你们好(nǐmen hǎo), I’m Lil!
And this is ChineseFor.Us Hands-On Writing.
Hi everyone, I’m Chuck.
This video series is inspired by our MiniProject—StrokeByStroke.
One of our most popular programs about writing characters.
When I was learning Chinese I always enjoyed writing characters.
You might think it’s hard.
But as long as you know all the basics and rules,
writing characters really isn’t as bad as you might think.
That’s why we are here
We’ll take you from being a complete beginner
to knowing everything there is about writing characters.
From strokes, to stroke construction,
stroke order, and also elements and radicals
—the building blocks of Chinese characters.
Also, if you’re already familiar with Chinese characters and their rules,
we might also give you some new ideas.
We’ve taken note of the most frequently asked questions about Chinese characters,
and in this series we would like to answer them one by one.
Today we’re gonna talk about:
What is the Chinese Language,
what are Chinese Characters,
and what is Pinyin?
Ok, let’s get started.
So what is the Chinese language?
Chinese is also known as
Mandarin, 中文(zhōngwén), 汉语(hànyǔ),
普通话(pǔtōnghuà), 国语(guóyǔ) and 华语(huàyǔ).
But in China there’re are also hundreds of dialects.
Many of which are so different
that even people that live in two different cities in the same province
can’t understand each other without speaking mandarin.
For example, Cantonese or 广东话, or 粤语,
is the dialect spoken by the people in China’s Guangdong Provin, Hong Kong and Macau.
And Sichuan Dialect, or 四川话, is spoken by the people of Sichuan Province.
For example: hello, in Mandarin is “你好”. In Sichuan dialect it’s “你好”, and in Cantonese it’s “你好.
But the good news is that a lot of people, especially the younger generations,
understand and are able to speak Mandarin.
Which is what you’ll learn from our videos.
So why does China have so many dialects?
Why does it have to be so confusing?
Well, that’s because, the Chinese writing system is totally different from phonetic based languages
like English, Spanish, French, or even Japanese, or Korean,
where looking at a word gives you a general idea of how it’s pronounced.
Whereas each Chinese character doesn’t tell you its pronunciation.
So during the long course of Chinese history and over thousands of years,
as people migrated further apart,
the characters stayed unified, through mail, books and other writings,
but the further people migrated the more their pronunciation would change.
But in 1958, to help standardize the official language,
Chinese linguists came up with the PINYIN system.
It uses a Roman alphabet to transcribe the Mandarin Chinese pronunciations.
And it’s been used ever since and has been a great help to foreigners, and Chinese people themselves.
One is that it helps us remember how to pronounce a certain character or a word ;
two is that you could use this PINYIN system to type out Chinese characters really easy.
Let’s take a look at these characters
and get a general idea of the relationships between Chinese characters and the Pinyin System.
All these characters have the same exact pronunciation, fēng.
In Pinyin system it’s written as “f-e-n-g with a tonal marker above the vowel”,
while in the writing system, each character looks different.
Same with this group, they are all pronounced “hóng”,
but the characters are significantly different.
So now we know what we’re dealing with here,
in order for you to learn Mandarin Chinese, you should know that there are two systems,
one is characters—the writing system;
and the other is Pinyin—the phonetic system.
Here’s some examples with characters, pinyin and their translation.
We will talk about Pinyin in our other Series—Perfect Pronunciation,
and in this Hands-on Writing Course we will be starting from the beginning.
From strokes,
stroke order,
elements and radicals,
character construction,
and radical categorization.
Sounds like a lot?
Don’t worry, each video is about 5 minutes long,
and all videos are designed to give you
a systematic and thorough understanding of the Chinese writing system.
Hope you enjoy!
Thanks and next time we’ll be talking about
how many characters we should learn
and also how many characters there are.
See you next time!
谢谢(xièxie)！再见(zàijiàn)！