1. 学习中文基本咨询 Adam Ross

2. Which Chinese to Learn? Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua 普通话 or Guoyu 国语 ) is the national language of both the People’s 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 Chinese Image from Chinesepod: http://chinesepod.com/images/pronu_tones.gif

5. In written “pinyin,” these tones are represented with these diacritics: mā (1st tone) 妈 “mother” má (2nd tone) 麻 “numb” mă (3 rd tone) 马 “horse” mà (4 th tone) 骂 “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 they’ve 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 characters Image 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 ( 汉语水平考试 “Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi” or “Test of Chinese Language Proficiency”) is offered annually at Seattle University.