Chinese

By Alan W — Last updated October 20, 2021

Chinese is the spoken and written language of China. What exactly does this mean? For most people most of the time, this means Standard Chinese or "Mandarin". Learning how to speak and read this language, however, does not mean you will be able to understand or use other things called "Chinese" such as Literary/Classical Chinese, Cantonese, or even the regional dialects of Beijing. In Chinese, the standard variety is more precisely called 普通话 pǔtōnghuà "standard speech". If you speak "good Chinese", you may be told your speech is 很标准 hěn biāozhǔn "very standard/correct".

See my page on learning Chinese for practical tips on learning/studying Chinese.

The Chinese Language

What sort of language is Chinese? What follows is a brief linguistic description of Chinese. See my article on Chinese characters for a more in-depth discussion of Chinese characters.

Sounds

Chinese is a tonal language which distinguishes between four tones plus a fifth "neutral/reduced" tone. Countless videos on the Internet can show you what these sounds are like, so I will not detail them here.

Chinese has a relatively simple sound system. There are no consonant clusters (e.g. in English we have the word clusters which starts with two consonants /kl/). Chinese words either end in a vowel or a nasal sound such as -n or -ng.

Learning the Hànyǔ pīnyīn (aka pinyin) will be sufficient to be able to transcribe any standard Chinese speech.

Morphology

The bulk of Chinese vocabulary is from combining Chinese character/morphemes into words. For example, there is the word 時間 shíjiān which combines,

時 shí "time"

間 jiān "interval"

Note that this is not all that different from what happens in languages like English and German in words like timesheet or whiteboard.

Syntax

Chinese, like English, generally follows a Subject-Verb-Object syntax (SVO). The two sentences below are "parallel",

I watch TV
我看電視
Wǒ kàn diànshì.

Like English, Chinese is relatively poor in inflexional morphology, so word order is important for conveying basic meanings, not just being poetic!