Chinese Classes with Native Chinese Tutors

1. What’s Pinyin and Why You Should Learn It

The reason why learning Chinese can be so intimidating at first is because its grammar, vocabulary, and writing system are completely different from English. Fortunately for Chinese learners, pinyin was invented, as this writing system created in the 20th century makes learning Chinese much easier for Westerners. Pinyin is a way of writing Chinese using the Roman alphabet based on its pronunciation, and if you take the time to learn it, you’ll be able to make progress much faster. To illustrate this, here are some of the most important benefits of learning pinyin.

• It allows beginners to start speaking Chinese quickly, as it helps you to pronounce even the words you don’t know properly.

• It will help you understand the four Chinese tones thanks to its visual reminders, such as the ones in mā, má, mǎ, and má that indicate if the vowel sound in these syllables has a high level, rising, falling rising, or falling tone.

• It allows you to type Chinese into a computer, so it’s great to chat with natives or take notes in Chinese.

2. Learn Chinese Grammar

If you’re completely new to Chinese grammar, I have good news for you: it’s not as hard as it sounds. In fact, although sentence structure is completely different from English, there are many aspects of Chinese grammar that are relatively easy to learn. Don’t believe us? Let’s take a look at some of them.

• Unlike most languages, there are no verb conjugations, so you won’t have to worry about irregular verbs. Even when you use different tenses, verbs don’t change, so if you want to know if someone is talking about the past, the present or the future, you simply have to check the rest of the sentence for context.

• Words in Chinese don’t have plural forms, which means nouns, pronouns and adjectives don’t change according to numbers. If you want to indicate that something is plural, you just add a phrase or a character that denotes the number of the object in question.

• There are no articles, so you won’t have to spend time learning how to say “the”, “a” or “an” in Chinese.

Important Rules to Understand Chinese Grammar

Now that we’ve explored the easy aspects of Chinese grammar, let’s take a look at some basic rules that will help you understand the way it works.

• Just like in English, the basic sentence order is subject - verb - object, so you won’t find it difficult at all to get used to the Chinese sentence pattern. Here’s an example.

  他 踢 足球。

  S V O

  He plays soccer.

  However, this is only true for simple sentences, as once you start to write more complex ones, you’ll find patterns like Subject–Adverbials–Verb–Complement–Object, which is where Chinese grammar starts to vary from English, but if you’re just starting, focus on mastering simple sentences first.

• There’s another sentence structure that it’s pretty common in Chinese, and it’s called topic - comment. Whereas in English and other European languages, we give importance to the subject of the sentence, in Chinese and other Asian languages they give importance to the topic of a sentence. Because of this, if you want to express an idea in Chinese and you want to sound natural, you should say the topic you want to talk about first, and then say what you want about it. To illustrate this, here’s an example.

  咖啡我不喜欢。

  Kāfēi wǒ bù xǐhuan.

  I don’t like coffee.

  Literally, “Coffee, I don’t like.”

• Adjectives typically go before nouns, and because this is also the case in English, you won’t have a hard time remembering this. Let’s take a look at some examples.

  漂亮的女孩

  piàoliang de nǚhái

  a pretty girl

  他们吃白饭。

  tāmen chī bái fàn.

  They eat white rice.

3. Useful Chinese Phrases

In case you are planning to travel to China in the next few weeks, and you don’t have enough time to learn the language, here are some of the most useful phrases you can learn in just a few hours to help you get by.

After reading this short guide, you probably have a much clearer view on what steps to follow to master the language, so what are you waiting to get started? At Language Trainers, we’ll help you find an ideal course for you that fits all of your requirements, so if you’re looking for personalised lessons at home or online, contact us today, and you won’t regret it!