Greetings everyone and welcome to the first post of Zhongwen Study. We will be focusing on studying the basic and key concepts to get you conversing in Chinese right away.
I will be posting new lessons in bite size chunks, to feed your 中文 ability.
We'll then, let us jump right into our first lesson.
I think a simple hello is a good place to start our language learning adventure. "你好" These two characters together are pronounced "Ni Hao" both of them are third tone. To understand how to say these characters correctly, you must understand that Chinese has five-tones when spoken.
- This tone is flat, meaning you need to keep it at the exact same tonal level while saying the character
- This tone starts out like the first one, however it goes up towards the end
- This tone goes down and comes back up again
- This town is short and strong it just goes down
- The fifth-tone is kinda ambiguous as it doesn't really exist. Instead there is no tone if it is fifth-tone.
It is very important to remember the number of each tone, as I will be referencing to them by number from now on.
你好 does mean hello, but these two characters are very important for so many words in Chinese.
你(Ni3) means "You" and 好(Hao3) means "Good or Okay." If we put them together it will be "You Good" which is how you say hello. However, if you want to make this into a question is it possible to do it by simply adding a character to the end of the sentence. Like for example we can put 你好嗎? which means
"You Good?"
Notice how the character 嗎 (Ma5) doesn't add another word to our sentence, instead it just adds a question mark. That is because this character is just used for marking the sentence as a question that we want a "Yes or No" answer from.
Try to practice your pronounce and writing before the next lesson as this is a lot to learn. Do not worry as you will be speaking Chinese in no time at all.
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