When we talk about
Learning Chinese, mostly people study Mandarin. There are some differences
between ‘Mandarin’ and ‘Chinese’. Mandarin is one type of Chinese. People in
China use Mandarin as office language. In China, there are many kinds of
dialects, such as Cantonese and Shanghaiese.
Pinyin
When people study Mandarin,
they always start from Pinyin. What is Pinyi?
Pinyin : a set of
phonetic symbol which make the every Character to be pronounced. Without pinyin,
we can not speak single word.
A Pinin syllable
is usually composed of an initial, a final and a tone. The consonant that
starts a syllable is called the Initial, and the part after the initial is the
final. The mark on top of the final is tone.
Chinese is a tone language.
Different tomes may results in different meaning. There are four basic tones in
Chinese, which are called the 1st tone, the 2nd tome, the
3rd tone, and 4th tone.
Hanzi
Chinese characters
(hanzi) developed from a pictographic writing system in use a few thousand
years ago. Now, people write Hanzi in two ways which is Simplified characters
and traditional characters. In mainland China and Singapore, people prefer to use
the simple character in writing, and in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, people
use the traditional word in Writing.
