Legendary investor Jim Rogers in 2007 sold his mansion in New York City and moved to Singapore to learn Mandarin Chinese. He sent his 4-year old daughter to a school where they only speak the language, and when asked how to survive the global financial downturn, his answer is “teach your children Chinese.”Today, Chinese presence saturates even more corners of the world, making it a huge economic cost to not learning the language.
Like every language, mastering Chinese requires considerable time, patience and practice. What’s unique to Chinese, however, is a complex tonal system and written characters. For a beginner, the journey to speaking fluent Mandarin Chinese could be easier if you grasp the six necessary keys. They are:
1. Start from the four tones
2. Master Pinyin
3. Stick to easy, short sentences
4. Build vocabulary
5. Repeat patterns
6. Speak up and expect mistakes
Let’s get into the details of each key:
1. Tone: In Chinese, tones are just as important as pronunciations, if not more. The aspect of tones also poses the most challenging task for speakers of other languages. You could unintentionally call you mom a horse or your wife a dwarf if the tones are not marked right.
To easily understand and pronounce the four tones right, try the following exercises:
Fist tone: a flat note and relatively high tone. Picture yourself singing “la”
Second tone: a rising tone. As in “far” when asking “Is it far?”
Third tone: a dipping tone, as when irritably saying, “So?”
Fourth tone: a downward tone, as when angrily saying, “No!”
In rare occasions, a word is not marked with a tone. In such a case, the unstressed syllable should be spoken quickly in a neutral tone.
2. Pinyin is a Chinese pronunciation system; it is composed of an initial sound, a final sound, and a tone. There are 23 initial sounds and 34 final sounds. The tone designates meaning to the word. Here a free Pinyin table to help you out.
3. When learning Chinese, you should try to use short and simple sentences as often as possible. The easy part of learning Chinese is that there are no verb conjugations. I , we, you, he, she, they, and it all use same verb. For example: am - “Shi”.
I am– Wo shi
You are – Ni Shi
He/She is – Ta shi
We are – Women shi
You are – Nimen shi
They are –Tamen shi
Pronouns are similarly simple and plural forms are the singular forms plus the syllable “men”. You can thus start speaking Chinese the very first day!
4. Remember small but highly utilized vocabulary. Chinese language consists of over 10,000 words; however, you don’t have to remember all of them, not even half. To be able to communicate in daily life and gain confidence speaking the language, you need to master the commonly used words --as few as 300. If you can remember and correctly pronounce them, you are on the way to take about the weather, hobbies, go shopping and even bargaining in Chinese.
5. The key to learning a new language is repetition. In Chinese, there are several highly used sentence patterns that you should keep in mind. Sticking to them will make daily conversation smooth and understandable. These include: Youmeiyou (do you have…?), you (have), yao (want), bu (no), nengbuneng (can….?) na er? (Where), etc.
6. Learn Chinese with a partner. Due to the tone variations and pronunciation rules, for a beginner speaking Chinese may make you sound funny to a native speaker but it shouldn’t deter you from seeking help. Quite the opposite, it should motivate you to practice with a partner. Ask a Chinese friend to help or exchange your language with a Chinese speaker to practice the tones. From identifying and repeating sentence patterns with a native speaker, you will better understand the context of using them.
After mastering the six keys, next time you could be well on you way to say: “ni de zhong wen bing bu jian de bi wo hao” (Your Chinese sucks worse than mine)
You are welcome to quote freely from this article once you give proper attribution. (A link to letterfromghana.blogspot.com and author: Brian Yang would be appreciated.) You are also welcome to republish this article in full once you give the proper attribution .
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