How to Learn Chinese

How to Learn Chinese in 2,200 Not-So-Easy Lessons

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 9, 2005; 4:45 PM
I spent several years, and some of your tax dollars, trying to learn Chinese, so I need to say something about a new campaign to get that language into U.S. schools and colleges.
The Asia Society just put out a report (see the internationaled.org Web site ) on how more Americans can learn Chinese. There was a world conference on the subject last month in Beijing. Chinese language instruction is, obviously, a good idea. China is our biggest trading partner, after Canada and Mexico. The country reminds me in some ways of America in the 1870s. It is recovering from horrid domestic events, getting stronger, with the potential to be the most important nation in the world. Chinese, along with Arabic, should be among our top foreign language priorities.
But let me -- just this once because I don't like recalling the pain -- tell you that learning Chinese is not going to be easy.
Chinese culture -- its philosophy, its art, its code of conduct, its food, its literature -- is one of the wonders of human civilization. It is so humane and so productive that I share few of the fears that the rise of Chinese economic and military power inspires in some Americans.

But the Chinese, despite all their good points, have a very difficult and in some ways inefficient language. Those Americans ready to pursue the worthy goal of learning it should be ready for a long, hard march.
Unkind people are saying at this point: Mathews may have been too dumb or too lazy to master Chinese, but the Chinese themselves seem to be handling their language fine. That is true. It is one more indication of the drive and ambition of those 1.3 billion people that most of them have become fluent and literate in a spoken language that includes four tones and a written language based on ideographs that give few clues to pronunciation and sometimes drive typists mad.
But it is also true that having to learn thousands of ideographic characters instead of just the two dozen or so letters of the Western alphabet has forced Chinese education into a deep, narrow groove. Chinese students and teachers have grown accustomed to relying on memorization, the way they learned to read. There is less creative thinking in the schools as a result, some scholars think.
For more than a century the Chinese have been arguing among themselves over how to simplify the written language without cutting themselves off from one of the great literary mother lodes of the past 3,000 years. The invention of the digital computer and the Internet have eased the reproduction and transmission of written Chinese, but children in China, and non-Chinese high school and college students like I once was, have to pound the meaning of all those slants and dots and curves into their brains, and hope they stay there.
Take one small example. When I lived with my family in Beijing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my six-year-old son got to be a pretty good reader. There wasn't much television to distract him, and as a budding baseball and football fan he loved to decipher the sports pages of the International Herald Tribune. When Chinese saw him reading the newspaper in the dining hall of the hotel where we lived, they were amazed, since their equally bright children needed much more time before they could handle a Chinese newspaper.
You can imagine, then, what it was like for me at age 19 when I took my first Chinese lessons in college.
Learning the spoken language was not so bad. It had few annoyances like gender and tense and verb changes based on rank. My first Chinese professor was Rulan Chao Pian, who used a system invented by her father, the legendary UC Berkeley linguist Yuen R. Chao. She and her father shared a mischievous sense of humor, although I did not think it was so funny at first. One of her first exercises was a short story made of words that used only one Chinese sound, shi (sounds like 'sure'). It was totally incomprehensible -- just as the sentence "Sure sure sure sure, sure-sure, sure sure sure" would be in English -- unless you got all the tones right or could see the characters.
Once I absorbed this sobering introduction to the maddening subtleties of Chinese expression, Pian handed me her father's textbook. He had a unique way of romanizing Chinese word sounds so we could learn how to pronounce them properly. Some Chinese language textbooks assigned the numbers one to four to each of the four tones, and you would pronounce the word based on which number was next to it. Some books used little marks going up, down or otherwise to indicate the high, rising, low and falling tones. Chao decided to give a different spelling of the same sound to indicate different tones.

Chinese Greetings

How to greet in Chinese?

Here is a great link to learn.


Chinese word-jian fei

Losing weight is a hot topic, here is an interesting video about  joan fei （减肥）.


An easy approach to Chinese-PINYIN

Initials and finals

Unlike European languages, clusters of letters – initials (simplified Chinese声母traditional Chinese聲母pinyinshēngmǔ) and finals (simplified Chinese韵母traditional Chinese韻母pinyinyùnmǔ) – and not consonant and vowel letters, form the fundamental elements in pinyin (and most other phonetic systems used to describe the Han language). Every Mandarin syllable can be spelled with exactly one initial followed by one final, except for the special syllable er or when a trailing -r is considered part of a syllable (see below). The latter case, though a common practice in some sub-dialects, is rarely used in official publications. One exception is the city Harbin(simplified Chinese哈尔滨traditional Chinese哈爾濱), whose name comes from the Manchu language.
Even though most initials contain a consonant, finals are not always simple vowels, especially in compound finals (simplified Chinese:复韵母traditional Chinese複韻母pinyinfuyunmu), i.e., when a "medial" is placed in front of the final. For example, the medials [i]and [u] are pronounced with such tight openings at the beginning of a final that some native Chinese speakers (especially when singing) pronounce  (Chinese; , clothes, officially pronounced /í/) as /jí/ and wéi (simplified Chinesetraditional Chinese, to enclose, officially pronounced /uěi/) as /wěi/ or /wuěi/. Often these medials are treated as separate from the finals rather than as part of them; this convention is followed in the chart of finals below.

Here is a  awesome link you can hear and practice the pronunciation!


Popular Chinese word YUN

A: 今天是周五，可是老板又让我们加班，晚上又聚不成了。
B: 我晕，你们老板真过分！
A: 今天上班的路上太堵了，十五分钟的路程却足足走了一个小时，真晕！
B: 哎，堵车真是没办法呀！　　
四、当你对他人所作所为感到极端惊讶时，你也可以说“晕死”。 比如：晕死！你今天怎么迟到这么久，都快下班了。
总之，任何让你接受不了的事，你都可以无奈地说“晕”！ 好了，朋友们，今天的汉语流行语“晕”您学会了吗？我们真诚地希望生活里能少一些让人“晕”的事。

晕 is a frequently-used word in daily life, originally referring to a dizzy or swirling feeling. For example, if someone does not sleep well at night, he or she may feel dizzy in the next day. Likewise, some people with extremely poor health probably have a feeling to faint sometime. Other persons perhaps suffer from dizziness and palpitation when at a high place, which is called 晕高儿 in Chinese. And the dizzy feeling in a car or boar called 晕车 or 晕船 respectively means carsickness or seasickness.
Afterwards, more usages of晕 are invented by netizens in China.
1, When you cannot help but doing something, you can use我晕 as an exclamation.
A: Is there anything more depressing than working overtime on Friday? No party any more.
B: Gosh, your boss really goes too far.
2,When you cannot put up with something any longer, you can say真晕 to express your mood.
A: God damn it. We have been trapped in the traffic jam for an entire hour. Actually it is a fifteen-minute distance.
B: well, in a traffic jam, you have nothing to do but wait.
3, When you are nagged at and you are fed up with it , you can say晕
E.g. Enough. I have had enough. Could you please stop for a moment?
4, When you are shocked at someone or something, you can say晕死 to express a surprise.
E.g. My God! You dare to be so late. It's nearly time for getting off work.
Judging from examples above, we can see, apart from conventional usage, 晕 can be used as an exclamation for someone's surprise, depression or agitation nowadays.
Well, have you got the usage of 晕？Hopefully there are less things that make you 晕.
So much for today's program! You are welcome to log in our website (www.chinese.cn) to learn more popular Chinese words.

From:  Confucius Institute Online


English Learning Diary

This is my second semester of English courses in New York, still suffering. 

What the teacher taught in class is simple, but different with what I learned in China, making me crazy! Every this particular moment, all Chinese students in class will stare at each other, and curled their lips.
"What the hell!"

Confusion most comes from speaking and speech class now. Don't ever use the Chinese dictionary tool to practice your pronunciation! Dictionary.com is your best choice!

Notice: Phonetic symbols differ. Trust ur ears!

Today I put the most common American English syllable practice.

NO MORE /ɔ:/

Let's speak:
 /a/  hot  hot 的发音练习 
So practice these words with the link above: pot, doctor positive


Food Diary

Living in  a new country is the start of a real independent life!