Hi! My name is Grace! Nǐ hǎo! Wǒ jiào hóng’ēn, and welcome to Intro to Chinese! Have you ever
considered learning Chinese? In this video, I'll discuss the many advantages of learning Mandarin
Chinese as a foreign language and introduce some foundational aspects of the Chinese language.
Did you know that Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the entire world?
There are currently over 1 billion Chinese speakers, surpassing the second most popular
language Spanish by more than double. As of 2015, China's economy was the fastest-growing
major economy in the world and remains one of the largest consumer markets out there.
Clearly, Mandarin is a language that can allow you to communicate
with a vast amount of people and access an unlimited field of opportunities.
In addition to helping you participate in the global stage of the future,
learning Chinese can help you get in touch with China's rich past.
China is a huge country, with over 5,000 years of recorded history, 55 ethnic minorities,
and hundreds of regional dialects. The most popular one is the standard Beijing Mandarin.
China also has a rich cultural history of food. Have you ever been to a Chinese restaurant?
China has also made big contributions to music, art, literature, and philosophy. Some extremely
influential Chinese thinkers you might have heard of are Sun Tzu, who penned the Art of War
that is still read everywhere, from business schools to military headquarters, and Confucius.
His theories of social order remain a significant influence on many East Asian societies.
Still not convinced? Imagine yourself wandering through the ancient palaces of the Forbidden City,
floating down the scenic canals of Suzhou, working in Shanghai's international hub,
reading the iconic classic Journey to the West, or digging into a delicious plate of Peking duck.
Just this summer, I had a great time visiting a tea village near Hangzhou
and talking with the local farmers. It was amazing to see
how beautiful China's countryside is and how rich the traditions of tea farming are.
Learning Chinese truly opens up a whole new world of possibilities.
If you can't wait to start learning, I'm going to use the rest of this video to introduce
some basic characteristics of Mandarin Chinese. Unlike most modern languages,
Chinese is a logographic instead of phonetic language. This means that instead of having
an alphabet and putting together different combinations of letters to form words, Chinese
is made up of thousands of written characters that each represent a single idea or word.
It's sort of like Egyptian hieroglyphics, where different pictures represent different words.
The oldest form of written Chinese was the oracle bone script, pictographs inscribed on bone
used for divination. Today's Chinese characters went through a series of
transformations, including simplification by Chairman Mao Zedong in the mid 1900s,
until it became the standard characters used widely across mainland China today.
As you can see, Chinese characters are both very beautiful and very complex. There are over 50,000
individual characters, and to understand 99% of modern written Chinese, you need to know roughly
3,000 of the most common characters. But never fear -- contemporary Chinese also has a romanized
spelling system called "pīnyīn" that can help you learn how to pronounce Chinese words. Using
pinyin, we can look at a complicated character such as "love" and see that it is pronounced "ài."
Check out some of our online language-learning games, available in the App Store as well,
for a fun and easy way to learn Chinese! Until next time, always be clever!