Chinese course

This lesson on video (in French):

Subscribe to the YouTube channel "Cours de chinois" (in French):
SUBSCRIBE!

China is a huge country, covering some 9.6 million km²! Its population is very diverse: 56 ethnic groups, including the Han, the Chinese "in the strict sense", who make up the majority. Each ethnic group has its own language (except the Hui, but that's another story), often with many variations, ranging from a simple accent to a separate dialect.

Chinese has several major dialect groups, but each one varies so much internally that people from one town cannot always understand people from the next, even within the same dialect group. To cope with such diversity, a common language is needed: Mandarin. In Chinese, it is called Pǔtōnghuà (pronounced roughly "poo-toong-hwah"), literally "the speech of general communication", in other words, the common language.

The online Chinese lessons on chine-culture.com are Mandarin Chinese lessons.

Spoken language and writing

Chinese has a feature that is part of its charm, but also part of its difficulty: the writing does not record pronunciation (or only a little, and never precisely). You can therefore learn to speak Chinese without knowing how to read or write it. This course teaches you to both speak and write Chinese, but you will not have to learn every character in the vocabulary, so that writing does not hold back your progress in the language.

Phonetic transcription: pinyin

Since Chinese writing does not record pronunciation, a phonetic transcription is needed. Since the 1950s, the official Chinese phonetic transcription has been pinyin, a word that means "spelling out the sounds" in Chinese. Before the 1950s, each country had its own transcription. That is why older books about China give transcriptions of Chinese words that do not match pinyin. For example, the old French transcription wrote the name of Confucius's home state as "Lou", because that is how French spells the sound English speakers would write "loo". In pinyin, this word is written "lu", because the "u" is pronounced like the "oo" in "food" (but sometimes also like the German "ü", as you will see in the next lessons). Learning all the differences in pronunciation between pinyin and English would be very tedious, even impossible, and totally discouraging for a beginner. It would not be very useful either. This Chinese course will therefore introduce the differences little by little. You can always refer to the summary on the Pinyin page.

Pinyin tones

In Chinese, each character corresponds to one syllable. Chinese words are generally made up of one or two syllables, sometimes three, rarely four. Each syllable has a meaning. For example, in the word 'hello', "nǐhǎo", "nǐ" means 'you' and "hǎo" means 'to be well'. To say hello in Chinese, you wish the other person well, just as we say "good day" in English.
In Mandarin Chinese, every syllable carries a tone. In other words, its pitch moves between low and high. This is a difficult point for beginners whose language has no tones. Perceiving the tones (telling them apart by ear) and producing them (pronunciation) comes with practice and usually takes several months. So don't get discouraged.

In Chinese, there are four distinct intonations, known as the four tones of Chinese. These four tones are marked with accents on each syllable. A syllable may also carry no tone at all: this is called the neutral tone.

Example of the four tones + the neutral tone with the syllable 'ma':

- 1st tone: mā 妈 (mom) this is the high tone or first tone
listen:

- 2nd tone: má 麻 (hemp) this is the rising tone or second tone
listen:

- 3rd tone: mǎ 马 (horse) this is the low tone or third tone
listen:

- 4th tone: mà 骂 (to insult) this is the falling tone or fourth tone
listen:

- 5th tone: ma 吗 (interrogative particle: placed at the end of a sentence to turn it into a question) this is the neutral tone or fifth tone. It is actually the absence of a tone, so it is rarely called the 5th tone. It is better to call it the neutral tone.
listen:

Pinyin tones are marked on the vowels. The vowel that takes the mark follows this order of priority: a, o, e, u, i (except when the u comes before the i). Examples: mǎi, huā, jiā, dōu, shuō, què, suì, xiě, jiǔ...