Beginner 001: Learning Mandarin

I'm learning Mandarin. I hope you’ll join me in my learning. I’ve labelled my learning as “Beginner” to help you find the beginner posts among the other "Intermediate" posts.

Languages are not the easy thing they were when I was young.  I learned just a little German a few years back and it was easy. Most of the time the words sounded similar to my own English and the sentence structure may not have been the same, but at least it was also similar.

Mandarin however was very different. It's not just the words and the sentence structures that are different; it’s the way they are said, the tones, that also come into play. There are also some sounds that we are not used to. Thankfully, Chinese words can be read in pinyin which uses alphabetical characters, but again, they are not the same. "Q" in pinyin is actually pronounced "CH" rather than the "Q" we know.

On the other hand, there are a number of things that make Mandarin a little easier. Mandarin has no gender, and no tense. What I mean by tense is that in English, we might say "I rode my bike yesterday and will ride my bike tomorrow".  In Mandarin we simply say "Yesterday I ride bike and tomorrow I ride bike". By using a time indicator (yesterday or today), Chinese know when you are on the bike, they don't have to choose a different tense to describe it, it’s obvious. 

You don't even have to change words just to make them plural - think about it. If I said "one bike" you know there is only a single bike, so why should I have to change that word when I describe many of them, "two bikes". Again, the Chinese know how many by the way you describe it - not because you put an "s" on the end or changed the spelling. Consider one foot and two feet.

So Mandarin has some strange tones, reading pinyin takes a little getting used to, but once you get over that fact, it's a reasonably straight forward language.