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Magic Chinese

FOUNDATION IV Mandarin Chinese in Use

Q & A with Peter (彼得)

The Chinese language you are learning is called Hànyù or Zhōngwén. It’s also called Pŭtōnghùa or Mandarin Chinese. How can it have four different names? Hàny& refers to the language used by people of the Han tribe in China, the largest Chinese ethnic group, which composes about 90% of the population. China is slightly smaller than the U.S. in total geographical area, but has close to 5 times of the U.S. population! There is a total of 56 ethnic groups, according to the Fifth National Population Census in 2000. Each ethnic group has its own dialect of the Chinese language. In order to communicate efficiently, Hàny&, the ethnic dialect of Han tribe, has been chosen as the official Chinese language. Zhōnggúo is China; therefore, Zhōngwén is the language spoken by the Chinese people. The term Pŭtōnghùa literally means “common language”, while Mandarin Chinese refers to the Mandarin dialect. Isn’t it amazing? All these four names refer to the Chinese language you are learning.

Who Uses Chinese in Our World?

Currently, Zhōngwén is used as a national language by people in mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore. Zhōngwén is also used wherever there is a large population of Chinese people, such as Chinatowns all over the world. However, they might also use different dialects of Zhōngwén, such as Cantonese in San Francisco, CA, USA. In ancient times, many nations in Asia used Chinese characters as their written language, such as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Today Japanese still uses kanji, borrowed Chinese characters, as part of their writing system. As for modern Korean

XV Foundation IV Mandarin Chinese in Use and Vietnamese, they’ve since developed their own spelling systems and no longer use Chinese characters. According to The World Almanac, there are more people on Earth who speak Chinese than either Spanish or English. It’s also one of the six official language used by the United Nations, along with Arabic, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Based on the trend of language learning in schools around the world, there will be more people using Chinese as time goes on.

How Many Characters Must I Learn?

That depends on what you want to do. Honestly, you really only need about 3,000 characters to do everything in your daily life, such as watching TV or movies, reading newspapers, magazines, novels, etc. Some characters are used more frequently than others, so you should start learning the high-frequency words first. A Chinese college-graduate will probably master 6,000 to 7,000 characters. So, you might ask, what about the other 80,000 characters? The truth is that you will not see them unless you become a linguist of the Chinese language or a scholar of the ancient Chinese literatures.

How are Chinese and English different?

When I first came to the U.S., I had to learn English from the very beginning, starting with ABC. That was really difficult for me because English is so different from Chinese. For example, in Chinese, there are no gender-specific nouns, a chicken is just a chicken. We also don’t have singular or plural forms of nouns. The best part is there is no need to conjugate verbs. We never need to change a verb according to person and tense. It took me a long time to get used to all these grammar rules in English. My friends told me there are even more of these changes in Spanish. Can you imagine how hard that must be! After we have mastered Chinese Pinyin and tones, we will almost be ready to take off for a fun language adventure. Oh, one more thing, the Chinese language’s written form does not use alphabet letters or a spelling system. Pinyin is only a tool to teach you how to pronounce the sound. The written form of Chinese is based on characters (字 zì).

XVI Magic Chinese

Now, let me invite you to join my friends and I on this amazing around-the-world journey with our Magic Compass. Wait! I almost forgot. Let me introduce to you four of my awesome friends in the adventure of Magic Chinese. Now we are ready. Let the fun begin!

Lisa (麗莎) Linda (琳達)

Tom (湯姆) Reggie (瑞奇)

XVII Foundation IV Mandarin Chinese in Use