by Jacky, who is learning Chinese as he is going to visit China later this year.
In the Western countries, to study this language, it is necessary to begin with "pinyin", which is a system of transcription from "mandarin" to roman letters. According to the wishes of PRC authorities, it was adopted by ISO in 1979, and then became international.
Four accents must be added to the vowels, to indicate the four tones of the language.
If we apply this to a "word", for example "ma", we obtain:
|
|
meaning |
character |
1st tone |
mā |
mum, mother |
妈 |
2nd tone |
má |
hemp |
麻 |
3rd tone |
mă |
horse |
马 |
4th tone |
mà |
to insult |
骂 |
For certain uses, there is a fifth, rather neutral, tone. In this case, there is no accent on the vowel.
There are many many characters (also called sinograms or ideograms). If you know:
There are drawing rules, for the strokes: horizontal before vertical, left before right, outside before inside … You also have to respect the number of strokes, for the final aspect of the sinogram is not sufficient to search in a dictionary. You need the right number of strokes.
In PRC, the traditional characters were simplified around 1960. Nowadays, only Taiwan, Hong-Kong, Macao, Japan (kanjis) and Korea still use the old ones ... how lucky the rest of us are!
by Jacky, published June 2012