Chinese Characteristics

Chinese is part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. There are several forms of spoken Chinese and numerous dialects. The standard form is Mandarin Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect, understood in practically the entire country and used as a mother tongue for 70% of the population.

The written language uses the Chinese characters, which stand for a unit of meaning as well as a syllable (?). The number of Chinese characters goes up to 56.000 (?), but it is enough to know around 3.500 to be able to read a newspaper in Chinese.

The oral language uses tones to distinguish words that have the same pronunciation. There are five tones in Mandarin: acute, ascending, descending, ascend-descending and neutral.

A good piece of news is that the grammar is terribly simple, as there is no conjugation or declination, and in addition the number of prepositions is rather limited, so it is fairly easy to build grammatically correct sentences.

More good news: Mandarin has only 450 syllables, and once you learn them you do not need to learn new ones: only new meanings for the syllables that you already know. Furthermore, words are rather short; most have only two syllables, so they are not difficult to remember once you get used to them.

Writing and reading are easier to learn using memory tricks. Each symbol can be divided into parts called radicals, which have their own meaning related to the character they form a part of. There are only 214, so once you know them, learning new characters is easy: you only need to memorize which radicals it is composed of.

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