simplified version first, for example: 发/發 fā. (If there's only one character given, it can be assumed that it's the same in both cases.)

Further difficulties stem in part from the fact that Mandarin includes a number of phonemes (sounds, basically) not found in, say, English. For example, Standard Mandarin has two distinct sh sounds where English has only one. This can work the other way as well, creating that 'flied rice' accent. While some people may think that r and l might be allophones, such as in Japanese Language, it isn't quite as simple as that. Standard Mandarin does have two^[2] distinct sounds corresponding to the English r and l. Although generally, the Mandarin r can be quite different to the English one, and has a 'buzzy' quality, sounding like something between a French r sound, and the s in measure, depending on the dialect. Most Mandarin speakers should be able to perceive l and r as distinct sounds, but they may have difficulty pronouncing them in consonant clusters, which are common in English but don't occur in Mandarin at all. So it's quite possible that a Mandarin speaker would struggle with saying words such as flight and fright distinctly, but not with lice vs rice^[3] The consequences of this for romanizing Chinese are discussed in another article. (But to cut a long story short, most of the tonal languages in the world, and there are a couple of thousand of them, use the Latin alphabet without difficulty. Vietnamese is a good example. The same applies to monosyllabic languages, although they are fewer and many of the best known examples use their own script - not necessarily pictorial, Burmese, Thai, Khmer and many others have an alphabet of their own or at least a syllabic script.)

Further, Chinese is a tonal language. Mandarin Chinese uses four tones and a neutral tone. A student not accustomed to tonal speech can easily mishear what is intended or form strange malapropisms just by not paying attention to the tone. As an example, the words for 'mother' (妈/媽 mā), 'to scold' (骂/罵 mà), 'hemp' (麻 má), and 'horse' (马/馬 mǎ) are distinguished only by a change in tone^[4] (now there's an international incident just waiting to happen).

In addition to confusion between tones, Mandarin has true homophones, which actually do sound alike, including tone. In one slightly odd case, the words for "needle" (针/針), "gizzard" (珍), and "true" (真) are pronounced alike (zhēn). There are even multi-syllable true homophones; for example, qīngdàn can mean "light in flavor/faint" (清淡), or "h-bomb" (氢弹/氫彈) depending on the characters used to write it. With insufficient context or attention, even native speakers can sometimes mistake one another's meaning, but no more often than in any other language. Having an idea of which words and phrases are most commonly used by Mandarin speakers, and in which contexts, goes a long way toward getting a better understanding of what's being said (although again, this is probably true for other languages as well).

In addition, Chinese is almost completely uninflected. There are no verb or noun endings to reflect tense, number or grammatical case. One exception is the 'word' 们/們 men which is attached to pronouns ^[5] to indicate a plural: (我 wǒ ('I') becomes 我们/我們 wǒmen ('we')). A verb's tense is indicated by context, usually by stating when it was done or will be done; this can be construed as Chinese having only three tenses; past, present, and future, with various offshoots. Aside from this idiosyncracy, word order is usually similar to English's subject-verb-object order. In fact, a sentence written in English and translated word-for-word into Mandarin might look a bit odd to a native speaker, but would probably be perfectly understandable. To give an idea of this, the sentence 我跟朋友走去公园/我跟朋友走去公園 wǒ gēn péngyǒu zǒu qù gōngyuán would translate word-for-word into the odd-sounding "I with friend walk go park" ("I'm walking to the park with my friend").

The third-person pronoun, has separate written forms for male, female, and neuter which sound exactly alike when spoken. Before modern times there was actually only one written form of third-person pronoun 他 'tā, different written forms were introduced from western languages. This can lead to Pronoun Trouble for native speakers of Chinese who learn new languages with gendered pronouns.

The 'classifier' or 'measure word' is yet another feature likely to give trouble to students of Chinese. These are a class of nouns which can have very general meanings, and in fact, can in many cases simply be omitted when translating Chinese. Nevertheless, they are still an essential part of Manadarin grammar. Simply put, it indicates the class of objects to which a number refers. So four trees would be 四棵树/四棵樹 sì kē shù while four cars would be 四辆车/四輛車 sì liǎng chē. 四 Sì means four, 树/樹 shù means tree, and 车/車 chē means car; 棵 kē and 辆/輛liǎng are the measure words. There are some limited cases of similar constructions in English: it might remind of you saying 'four loaves of bread' instead of just 'four breads'. Using the wrong measure word for something can be a bit embarrassing, especially if one uses one of the words used with animals for people. Thankfully, the measure word 个/個 gè can stand in for nearly any other measure word in a pinch, functioning in many ways as a generic measure word (eg. 我有四个朋友/我有四個朋友 - "I have four [units of] friends").

Interestingly enough, exclamation points and question marks can be included as words in the sentence. These are known as particles, and are typically added to the end of sentence. The a (啊) (pronounced 'ah!') sound that Chinese people supposedly make expresses surprise, doubt, agreement, or affirmation depending on the tone used. ma (吗/嗎) (yes, another word to mix up with 'mother' and 'horse'^[6]) is used to express a question. There are many other useful particles, including 吧 ba, which is used to imply politeness when making suggestions. There is also 呢 ne, which roughly means "How about...", which is commonly used when response to "你好吗/你好嗎? (nǐ hǎo ma)" ("How are you/are you well?") - "好,你呢? (hǎo, nǐ ne)" ("I'm fine, how about you?")

The MediaGlyphs Project is a cross-cultural language that uses Chinese grammar and easily recognized pictures to aid in translation from one natural language to another.

Chinese Writing

Chinese is a logographic language, using thousands of characters, each of which represents a syllable, although often two characters are pronounced the same but have different meanings. Only the most basic characters, such as the ones for 'sheep' or 'door', bear even a vague resemblance to physical things.

The writing system is ancient: dating back at least five thousand years, it is the oldest writing system which still known to be in current use. As one might expect, many, many styles of writing the characters have been developed over the years; the split between Traditional and Simplified Chinese is the most recent. When written in vertical columns, Chinese is generally read from top to bottom, right to left. When written horizontally, as on a shop sign, it is usually read from left to right, though older signs (on temples, for example) may read from right to left.

Despite the daunting number of characters, there is a certain twisted logic to their construction. Many of the more complex characters are composed of simpler characters and these often give a clue as to the meaning or pronunciation of the whole. Indeed, when describing a character, such as a surname, that has several homophones, one lists the component pieces. Just to add to the confusion, some characters have multiple readings and the pronunciation 'hints' may not be valid in modern speech.

Generally, upon meeting an unknown character, one looks at the uppermost or leftmost element for some clue to its meaning. There are a number of standard 'heads' and sides ("radicals") that indicate general categories like the 'Grass' radical for plants (other than trees) or the 'Walking' radical for movement. The words for 'to flee' and 'peach' are homophones. Both characters are composed of two components: 'Peach' (桃 'táo') has a 'wood' radical on the left, while 'flee' (逃 'táo') has the walking radical; both share a common element on the right (兆 zhào, giving some indication of the pronunciation.

In writing hanzi, the strokes that make up each character have a set order. In general, a character is built up from left to right, top to bottom, though certain radicals are always written after the the rest of the character is complete. This is most important in calligraphy and somewhat superseded with the introduction of pinyin-based typing.

Each character generally corresponds to a single sound or 'syllable' in spoken Chinese, which means that even a relatively short line of dialogue can span the entire screen when close captioned. While each character can have an intrinsic meaning, many 'words' are short phrases consisting of multiple characters and similar phrases can have widely different meanings. For example, 火车/火車huǒchē (lit., "fire vehicle") means train while 救火车/救火車jiùhuǒchē (lit., "help fire vehicle") means fire truck^[7]. One of the editor's particular favourites is the word for panda 熊猫/熊貓 xióngmāo', which has the literal translation of "bear cat".

As the language lacks an alphabet, Chinese dictionaries tend to be organized by stroke number and the radicals mentioned earlier (as well as other commonly used elements), though the index may also use the sound, often in pinyin or bopomofo. Ironically, this can make simple characters harder to look up. ("Pinyin" is the pronunciation-guide-using-Latinate-alphabet stuff you've seen scattered throughout the article; the Japanese equivalent is Rōmaji. "Bopomofo" is a transliteration system, with each character described by a mark for a consonant and a mark for a vowel.) Further complicating the issue is that multiple transliteration systems have existed for Pinyin throughout the years. Again, this is discussed in detail at another article, but suffice it to say that "Kung Fu" and "gōngfu" describe the same two-character word (功夫).

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This language provides examples of:

• Alternate Character Reading: Some characters have multiple meanings or sounds. Sort of like the English stock or lead or maybe minute.
  • Pinyin^[8] has shades of this too - it uses the Latin alphabet to represent the pronunciation of Chinese words. In most cases, this is fairly straight forward: for example ping and ban are pronounced pretty much as you'd expect. However, there are a few letters which are used to represent non-English sounds - sounds like ci or quan aren't pronounced at all like their spelling might suggest^[9].
• Broken Base: The supporters of Traditional versus Simplified characters. the simplified supporters like the fact that they can write a paragraph in half the time and not having the characters turn into illegible inkblots when the font get too small. While the traditionalists like the hints to meaning and pronunciation that the oldstyle characters contain and the link to history that it provides. Also, as the simplification scheme is promulgated by the mainland communist government, the people of Taiwan/overseas Chinese takes slight offense due to political/ideological reasons instead of anything linguistic.
  • Insistent Terminology: The official Chinese term for Traditional characters in Taiwan means "Standard/Orthodox characters", while elsewhere in the Sinophone world they are generally referred to as "Complex characters" (as the character used, 繁, carries the connotation of "frustratingly" complex). Some Simplified supporters insist on using the term "Complex" in English as well, considering the term "Traditional" a misnomer, due to the fact that some characters had been made more elaborate over time and that many Simplified characters are based on traditionally used abbreviated forms.
• Four Is Death: The Chinese language may be the Trope Maker.
• I Have Many Names: The most common are Putonghua ("Common Speech") and Guoyu ("National Language"), used on the Mainland and Taiwan, respectively. In parts of the diaspora, Huayu ("Chinese Language", Hua being a name for Chinese culture) is common. Finally, the word "Mandarin" is a rendering of Guanhua, "the speech of officials" from a time when it was the language of government functionaries based around Beijing.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: Those four tones and the sheer number of true homophones make for loads and loads of these. There's an entire class of jokes called xiehouyu whose punchlines often rely on wordplay.
  • The character for "spring" written upside-down is sometimes seen around the Chinese New Year because this was traditionally considered the start of spring. As it happens, the words for upside-down (倒) and "to arrive" (到) are homophones (dào). So "spring" upside-down = "Spring has arrived."
  • A ridiculous number of Chinese superstitions are based on homophones. There is the Four Is Death as mentioned above, other example include: pears should never be included in a fruit basket intended for newlyweds because the Mandarin for pear (梨, lí) sounds the same as the word for separation (coincidentally, part of the compound word meaning "divorce."). And fish is usually eaten for New Year's Eve dinner as the the word for fish (鱼,yú) and the word for surplus, i.e. you ended the year with more than you started, are homophones.
  • These are also exploited to avoid censorship: homophones and near-homophones are used to get around government filtering on certain character combinations. The government sometimes cottons on to particularly widespread workarounds, but all in all it's a game of cat and mouse in which the Chinese Internet is always two to three steps ahead of the censors.
• Loads And Loads Of Characters: The language has over 40,000 characters with a college grad knowing about 5,000. You only need 200 to 500 or so for a basic conversation or skimming a newspaper. As described above, there are rules for deducing the pronunciation of an unknown character, though they are not completely foolproof.
• New Media Are Evil: Many old fogeys have claimed the advent of pinyin-based character inputting has led to a loss of literacy among the younger generation. Whether or not the use of this technology actually has any impact on literacy skills has not been proven.
• Pronoun Trouble: Primarily in translation since the (spoken) third-person is gender-neutral.
  • In written Chinese "he" and "she" are fairly intuitive, with the left-side radical being "woman" for "she" and "person" for "he" while sharing the same root/base. However, the word for "it" does not resemble the others in any way-- as it was originally the Chinese word for "others." (aside- in Traditional Chinese, even "you" is gender-specific).
    • The second-person is gender-specific in Taiwan but not in Hong Kong; people in Hong Kong were never taught the female ni.
  • When the overzealous language reformers made up genitive third-person pronouns, they also made up a ta for animals; a ta for all inanimate it, and a ta for gods.
  • On the other hand, when translating into Mandarin, you could say Pronoun Trouble is averted for many of the same reasons. If you know 4 syllables: 我 wǒ - I/me, 你 nǐ - you, 他 tā - he/him, 们 men (plural suffix for making we/us, (all of) you, and they/them), then you know every pronoun you commonly need^[10]. And if we throw in the possessive suffix 的 de, we can also express 'mine', 'ours', 'yours', 'his/hers/its' and 'theirs' as well^[11].
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks:
  • Some supporters of the traditional characters consider Simplified Chinese to be an example, despite the fact that traditional characters are perfectly legible to those who have learned simplified (with a bit of practice) and vice versa.
  • And on the mainland, the second round of simplified characters was eventually withdrawn, after causing 9 years of widespread confusion and disagreement. (More info here.)

1. ↑ cognate with the Japanese kanji
2. ↑ or possibly three, if you take Erhua into consideration
3. ↑ To complicate matters, there may be a few dialects in which the sounds of l and r are pronounced more similarly than the Standard Mandarin, or even reversed. And, there are also some dialects (mainly in southern China), which have similar issues for l and n.
4. ↑ Observant readers might notice that the words for 'mother' and 'scold' are the same basic shape as 'horse', but with additional elements (called radicals). While it's not a cast-iron guarantee that similar-looking characters have similar pronunciations, it is a useful rule of thumb.
5. ↑ and a select few nouns referring to people, for example, 人们/人們 rénmen - people, 朋友们/朋友們 péngyǒumen - friends
6. ↑ If this isn't confusing enough, there is also the particle 嘛, prounouced identically as ma, and used to add emphasis
7. ↑ or fire engine, to those of you reading in "Traditional American"
8. ↑ the modern standard Romanization used in mainland China
9. ↑ ci is pronounced similarly to the tsu in tsunami, and quan is pronounced more like tchwen
10. ↑ Admittedly, there are also 她 tā she/her and 它 tā it, but they're pronounced the same as 他, and there is also 您 nín which is a polite form of 你, but we're still using fewer 'words' than English to express the same concepts
11. ↑ Technically, it's a particle, not a suffix