Mandarin Chinese is the set of Chinese dialects spoken in North, Central, and Southwest China. This includes Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, so when we refer to these terms we are referring to Mandarin. There are more than 850 million people who speak this language in the world, of the more than one billion people in China, more than 850 million speak Mandarin.
However, in South China there are several dialects that are very different from Mandarin, which is why the term Mandarin is used to designate the official Chinese language in general.
Mandarin Chinese prevailed over the other dialects due to the homogeneity of the existing language in the northern areas of China, probably due to geographical issues such as plains and grasslands. On the other hand, in the south, due to the mountainous characteristics that somehow separated and prevented communication between the towns, the dialects did not integrate and maintained their differences, both among themselves and with those of the north.
Finally, Mandarin is taken as the official language of China, called pinyin, which allows both reading and writing Chinese using Western characters, also using phonetic symbols for pronunciation.
Here we will teach you the basics so that you know how to learn Mandarin Chinese as well as we will indicate some pages that will allow you to translate texts or small phrases to be able to handle yourself on a trip.
What do you need to learn Chinese?
- Computer and Internet connection
- Take classes
- Practice and memorize words, phrases and numbers
Instructions for learning Chinese
- How to speak Chinese: to learn greetings and important phrases for a traveler, for example, you can go to free sites such as:
- In which you will find the main phrases: “good morning”, “good night”, “thank you”, “thank you very much”, etc. You will do this simply by selecting the phrases you want to translate.
- First you must select from which language you want to translate and to which one. For example, in the first step we translated the text “Chinese is a language that uses different symbols”, you click translate and you already have it in traditional Chinese. Or you can also do it in simplified Chinese, let’s see how it looks:
- Mandarin Chinese was born as a tonal and analytical language that does not have verbal inflection, it has an ideographic or logographic writing, each symbol represents a phrase or an expression. This is why to learn Mandarin Chinese we would need to know a minimum of 3000 basic symbols to have a basic command of the language.
- The pinyin or Mandarin Chinese translation system allows you to read and write Chinese using Western characters while using symbols to mark accents and pronunciation. It was officially accepted by the Republic of China in 1958 and in 1979 it was already accepted and adopted by the entire country.
- In short, pinyin is a phonetic transcription system for Mandarin Chinese recognized as an official system in the Republic of China. Instead of using the Chinese symbols that normally do not say anything about the pronunciation, the letters of the Latin alphabet are used.
- This method has a complex system of diacritics to mark tones that are written below. That is why no symbol of the writing should be omitted, otherwise the meaning may be different. There are other rules such as whether two words should be written separately or as one.
- It is recognized that although the number of symbols necessary to know this language is much less than the number of words necessary to handle a language like English or French or Spanish, it has the difficulty that the beginning is complicated but after a while cease to be.
- For example, if you want to learn how to write “hello”, something very common to start with, this is done like this: 你好. There are actually two characters there: you and good (as if asking Are you okay?). The first character 你 is made up of three parts that can be studied as one or separately, that is, as three different characters or one whole character. Note that the second character is made up of two parts: 好, so to learn how to say hello you must learn 5 building blocks and 2 characters. This is completed by learning pinyin which is the one that will allow you to apply the different tonalities and this is achieved by “listening”.
- The good thing is that getting to learn to write and say “hello” has involved an effort to know 7 characters, but this will make it easier for you to learn other words. That is why we insist that the learning curve is very steep but once you start and pass the first stage the complication is greatly reduced. It is contrary to what happens in other languages that perhaps start off easy but then, when you have to learn a large number of words, as well as grammatical structures, they become much more complicated.
- Now we will show you how the Chinese numbers are helped by the pinyin that will help with the correct pronunciation.
- The number One: it is written (一) or also yī, it is pronounced [iii]
- The number Two: it is written (二) or also èr, it is pronounced [arr]
- The number Three: it is written (三) or also sān, it is pronounced [saan]
- The number Four: it is written (四) or also sì, it is pronounced [ssuh]
- The number five: it is written (五) or also wǔ, it is pronounced [wuu]
- Number Six: written (六) or also liù, pronounced [liou]
- The number Seven: written (七) or also qī, pronounced [chi]
- Number Eight: written (八) or also bā, pronounced [paa]
- The number Nine: written (九) or also jiǔ, pronounced [yiou]
- The number Ten: it is written (十) or also shí, it is pronounced [shii]
Tips for learning Chinese
- With the economic importance that China is acquiring day after day, it is logical that learning its language will become a necessity in the not too distant future.
- Mandarin Chinese is one of the six official languages spoken within the United Nations.
- Whatever language you are learning, it is very important that you memorize a good amount of words or phrases.