It could seem impossible to learn Chinese but it is not!
Grammatically Chinese is very easy and there is a lot
of logic in the language and the Chinese Characters. In Chinese there is
no tenses. Every Chinese word can have only one form. Instead of learning
hundred of tenses you learn a few particles to add to words to tell what
tens it is. Instead of big, bigger or good better Chinese use an easy way
of comparison. There is one word for comparison. This word is used in every
comparison. Better could be e.g. you compared to me good = you are better
than I am.
There is no alphabet in Chinese. Instead there are characters.
A character could be a word or a part of a word. Normally a word consists
of two or more characters. The Chinese characters have changed their forms
during history but they are probably around 8000 years old. 3500 years
ago there where a more complex writing system. Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan
language. It has nothing to do with Japanese. In fact Japanese have no
connection to any other language, even though they have imported the Chinese
characters.
In Chinese there is many different dialects. E.g. is Cantonese
one of them. People in e.g. Hong Kong speak Cantonese. In main land China
they speak a dialect called mandarin (putonghua). Everywhere in China the
characters are the same. Taiwan (China claims the rights to Taiwan) and
Hong Kong still uses the old Chinese Characters ( traditional Chinese Characters).
There are about 20.000 characters in a normal Chinese
word processor. This does not mean that you have to know all of those.
Since 1988 the educational plan states that the students have to learn
3500 up to senior high school. To be able to read a normal book or newspaper
you have to know about 2000 characters, however if you learn the 1000 most
frequent Chinese characters you can create about 3000 Chinese words with
them. This is normally enough to be able to read a Chinese newspaper and
understand most of its contents.
For a student in Chinese it is the first time that is
the hardest. When you have reached the first level of understanding of
the language you will find that you learn much faster and things feel easier.
You will then feel that you understand the characters, the grammar, how
to use the characters in new words and much more. When you have reach this
point it is wonderful feeling. Then it is really fun to study Chinese.
Now you recognize many characters in new words and can learn more characters
a day than before.
Actually you can use western letters to write Chinese
with. By using a transcribing system called pinyin you write a character
as it sound.
E.g. the character for big (
)
could be written like this 
.
What is over the "a" is a tone mark. Due to the tones
in Chinese you have to mark the western letters with the tone. In this
case it is the 4:th tone which is a tone starting from a high pitch and
falling shortly to a low pitch.
Building up a Chinese
character
It
might seem like a Chinese character only consists of a bunch of lines with
no order, but that is wrong. Study this example for instance, every
part of it have a meaning. By combining those parts we construct a new
character. The first part ( top left in the picture ) is the character
for field, next part means earth, soil. By combining those two characters
we have constructed a new character with the meaning of " distance, village".
Time was at this time measured with sundial. To show a change in time the
shadow had to move a small distance. Next character, middle left row, is
a radical with a pronunciation that sounds much like our final character
( the radical is pronounces tong while our final character is pronounced
zhong ( sounds like djong )). The final row to the left is a character
for metal or gold. Clocks are often made of metals, like gold. This character
has been simplified in our final character. Now we have a new Chinese character.
By knowing something about the parts in the character we can understand
some about its meaning. We know how it probably is pronounced and some
about its meaning. Even if you haven´t seen the character before
you can understand some about it by using your knowledge about other Chinese
characters.
There are 6 different methods how the Chinese characters
are constructed. Those methods could be divided into three groups: group
A: reproductions, group B = compounds
and group C: invented
Reproductions
could be concrete or abstract.
From the beginning all characters where reproductions but today only 2-3
% are reproductions.
Concrete reproduction, e.g.: 
=
mountain 
=
Water
= field
=
mouth
Abstract reproduction, e.g.:
= under 
=
over = big
=middle
Compounds
could be, Associations or Phonetically compounds.
Associations
e.g.:
=
sun + 
= moon 
=
bright
= woman + 
= child, son 
= Good
Phonetically compounds, e.g.:
= woman 
= horse( pronounced ma ) 
=
mother (pronounced
ma, something female which pronounce ma = mother)
Mother is often written 
This
is because it otherwise sounds to "short". This is often made in Chinese.
Invented:
The invented characters could be characters with kindred
meaning or phonetic loans.
Phonetic loans: e.g. "arrive"
. In the beginning it had the same pronunciation as "wheat". The character
for wheat therefore comes to mean both wheat and arrive. Today it means
only arrive and wheat have been given a new character.
Kindred meaning: Characters
that are used to describe more than one thing. The character for "flash"
represents today often electricity as well as flash.
Most Chinese words consist of two or more characters.
This makes is much easier to learn Chinese since you often already has
learnt one of two of the characters in a new word.
che = carriage
qiche = car ( steam carriage )
gonggong qiche = bus ( public steam carriage )
huoche = train ( fire carriage )
dianche = electric carriage/buss
dianshi = TV
dianhua = telephone
tanhua = chat, talk
There are two sorts of Chinese characters in use today,
traditional and simplified. The Chinese characters had been more or less
unchanged for more than 200 years when the Chinese communist party during
the 1950:th decided to change them. They did also discuss if the should
remove all characters and start to use western letters instead. Luckily
they decided to simplify the characters instead. The reason they wanted
to simplify them was that China at that time had a great number of illiterates.
They wanted to educate everyone and to make that possible they needed to
make it easier to learn Chinese. After much work they come up with an idea
how to simplify the characters in accordance to some rules. The new characters
are called simplified and are in use all over Mainland China. In Hong Kong,
Taiwan etc. they still use the traditional characters. In some shop
signs, books, poetry, calligraphy etc. you can find the traditional characters
even in Mainland China. Many think that the traditional characters are
more beautiful than the simplified.
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