Basic Facts about Learning Chinese

1
Basic Facts about Learning Chinese

• ????????
• Adam Ross

2
Which Chinese to Learn?

• Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua ??? or Guoyu ??) is
  the national language of both the Peoples
  Republic of China and Taiwan.
• Cantonese, though widely spoken in North America,
  is rarely taught outside of South China
• There are other regional dialects of Chinese,
  such as Taiwanese and Shanghainese, which are
  often spoken in local regional communities.
• All of these dialects are mutually unintelligible
  when spoken, but their written forms are
  generally the same.

3
The Bad News about Learning Chinese

• Chinese is a TFL (Truly Foreign Language) and
  takes up to four times as long for English
  speakers to master than other European languages
  like French or Spanish.
• Chinese is a tonal language, and students need to
  have much drill and practice to master this
  aspect of Chinese pronunciation.
• Chinese is a character-based language, and
  students must eventually master 1000s of
  characters

4
The four tones of Standard ChineseImage from
Chinesepod http//chinesepod.com/images/pronu_ton
es.gif
5
In written pinyin, these tones are represented
with these diacritics
ma (1st tone) ? mother má (2nd tone) ? numb
ma (3rd tone) ? horse mà (4th tone) ? to scold
6
Now, the Good News!

• Chinese grammar is almost ridiculously easy
  there are no tenses, irregular verbs,
  conjugations, declensions or other tricky parts
  of speech that plague students in Western
  languages.
• Students can put together very comprehensible
  speech pretty easily once theyve mastered basic
  pronunciation issues.
• Learning characters has a certain cachet, and
  students are often drawn by the artistic element
  of writing in characters.

7
Chinese Writing

• Chinese can be written in simplified characters
  (used in mainland China) or traditional
  characters (used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore
  and in overseas Chinese communities)
• Most Chinese programs choose to teach one form or
  another, but some opt to teach both

8
Various forms of Chinese charactersImage from
http//www.orbitchinese.com/image/symbol.gif
9
Learning Chinese Sounds

• Chinese sounds can be represented by a variety of
  systems. Most programs teach Hanyu Pinyin (or
  simply Pinyin for short), which was developed in
  the PRC in the 1950s.
• Pinyin is the Romanization system used in
  virtually all Western media to represent Chinese
  names and sounds.
• Other common system (often used by teachers from
  Taiwan) include Tongyong Pinyin and Zhuyin Fuhao
  (Bo-Po-Mo-Fo)

10
Standards for Chinese Testing

• The Chinese SAT II as well as the AP Chinese Exam
  are available in both simplified and traditional
  characters.
• The Chinese AP is administered on computers, and
  testees input characters on their keyboard,
  selecting characters they input via Hanyu Pinyin.
• STAMP and NOELLA are new proficiency tests
  administered online. These tests were developed
  in a partnership between Avant Assessment and the
  University of Oregon.
• For more advanced students, the HSK (??????Hanyu
  Shuiping Kaoshi or Test of Chinese Language
  Proficiency) is offered annually at Seattle
  University.