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Free tutorials: Learn Mandarin Chinese
Video 1: Understanding Chinese Tones
Because the Chinese language has so few different syllables, tones are used to differentiate between different words. In Mandarin, the official standard language of China, there are 4 different tones, as well as a neutral tone, which is used very rarely. The 4 tones allow speakers to pronounce the syllables in different ways, so that different meanings can be conveyed - even though some words sound similar, they have individual characters and meanings.
Learning to hear and pronounce these tones correctly is a challenge for anybody who's never learned a tonal language before. Yet, its importance should not be overstated either. Usually, up to an intermediate level, it will be perfectly clear which meaning is intended, even if you pronounce or hear a tone incorrectly.
How you can deduct meaning without tones:
1. The context of the conversation
2. The grammatical position in the sentence
3. The fact that many Chinese words are duo-syllabic, reducing the potential confusion.
Video 2: Making Sense of Chinese Grammar
For anybody who has bad memories of learning French or Spanish regular and irregular verb conjugations, German article declinations in Nominativ, Akkusatif, Genitif or Datif, French plural nouns, or noun genders, look no further. The Chinese language is completely devoid of all these complications that characterise Western languages!
In Chinese, forms never change, because the pronunciation of a character is fixed. The sound of a character will never change in function of the person, tense, number, gender of words.
Chinese grammar can therefore be simply summarized as follows:
1. No conjugations: each verb only has one form, and consequently, no irregular verbs
2. No tenses: use of particles to express if an action takes place in the past, present or future. Again, the verb form never changes in function of the tense
3. No articles: there's no such thing as ‘the’ and ‘a’, no le/la, no der/die/das in Mandarin
4. No plurals: quantifiers before the noun, or simply the context, will make clear whether we are talking in singular or in plural
5. No gender: no masculine, feminine or neuter words
6. No cases: since articles don't exist, and nouns can't be changed, it's impossible to have akkusativ/genetiv/dativ in Chinese
7. No declinations of adjectives by number or gender: just like nouns, adjectives never change
8. Fixed sentence patterns, no inversion: fixed pattern of subject – verb – object.
Video 3: Expanding your Chinese Vocabulary
Many people seem to think that Chinese is the most difficult language in the world. “C’est du chinois” say the French, when referring to something completely incomprehensible.
There is of course no such thing as the most difficult language in the world. Many factors need to be taken into consideration and it all depends on what your mother tongue is and what other languages you have already mastered. Learning French is easier for Spanish or Italian native speakers than it is for Germans, whereas learning Dutch or Norwegian would be easier for a German than for a Spaniard.
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