Overview of the Chinese Language

Chinese is the most popular language in the world. More than one billion people in the People's Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other places in East Asia speak Chinese. Significant populations of people who speak Chinese also live in urban centers around the world. For example, San Francisco has the largest Chinese-speaking population of any city outside of China.

Chinese actually consists of a large number of dialects which share a written language but are mutually unintelligible when spoken. Because of this, some linguists consider them separate languages instead of dialects. Mandarin Chinese is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, and it is the most widely-spoken form of Chinese. Other important linguistic groups include Cantonese, Wu, Xiang, Hakka, Min, and Gan. Within each group, many variations in spoken language occur. It is said that speakers from one area may not understand those who live only a few miles away. The majority of Chinese speakers in the United States speak Cantonese.

Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, which also includes Tibetan, Karen, and Lolo-Burmese. The Chinese language has influenced many of the other languages of East Asia. Written Chinese originated more than 4,000 years ago and remained relatively stable until the People's Republic of China decided on a campaign to make it easier to read Chinese by simplifying the characters, which can have as many as 30 strokes. To date, the simplified Chinese characters have been adopted only in the PRC and Singapore, but Hong Kong may start to use them, following its 1997 reunification with the mainland. Another change initiated in the PRC is the widespread use of Pinyin, a system of transliteration, representing the sounds of the Chinese language using the Latin alphabet. The Chinese government has expressed interest in eventually replacing the character system with a phonetic alphabet, but to date Chinese characters remain the standard in communication. The written Chinese language consists of about 40,000 characters.

Because Cantonese speakers were the first people to speak Chinese who came to the United States, many English words of Chinese origin come from Cantonese. They include chop suey (from the Cantonese tsap sui or mixed pieces), chop chop (from the Cantonese chop, meaning quick), and dim sum (from the Cantonese for little hearts; the same characters are pronounced "dian xin" in Mandarin Chinese). Other culinary terms come from Mandarin Chinese, including chow mein (from chao mian, to stir fry noodles), and tofu (do fu in Mandarin Chinese). Aside from food, Chinese martial arts terms have come into English, including kung fu (gong fu in Chinese) and tai chi (tai ji in Chinese). Recently, feng shui, the Chinese architectural principle, has also been adopted into English.

Nobody who is learning Chinese would look at Chinese characters and mistake them for English words! However, as you learn to speak Chinese, some words may sound familiar. Generally, however, they are not what you might think. For example, depending on its tone, the word shu can mean book, uncle, neglect, ransom, ripe, and comb. However, it never means "shoe."

Formal and Informal Address in the Chinese Language

When speaking Chinese to an older person or someone in a formal setting, Chinese speakers use the second person nín instead of the more general n. In addition, Chinese uses a number of terms to indicate their respect for the person to whom they are speaking including guì (honored or honorable). To show respect for an older person, Chinese speakers often use the word o, meaning venerable or old, after the person's last name.

Chinese Pronunciation and Chinese Grammar

The Chinese language is a tonal language, which means that a given word can change meaning depending on its tone. Mandarin Chinese has four tones: flat, rising, falling then rising, and falling. Other dialects can have as many as nine tones. Careless use of tones with the syllable ma in Mandarin Chinese could cause one to call someone's mother a horse! So be careful with your Chinese pronunciation.

Chinese does not have words as such. Each Chinese character represents a syllable. A single character may represent an object or idea or it may combine with other characters to produce a new meaning. In some cases, a character's meaning changes completely in combination. For example, sheng means "teacher," "Mr." or "Sir." Taken individually, its characters can mean "first" or "earlier," and "born" or "student."

Learning to read Chinese and write Chinese takes commitment. If you want to learn to read Chinese, you must learn about 3,000 Chinese characters to become literate. Many Chinese characters give no indication of what they should sound like when said. Therefore, learning Chinese vocabulary is a two-step process, where one must learn sound and meaning separately. Some characters do indicate their sound, but students who are just beginning to speak Chinese may not recognize those indications.

Chinese verbs never change form. The speaker is indicated by a pronoun, while time or aspect are marked by adverbs and a series of particles (suffix-like syllables) that indicate completion, continuation, and emotion.

As you learn Chinese pronouns, you will notice that the words for "he" and "she" share the sound , but are represented by two different Chinese characters. When you listen to people speak Chinese, you must use the context to differentiate between the pronouns.

The Chinese language was traditionally written from right to left in vertical columns. Today, most material published in the People's Republic of China is printed in rows read from left to right as in English, while Taiwan's publishers continue to write Chinese using the traditional method.

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