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About This Course
Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening and Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing constitute an introductory course in modern Chinese (Mandarin), the language with the largest number of native speakers in the world, which is the official language of mainland China and Taiwan and one of the official languages of Singapore. The focus of this course, which is designed for adult English-speaking learners, is on communicating in Chinese in practical, everyday situations. We have tried to keep in mind the needs of a wide range of users, from college and university students to business people and government personnel. With some adjustments in the rate of progress, high school students may also be able to use these materials to their advantage. By availing themselves of the detailed usage notes and making good use of the Practice Books, the video, and the audio, it is even possible for motivated self-learners to work through these materials on their own, though it would be desirable for them to meet with a teacher or native speaker for an hour or two per week, if possible. Although users with specialized needs will, in the later stages of their study, require supplementary materials, we believe this course provides a solid general foundation or “base” (hence the title of the course) that all learners of Chinese need, on which they may build for future mastery.
The course is divided into spoken and written tracks, each with various types of ancillary materials. The following diagram will clarify the organization of the whole course:
Several modes of study are possible for these materials: (1) the spoken series only; (2) a lesson in the spoken series followed a few days, weeks, or months later by the corresponding lesson in the written series; and (3) a lesson in the spoken and written series studied simultaneously. What is not possible is to study the written series first or only, since the written series assumes knowledge of the pronunciation system and relevant grammatical and cultural information, which are introduced in the spoken series.
Students embarking upon the study of Chinese should be aware that, along with Japanese, Korean, and Arabic, Chinese is one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers. This course makes no pretensions of being an “easy” introduction to the language. However, students can be assured that if they make the effort to master thoroughly the material presented here, they will acquire a solid foundation in Chinese.
The proficiency goals in speaking and reading by completion of the Intermediate Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening and Intermediate Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing portions of the course are Intermediate-High on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Chinese Proficiency Guidelines, which correlates with S-1+/R-1+ on the U.S. government Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Language Skill Level Descriptions. By the time they attain this level, learners will be able to conduct simple, practical conversations with Chinese speakers on a variety of everyday topics (cf. Table of Contents). They will also be able to read simple, connected texts printed in simplified or traditional Chinese characters and recognize about 600 high-frequency characters and common words written with them. Of course, they will not yet be able to conduct conversations on professional topics or read newspapers or novels, skills that in the case of Chinese take a considerably longer time to develop.
Some of the special features of Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening and Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing include:
Separate but integrated tracks in spoken and written Chinese. Most textbooks for teaching basic Chinese teach oral and written skills from the same materials, which are covered at a single rate of progress. Students typically study a dialog, learn how to use in their speech the words and grammar contained in the dialog, and also learn how to read and write every character used to write the dialog. But the fact is that, due to the inherent difficulty of Chinese characters, native English speakers can learn spoken Chinese words much faster than they can learn the characters used to write those words. As East Asian language pedagogues Eleanor H. Jorden and A. Ronald Walton have argued,1 why must the rate of progress in spoken Chinese be slowed down to the maximum possible rate of progress in written Chinese? Moreover, in Chinese, more than in most languages, there are substantial differences between standard spoken style and standard written style, with many words and grammar patterns that are common in speech being rare in writing or vice versa. For all these reasons, this course uses separate but related materials for training in spoken and written Chinese. However, reflecting the fact that written Chinese is based on spoken Chinese, and so as to mutually reinforce the four skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing), the written track is closely integrated with the spoken track. A day’s spoken lesson is based on a conversation typically introducing one to three new grammar patterns and 15 to 20 new spoken words, while the corresponding written lesson introduces six new high-frequency characters and a number of words that are written using them, chosen from among (but not including all of) the characters used to write the basic conversation of the corresponding lesson. Experience shows that the learning of written skills in Chinese proceeds more efficiently if learners study for reading and writing the characters for words they have previously learned for speaking and comprehension. Under this approach, when students take up a new lesson in written Chinese, they already know the pronunciations, meanings, and usages of the new words, needing only to learn their written representations—which considerably lightens the learning load. Such an approach also allows students and instructors maximum flexibility concerning at which point, how, and even whether, to introduce reading and writing.
Graduated approach. There is so much to learn to become proficient in Chinese that Chinese language learning can easily become overwhelming. By dividing large tasks into a series of many smaller ones, the learning of Chinese becomes more manageable. Therefore, each spoken lesson consists of only one fairly short (five- to twelve-line) conversation, while each written lesson introduces only six new characters. An added bonus to this approach is the sense of accomplishment learners feel through frequent completion of small tasks, rather than getting bogged down in long lessons that seem never-ending.
Naturalness of the language. A special effort has been made to present natural, idiomatic, up-to-date Chinese as opposed to stilted “textbook style.” This will be evident, for example, in the use of interjections, pause fillers, and final particles, which occur more frequently in this text than in most other Chinese language textbooks. Occasionally, for comprehension practice, we have included recordings of slightly accented Mandarin speech, so as to familiarize learners with some of the more common variations in pronunciation they are likely to encounter.
Authenticity of the language. Chinese, like English, is a language spoken in a number of different societies, with multiple standards and varying usages. Although the emphasis of this course is on the core that is common to Mandarin Chinese wherever it is spoken, linguistic differences among the major Chinese speech communities as well as recent innovations are taken up where appropriate. Of the 96 basic conversations in Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening and Intermediate Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening, the audio and video for 56 of them were recorded in Beijing, with another 31 recorded in Taipei, 3 in Hong Kong, one in Macao, 2 in Singapore, 2 in Malaysia, and one in the U.S. The relatively small number of terms that are restricted in use to a particular speech area are so indicated.
Emphasis on the practical and immediately useful. We have tried to present material that is high in frequency and has the most immediate “pay-off value” possible. An effort has been made to include the most useful words, grammar patterns, situations, and functions, based on several published frequency studies as well as research by the author. The units of this course have been arranged in order of general usefulness and practical importance. Although the course is designed to be studied from beginning to end, learners with time for only, say, the first five or ten units will at least be exposed to many of the most useful vocabulary items and structural patterns.
Eclecticism of approach. We believe that language is so complex and the personalities of learners so different, that no single approach or method can possibly meet the needs of all learners at all times. For this reason, the pedagogical approach we have chosen is purposefully eclectic. This course is proficiency-oriented and situational in approach with a carefully ordered underlying grammatical foundation. We have borrowed freely from the audio-lingual, communicative, functional-notional, and grammar-translation approaches.
Maximum flexibility of use. Student and teacher needs and personalities vary widely, as do the types of programs in which Chinese is taught. We have tried to leave options open whenever possible. This is true, for example, in the question of how to teach pronunciation; whether to teach the spoken skills only or also the written skills; when to introduce reading and writing; whether to teach simplified or traditional characters or both; and which of the exercises to do and in which order to do them. There is detailed discussion of all these and other questions in the Instructor’s Guide for Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening and Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing.
Attention to sociolinguistic and cultural features. Knowing how to say something with correct grammar and pronunciation is not sufficient for effective communication. Learners must know what to say and what not to say, when to say it, and how to adjust what they say for the occasion. How do the gender, age, and social position of the speaker and listener affect language? Finally, language does not exist apart from the culture of its speakers. What are the cultural assumptions of Chinese speakers? These are some of the matters to which we have tried to pay attention.
Extensive built-in review. In order to promote long-term retention of the material learned, a great effort has been made to recycle vocabulary and grammar periodically in later units in the textbook and Practice Book after they have been introduced. In addition, there is a review and study guide at the end of every unit.
Attention to the needs of learners with prior knowledge of Chinese. While the course is designed for beginners and assumes no prior knowledge of Chinese, it tries to take into account the special situation and needs of learners who possess some prior knowledge of the language acquired from home or residence overseas. Consequently, there are special notes on features of standard Mandarin pronunciation and usage that differ from the Cantonese or Taiwanese-influenced Mandarin to which some learners may have been exposed.
Organization and Use
Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening consists of twelve units. The first two are introductory units not directly related to the material in Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening.2 They are followed by ten units, numbered 1 to 10, that parallel the ten units in Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening. Each of these units in turn consists of four parts, with each part presenting six characters, common words written with them, and reading exercises to help you master the new material.
The twelve units of Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing introduce a total of 288 characters and about 700 common words and expressions written with them. Except for the two introductory units, the six characters in each lesson were chosen, based on frequency of occurrence, from the characters used to write the Basic Conversation of the corresponding lesson in Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening.3 Since each lesson of Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing was designed to be studied after the corresponding lesson of Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening and Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening Practice Book, when you begin a new lesson of Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing, you already know the pronunciations, meanings, and usages of the new words, so you need only learn their written representations. This considerably lightens your learning load!
Our guide in questions of frequency has been the general character list in the 现代汉语频率词典 Xiàndài Hànyŭ Pínlǜ Cídiăn Frequency Dictionary of Modern Chinese, published by Beijing Languages Institute in 1985. All of the characters in Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing were selected from the top 1,000 (and most from the top 300) characters in that dictionary, with three exceptions: the surname 李 Lĭ, the character 湾 (灣) in 台湾 (台灣) Táiwān, and the character 津 in 天津 Tiānjīn.
NEW CHARACTERS AND WORDS
The first section of each part or lesson in Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing is called “New Characters and Words.” It introduces the six new characters of the lesson as well as common words written with them. For each new character, the following information is provided:
1. Number. The number at the beginning of the section for each new character is the number of the character in this course. Later in the course, characters are sometimes referred to by their number.
2. Simplified form. If only one character is given, then the simplified form is the same as the traditional form.
3. Traditional form. If the traditional form of a character is different from the simplified form, it is given next, enclosed in parentheses. So that learners are always clear about which characters are simplified and which are traditional, whenever simplified and traditional characters occur together, simplified characters always come first, with traditional characters following, enclosed in parentheses.
4. Pinyin. The Pinyin transcription follows on the same line after the character.
5. English. The last item on the first line of each new character section is an English translation of the basic meaning of the character. The translation here is for reference only and does not need to be learned. The meaning of the individual character may be different from the meanings of words containing the character. Moreover, the English translation is not meant to be complete and includes only those meanings that are judged to be pedagogically useful for learners at this point in their study of Chinese.
6. Radical. Beginning on the second line of each new character section, the radical for the new character is given. If the character differs in its simplified and traditional forms, and if those two forms have different radicals, then both radicals are indicated. If the radical has a common colloquial name, that also is given.
7. Phonetic. If there is a pedagogically useful phonetic, it is indicated. If the character itself is a common phonetic, examples are given of characters in which the phonetic occurs.
8. Other components. Any other components of the character are mentioned and discussed.
9. Structural explanation. When something pedagogically useful can be said about the history and development of the character, it is included. Our primary consideration is helping students remember the character, so some explanations that have mnemonic value are mentioned even if they may not be historically accurate. On the other hand, explanations that are excessively complex and would not be helpful to the average learner have been omitted.
10. Similar characters. At the end of the new character section are listed any “look-alike” characters with which the new character should be contrasted.
11. New words written with the character. Indented under the section for each new character is a list of new words that are written with the character. These are given in simplified characters, traditional characters (if different from simplified), Pinyin transcription, and English translation. They are also recorded on the accompanying audio disc.4
12. New words written with characters you already know. This section, which is also recorded on the accompanying audio disc, presents new words occurring in the corresponding lesson of Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening that happen to be written with characters that have already been introduced in connection with other words in previous lessons of Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing.
IMPORTANT NOTE TO LEARNERS: What you must learn before beginning the Reading Exercises and proceeding to the next lesson is those new words in sections (11) and (12) that are followed by word class abbreviations in bolded brackets. Everything else is for reference only.
READING EXERCISES
The next section of each lesson is the Reading Exercises. These should be the focus of study and practice, since they present the new characters, words, and other features of written Chinese in context. When working with the Reading Exercises, you should practice both oral and silent reading. Be sure to make frequent use of the accompanying audio disc to hear and practice correct pronunciation, phrasing, and intonation.
The Reading Exercises are presented twice: first in simplified characters in horizontal format, and then again in traditional characters in vertical format.5 This is done to provide learners with practice in reading both types of characters and both formats. Of course, learners may choose to read only one version of the Reading Exercises, or they may read one version first and the other version several months later.
The Reading Exercises for Units 1 to 10 consist of the following components:
1. Sentences. These illustrate the use of the new characters and words in context. There are always ten sentences in this section, and they exemplify all the new characters and most of the new words of the lesson.
2. Conversations. The conversations are in spoken style. The name or role of each person speaking is included and should be studied along with the conversation itself. During class or practice sessions, you should find a partner or partners, and each of you should take a role. Then switch roles, so you get practice reading all of the lines.
3. Character Differentiation Drills. In the same way that drills can be useful for teaching spoken language, they can also help teach written language. The purpose of the character differentiation drills is to give you practice in differentiating “look-alike” characters that learners new to Chinese might confuse. Pronounce each drill out loud and think of the meaning of the character you’re pronouncing.
4. Narratives. The purpose of the narratives is to give you practice in reading connected prose, which is different in a number of ways from a series of independent sentences. A few of the narratives include some elements of written-style Chinese. The first time you read a narrative, you should read it out loud; the second time, read silently and try gradually to increase your reading speed. Always think of the meaning of what you’re reading.
5. Notes. These are miscellaneous comments to help you understand the meaning, structure, and cultural background of the material in the Reading Exercises. No attempt is made to provide systematic treatment of grammar, since that is provided in Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening.
Some of the lessons include additional sections on special topics such as numbers, personal and place names, money, times, and dates. There are also a total of 18 supplements presenting examples of popular culture and realia ranging from tongue twisters and riddles to tables and handwritten notes.
An Overview of the Chinese Writing System
Most people equate the Chinese writing system with Chinese characters. Characters are certainly the most prominent feature of written Chinese, but the Chinese writing system actually consists of a whole lot more. In addition to simplified characters, traditional characters, and unofficial but often encountered alternate characters, the Chinese writing system also includes the uppercase and lowercase letters of the Roman alphabet (as in X光 “X-ray,” B型肝炎 “Hepatitis B,” 卡拉OK “Karaoke,” and e世代 “digital generation”); the Pinyin romanization system (for computer entry or to indicate the pronunciations of rare characters); the Arabic numbers plus the Chinese symbol 〇; mathematical symbols such as +–× ÷ = and %; the Chinese currency sign ¥; the reduplication sign 々; punctuation; use of smaller characters for humility; and spacing conventions. Of course, as an educated reader and writer of English, you already know some of the preceding, so not everything will be new for you.
Chinese characters are variously termed “ideograms,” “ideographs,” “logographs,” or “graphs.” In this book, we shall simply call them “Chinese characters” or just “characters.” It’s important to keep in mind that, as is true of all languages, in Chinese speech is primary, the standard Chinese writing system of today essentially being a set of written symbols for recording Chinese speech; Chinese characters certainly do not, as claimed by some, constitute a “language-independent system of logical symbols.” It’s best to think of a Chinese character as standing for a meaningful syllable of a spoken word, a little as if in English we had one symbol for “auto,” another for “bio,” and yet another for “graph,” so that we could then put them together in different combinations like “autograph,” “biography,” and “autobiographer.”
ORIGIN OF THE CHARACTERS
Until quite recently, Chinese children were taught in school that the Chinese characters were the invention of one man, Cang Jie, an official in the court of the Yellow Emperor around 2600 BCE. According to one version of this legend, Cang Jie got the idea for characters from the tracks which he saw birds and other animals make in the ground. However, scholars today agree that Chinese characters are not the invention of any one person but are rather the cumulative product of many individuals over a long period of time. The characters are quite clearly pictographic in origin. The prototypes for the characters are simple drawings of animals and other natural objects which can be found etched on fragments of ancient pottery dating back to before 2000 BCE. Recently, there have been reports of thousands of pictorial symbols dating back even earlier that have been found carved on cliff faces in northwest China.
The earliest examples of fully developed Chinese writing we have today are the so-called 甲骨文 Jiăgŭwén or oracle bone inscriptions, dating from the late Shang Dynasty (ca. 1300 BCE). To divine the future for the Shang rulers, priests would hold ox collar bones and tortoise shells over a fire until they developed cracks and then interpret the meanings of the cracks, making predictions about weather, religion, politics, and war. The interpretations and predictions would then be recorded on the bones and shells in a few lines of text written in the characters of the day (see the photos on this page and page 15). Over 100,000 pieces of Jiăgŭwén are extant, containing over 3,000 different characters, roughly half of which can be read today.
Oracle bone
The story of the discovery of the Jiăgŭwén is a colorful chapter in the history of Chinese paleography. The oracle bones, which had been discovered in the vicinity of Anyang, Henan, had for some time been regarded as “dragon bones” and had been sold and ground up for Chinese medicine in pharmacies in the Beijing area. In 1899, a scholar by the name of Wang Yirong, who was taking the dragon bones for malaria, examined the characters on the bones and started researching them with his friend Liu E. They concluded that the inscriptions on the bones were older than any other characters known at the time. Wang died the next year, but Liu published a book on his and Wang’s collection of bones in 1903, which made their discovery known to the world.
Both the forms of the characters and the total number of characters multiplied greatly during the succeeding Zhou Dynasty (11th century to 221 BCE), differing widely from place to place. The characters from this period, most extant specimens of which are inscribed on various kinds of bronze vessels, are collectively known as 大篆 Dàzhuàn or Great Seal Script.
In 221 BCE, Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor, unified the country and made mandatory throughout all of China the use of the Qin script. This script, known as 小篆 Xiăozhuàn or Small Seal Script, is ancestral to all later forms of Chinese writing and is still sometimes used today for ornamental purposes and in the making of seals. At about the same time as the official Xiăozhuàn script, there developed among the common people a much simplified form of Xiăozhuàn called 隶书 ( 隸書 ) Lìshū or Clerical Script, which was characterized by a straightening out of round strokes and a generally much less pictographic appearance. By the latter part of the Han Dynasty (ca. 200 CE), Lìshū had been further simplified into 楷书 ( 楷書 ) Kăishū or Standard Script, which has served ever since as the standard for both printed and carefully handwritten characters.
The table below summarizes the development of two characters from their Jiăgŭwén to their Kăishū forms (but keep in mind that it is of necessity somewhat simplified, and in actual practice there was not a neat and easily dissected progression—two or more types of characters typically coexisted in different locales for decades or even centuries):
STRUCTURE OF THE CHARACTERS
Every Chinese character is made up of from one to twenty or more separate strokes. The basic strokes are eight in number: diăn (丶), héng ( 一), shù (丨), piĕ (丿), nà ( ), tí ( ), gōu (亅), and zhé ( ). Some of the basic strokes have several variants, and there are also compound strokes consisting of combinations of the basic strokes. Don’t worry, you’ll learn all these strokes as you learn Chinese characters made up of them. In case you’re curious, the characters with the fewest strokes in the language are 一 yī “one” and 乙 yĭ “second of the ten Celestial Stems,” each of which is composed of only one stroke; while the most complex commonly written character is 鬱 yù “melancholy,” which consists of 29 strokes (in the simplified character system it has been simplified to 郁). Less common, fortunately for us, is 齉 nàng, an onomatopoeic word meaning “nasal twang” that has all of 36 strokes, whether in the traditional or the simplified character system!
According to Chinese tradition, the characters are divided based upon their structure into six types called 六书 ( 六書 ) Liùshū “Six Categories of Writing.” This system of categorization was first employed in a well-known Chinese etymological dictionary known as the 说文解字 ( 說文解字 ) Shuōwén Jiĕzì that was completed by a man named Xu Shen in 121 CE. The different categories of characters are as follows:
1. 象形字 Xiàngxíngzì “Pictographs.” These are more or less stylized drawings of objects in the real world such as elements of the universe, topographical features, flora, fauna, parts of the human body, tools, and architectural structures. Although in the development of the Chinese script, pictographs were the earliest type of character, they now make up only a small fraction of characters. Thus, it’s incorrect to consider modern Chinese writing as being primarily pictographic, or to refer to all characters as “pictographs.” Some examples of pictographs still in common use today are:
Oracle bone
2. 指事字 Zhĭshìzì “Simple Ideographs.” Rather than being pictures of objects, like the pictographs, these are symbolic representations of abstract concepts such as number and position. The proportion of simple ideographs in written Chinese is even smaller than that of pictographs. Examples:
3. 会意字 ( 會意字 ) Huìyìzì “Compound Ideographs.” While simple ideographs are composed of a unified whole and are complete in themselves, compound ideographs rely for their meaning on the combination or interaction of the meanings of two or more separate parts, each of which can occur as an independent character. This category of characters, while more important than the simple ideographs, also accounts for only a small fraction of characters. Examples:
4. 假借字 Jiăjièzì “Borrowed Characters.” Although pictographs and ideographs could be devised for some words in the language, there were many other words which did not readily lend themselves to either of these two means of written representation. Frequently, when the Chinese ancients wanted to write something for which they knew no character, they would borrow another character which had the same or a similar sound. For example, in ancient China there were two different words both pronounced somewhat like English “lug”: one was the name for growing grain, which was written with the pictograph 來, and the other was the verb “to come,” which as yet had no character. Someone came up with the then novel idea of writing “to come” with the borrowed character 來 “grain.” Though the original meaning “grain” and the borrowed meaning “to come” coexisted for a period of time, eventually, in this particular case, “to come” won out, with the result that in modern Chinese that is the only possible meaning of the character. After phonetic-semantic compounds (see below), the borrowed characters constitute the second-largest category of characters. They also played an important role in the simplification of characters in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, along with the phonetic-semantic compounds, they help make the case that even in ancient times, Chinese characters were largely phonetic in nature. But though the context would often clarify the meaning of borrowed characters, sometimes there were ambiguities. The problem of avoiding ambiguities when borrowing characters for their sound gave rise to the next category of characters, which today accounts for the great majority of characters in the language.
5. 形声字 ( 形聲字 ) Xíngshēngzì “Phonetic-Semantic Compounds.” In trying to solve the problem of avoiding ambiguities, the ancient Chinese hit upon the idea of combining the sound-borrowing principle of the Jiăjièzì with the semantic principle of the first three categories of characters to create compound characters, one part of which—called the phonetic, often on the right side of a character—would indicate the sound; and the other part of which—called the semantic, often on the left side of a character—would indicate the meaning.
Take the common Chinese noun pronounced mā, meaning “mom” or “mother.” At some point in the past when this word did not yet have a character associated with it, some Chinese writer who wanted to write this word borrowed the character 馬 mă “horse” to represent the sound of mā (the two words are pronounced identically except for tone) but made a crucially important addition: he or she added to the left of 馬 the character 女 nǚ “woman” to indicate to the reader, first, that a word different from 馬 was meant; and, second, that the word had something to do with “woman.” And so was created the character 媽 mā “mom, mother.” Similarly, consider 螞 mă “ant,” which is made up of the same phonetic element plus the semantic element 虫 chóng “insect”; or the question particle 嗎 ma, composed of the same phonetic plus the semantic 口 kŏu “mouth,” which indicates that this is a word often used in speech.
Here are examples of several groups of phonetic-semantic compounds:
In the above examples, which were carefully chosen to illustrate the principle of Xíngshēngzì, there are fairly close correlations between the sound of the phonetic and the sound of the compound. Unfortunately, due to sound change and interdialectal borrowing over the course of many centuries, plus the fact that the “fit” for some phonetics was never exact to begin with but only approximate, many of the correlations have become obscured, so that the phonetic information contained in phonetic-semantic compounds today is often inexact.
The phonetics of Chinese characters are a little like different vowel and consonant combinations in English. In English, we have many regular sound-to-writing correspondences, like the combination “-ill” that is pronounced the same way in all words ending in “-ill,” for example, “pill,” “kill,” and “hill.” But we also have some irregular correspondences like “-ove” which can have several different pronunciations, for example, “shove,” “cove,” and “prove.” Chinese phonetics are typically like the irregular English correspondences, with one phonetic often representing two or three common pronunciations.
In groups of different characters sharing the same phonetic, the final is the most likely to be similar, the initial is the next most likely to be similar, and the tone is the least likely to be similar. Even when the initials or finals of different characters in a phonetic series are different, they are often still phonetically related, that is, they may all be labial sounds made with the lips like [b p f]; or they may all be sounds made with the velum in the back of the mouth like [g k h]; or they may all end in the same consonant like [-eng -ing].
As for the semantics in phonetic-semantic compounds, they can provide only a hint as to the meaning of the character, for example, “related to water” or “made of metal” or “type of fish.” Sometimes the semantic seems illogical, but that may be due to changes in culture and society since the system of semantics was first devised; for example, 枕 zhĕn “pillow” is written with the semantic 木 mù “wood,” but that is because formerly Chinese pillows were indeed made of wood. The semantic element of a Chinese character is in English more commonly referred to as the radical of the character, because Chinese dictionaries have traditionally been organized based on a sequence of 214 radicals, arranged in a set order from those with the least number of strokes to those with the most strokes. The radical of a character usually corresponds to its semantic, though there are some exceptions. While the system of phonetics and the system of semantics (or radicals) of Chinese characters are inexact and involve many inconsistencies, they can still be quite useful for guessing the pronunciations and meanings of unfamiliar characters, or for learning and remembering new ones. Native Chinese readers make use of them in their reading, and we’ll be exploiting them to their fullest potential in this book.
6. 转注 ( 轉注 ) Zhuănzhù “Mutually Explanatory Characters.” The sixth category of characters mentioned in the Shuōwén Jiĕzì is termed 转注 ( 轉注 ) Zhuănzhù. These involve pairs of words that are phonetically and semantically similar, where one word in each pair already had a character associated with it but the other did not. Subsequently, a character was created for the word without a character by modifying the existing character for the other word in the pair. Most Zhuănzhù characters are no longer in use, but one commonly cited example is the pair 老 lăo “old” and 考 kăo “deceased father.” Since the Zhuănzhù make up the smallest category in the Liùshū and since not even specialists are in agreement as to their exact nature, we shall not discuss this category in more detail here.
CURSIVE SCRIPT
In addition to the types of characters discussed above, which are the Kăishū standard printed or carefully handwritten forms of characters, there also exist cursive forms of characters. In the same way that when writing English by hand we normally connect letters (i.e., we don’t usually print little but instead write the word with connected strokes as little), Chinese writers also usually connect many of the strokes of characters when writing by hand.
Depending on a number of factors such as the formality of the occasion, the educational level of the writer and person written to, the personal preferences of the writer, and how much of a hurry the writer happens to be in, there will be wide variation in the degree of cursiveness of any particular piece of handwriting. Handwritten Chinese containing a moderate degree of cursiveness is quite common and is known as 连笔字 ( 連筆字 ) Liánbĭzì “Connected Characters” or 行书 ( 行書 ) Xíngshū “Running Script.” We’ll be introducing a small amount of slightly cursive handwriting later in this course. A more extreme degree of cursiveness is termed 草书 ( 草書 ) Căoshū “Grass Script” and is, fortunately for the foreign learner of the language, much less common than it used to be. Actually, it’s often difficult to determine exactly at what point Xíngshū ends and Căoshū begins. There is a well-known Chinese proverb that says 草书三天不认主 ( 草書三天不認主 ) Căoshū sāntiān bú rèn zhŭ “After three days, something written in Căoshū will not be recognizable even by the writer.” There is an even more divergent type of cursive script known as 狂草 Kuángcăo or “Crazy Grass” but, not to worry, we won’t be dealing with anything like that in this course!
Here are some examples of characters written in Xíngshū and Căoshū:
SIMPLIFIED CHARACTERS
So as to increase literacy, the government of the People’s Republic of China began promoting the use of so-called 简体字 ( 簡體字 ) jiăntĭzì or “simplified characters” by means of two official lists it promulgated in 1955 and 1964. By the term “simplified” was meant primarily a reduction in the number of strokes of characters, especially of high-frequency characters composed of a higher than average number of strokes. Actually, the history of character simplification in China is a long one, most of the characters on the two lists having been used informally for centuries, much as we in English have long used abbreviations like “nite” for “night” or “thru” for “through” in informal writing. In Chinese, the main difference from before is that, in mainland China and Singapore, the simplified characters have now been standardized and given official status.
There is no doubt that simplified characters, having a reduced number of strokes, can be handwritten more quickly than the traditional characters (though in the past most adult writers did their rapid writing in Xíngshū, which is even faster). However, precisely because of the reduction in strokes, the number of points of contrast among characters has been reduced, resulting in an increased number of similar-looking characters. Take the two expressions shèyŏu “has established” and méiyou “does not have.” Written in traditional characters ( 設有, 沒有 ), the distinction is clear; but written in simplified characters ( 设有, 没有 ), they are easily confused, especially when handwritten rapidly. Other examples of such simplified character look-alikes include 活话 (cf. traditional 活話 ), 向问 (cf. traditional 向問 ), and 刷剧 (cf. traditional 刷劇 ). It could be argued that character simplification has made writing easier, but has in some instances actually made reading harder (not to mention that most readers must now become familiar with two sets of characters).
Roughly half of the three thousand or so characters necessary for literacy in Chinese has been affected by the simplification process. Of the 288 characters introduced in Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing, a total of 197 are the same in their simplified and traditional forms, with only 91 being different—and a number of those involve very small differences that are hardly noticeable. Learning the distinctions between the simplified characters and the traditional characters is not as burdensome a task as it may at first seem, since in many cases the simplification of one character component—for example, that of the so-called “speech radical” from 言 to 讠—has affected dozens of characters that contain it.
The main methods by which characters were simplified include:
1. Simplified characters already in popular use were given official status. Examples:
過 → 过 guò “pass”
當 → 当 dāng “serve as”
2. Simpler forms that were originally the standard form of the character but which had later been replaced by more complex forms were reinstituted. Examples:
從 → 从 cóng “from”
眾 → 众 zhòng “multitude”
雲 → 云 yún “cloud”
3. Simpler characters were borrowed to write more complex characters with the same pronunciation, according to the Jiăjiè principle of borrowed characters. While this occasionally creates ambiguities, the context usually makes the meaning clear. Examples:
困 kùn “difficulty,” 睏 kùn “sleepy” → 困 kùn “difficulty; sleepy”
谷 gŭ “valley,” 穀 gŭ “grain” → 谷 gŭ “valley; grain”
4. Cursive forms of characters were regularized into Kăishū style. Examples:
東 → 东 dōng “east”
樂 → 乐 lè “happy”
為 → 为 wéi “be”
5. Parts of characters were used to substitute for whole characters. Examples:
習 → 习 xí “practice”
與 → 与 yŭ “and”
雖 → 虽 suī “although”
條 → 条 tiáo “strip”
飛 → 飞 fēi “fly”
電 → 电 diàn “electricity”
6. The redundant parts of characters were deleted or simplified. Examples:
蟲 → 虫 chóng “insect”
齒 → 齿 chĭ “tooth”
7. Wide characters were made narrower, and long characters were made shorter. Examples:
噸 → 吨 dūn “ton”
蠶 → 蚕 cán “silkworm”
8. New characters were constructed based on the Xíngshēng principle of phonetic-semantic compounds. Examples:
藝 → 艺 yì “art” (since 乙 yĭ is a near homonym of 藝 )
畢 → 毕 bì “finish” (since 比 bĭ is a near homonym of 畢 )
9. Common character components were replaced by simpler components. For example, the common but complex component 雚 was replaced by the much simpler component 又. Examples:
歡 → 欢 huān “happy”
觀 → 观 guān “look”
勸 → 劝 quàn “urge”
權 → 权 quán “authority”
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE CHINESE WRITING SYSTEM
In the PRC today, all mass media publications such as newspapers and magazines are printed exclusively in simplified characters. So are school textbooks from kindergarten through high school. Scholarly works and university textbooks, especially those dealing with ancient literature and history, are sometimes still printed in traditional characters. Street signs and handwritten materials, such as notes and letters, typically contain a mixture of some simplified and some traditional characters, depending on the age, educational level, and personal preference of the writer. In addition to the official simplified characters, there are also several hundred unofficial simplified characters commonly used in handwritten notes or on signs.
Interestingly, in recent years—even though the government discourages this—it has become fashionable in some parts of China to use traditional characters on the signs of hotels, restaurants, and shops. Professional people often have some traditional characters on their name cards. The reasons for this partial return of traditional characters include that they are considered more formal, more aesthetically pleasing, and more chic, since they are associated with the affluent Chinese societies of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Traditional characters are probably also considered more eye-catching, precisely since they differ from what is normally written. While educated mainland Chinese readers can read most texts printed in traditional characters, they often cannot write traditional characters.
In Taiwan the situation is more or less reversed. With few exceptions, only the traditional characters appear in print. However, as in pre-1949 China, many simplified characters are used in informal handwriting such as in notes, personal letters, and signs. In recent years, with the increased contact between Taiwan and mainland China through the exchange of letters, e-mails, television programming, and personal visits, many people in Taiwan have become familiar with the relatively few simplified characters that are post-1949 innovations. However, while educated Taiwanese typically can recognize most simplified characters, they may not be able to write them.
As for the other Chinese language-using societies, traditional characters are official and widely used in Hong Kong and Macao, but one increasingly sees simplified characters there also, in part due to the influence of the large numbers of visitors from the mainland. In Singapore, simplified characters are official, though it’s not uncommon to see traditional characters on store signs. In Malaysian Chinese communities, both simplified and traditional characters are in common use, as is the case in overseas Chinese communities in the rest of the world.
What we have, then, is a single language with multiple written standards—a rather common situation among the major languages of the world, and in essence not so very different from the different spellings and usages prevalent in the various English-speaking countries. The bottom line for you, as a learner of Chinese, is that if you wish to become proficient in reading all kinds of Chinese written today (even just Chinese written in mainland China), you’ll eventually need to be able to read both simplified and traditional characters. With time and practice, this is all very doable, and the materials you have in your hands right now are designed to help you do that as efficiently and easily as possible, since every lesson is presented first in simplified characters and then again in traditional characters (of course, you can also choose to study only one type of characters). Now, as regards writing, since most educated Chinese can recognize both forms of characters and since computer conversion of simplified to traditional or vice versa is easily accomplished, there is really no need for most learners to learn how to write both forms of characters. You’ll probably wish to learn how to write the type of characters used in the region where you plan to live or travel most frequently.
Finally, there is the question of the format of the characters. Traditionally, Chinese characters were written from top to bottom, right to left. Since the 1950s, it has become increasingly common to write Chinese according to the Western format, that is, horizontally, from left to right. This is now the standard format in the PRC, though in recent years the vertical style seems to have been making a limited comeback for writings on literary or cultural topics. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, the traditional vertical format is still common, though scientific and technical writings, informal handwritten notes and letters, and the subtitles of movies and television programs are now usually in horizontal style. The option of horizontal or vertical formats—and a third, rarer format with characters written horizontally but from right to left—adds a stylistic variety and versatility to Chinese that is absent from English and most other languages. Since both horizontal and vertical formats are commonly encountered everywhere that Chinese is used, this textbook includes texts in both formats.
What does the future hold in store for the Chinese writing system? That is not so easy to predict. There is no question that, if written as it is spoken, Chinese could be written in Pinyin. It’s possible that, someday, Pinyin might replace the characters, something that a number of Chinese intellectuals and political leaders have in the past advocated. The widespread use of computers for processing Chinese characters, for which most people input Pinyin and select the characters they want from their monitor screen, has already had a noticeable effect on the ability of native Chinese to handwrite characters from memory, as have newer communications technologies like e-mail and text messaging. Not only people’s ability to write characters has been affected, but also the content of the Chinese they write, which includes many neologisms, simplifications, and abbreviations, and reflects frequent mixing of characters with Pinyin and Roman letters.
On the other hand, Chinese society is, like our own, very conservative and the characters have been an intrinsic part of Chinese culture for thousands of years. Though characters have the disadvantages of being hard to learn and at times cumbersome to work with, they do have certain advantages, including flexibility of format (think of book titles), efficient use of space (one page of English in United Nations documents typically translates to about of a page of Chinese), and the fact that one can skim or scan for a specific word or phrase faster in Chinese than in alphabetic languages (since characters tend to stand out more). It must also be acknowledged that the Chinese writing system has stood the test of time and proven to be eminently successful, since it is used today by more people than any other written language in history. The reality is that Chinese characters will be around for the forseeable future, so the only realistic approach for the non-native who wishes to learn Chinese reading and writing is to buckle down and learn them. Indeed, due to simplifications and standardization in the language, better reference tools, and improvements in technology, textbooks, and teaching methods, written Chinese is today easier to learn than ever before. In the next section, we’ll take up some practical suggestions for ways to help you learn it better.
Suggested Strategies for Learning to Read and Write Chinese
In learning to read and write Chinese, it’s important not only to work hard but also to work smart, that is, to make the most efficient use possible of your time and energy. Many of the strategies suggested in the orientation section of Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening apply also to written Chinese, so it would be well worth your while to review those strategies now. Below are listed a few additional strategies that apply specifically to reading and writing.
1. Learn to handwrite all the characters in this volume. Being able to handwrite characters is important not only for writing but also for reading, since if you can write a character correctly from memory, you’re more likely to be able to recognize it and distinguish it from similar characters. Later on in your study of Chinese, you’ll also want to learn how to process Chinese characters using computers, but we feel it’s very important for beginning learners to have the experience of learning how to write several hundred of the highest-frequency characters by hand.
2. In learning and reviewing characters, it’s important to practice writing each one many times, so that you eventually are able to write it from memory. The character practice sheets in the accompanying volume Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing Practice Book have been designed to help you learn to do this with the correct stroke order and direction. Don’t just “draw” the characters; at the same time you’re writing a character, pronounce it out loud and think of its meaning. By combining mechanical, visual, and auditory stimuli in this way, you’re more likely to remember the characters you study.
3. Be sure to follow the correct stroke order and direction. If you don’t, your characters will not only not look right but you might have difficulty in using dictionaries, since these are traditionally based on the number of strokes in characters or character components. The accuracy of handwriting recognition software might also be affected if strokes are written in the wrong order and direction. And if you’re not familiar with correct stroke order, you may in the future have problems reading and writing Chinese cursive script, since which strokes can be connected is closely related to the order and direction of individual strokes.
4. While accuracy is most important, strive to make your characters look as aesthetically pleasing and as “Chinese” as possible. Be aware that, in Chinese society, how you write your characters says a lot about the kind of person you are and the education you’ve received.
5. Be sensitive to the constituent components of characters, many of which reoccur in other characters. For example, there are many groups of characters that share a component called the semantic or radical, e.g., the characters 河, 湖, and 海, all of which contain on their left side the so-called “water” radical (氵) and have meanings related to “water” (“river,” “lake,” and “sea,” respectively). And then there are other groups of characters that share a component called the phonetic, e.g., 生, 姓, and 星, all of which share the phonetic 生 and have a pronunciation somewhat similar to shēng. This textbook provides detailed information on character components, but you would do well to keep your own lists of characters you’ve studied that share radicals, phonetics, or other components.
6. When you encounter a new character or one you once learned but have forgotten, guess its pronunciation from the phonetic, and guess its meaning from the radical. And always carefully consider the context—the word the character represents or is part of, the sentence in which it occurs, and the overall discourse. This is what native readers do.
7. Watch out for characters that are similar in appearance to other characters. The fact is that there are in Chinese many groups of similar-looking characters such as 干千, 大太, 文交, 可司, 住往, 王五正, or 差着看. Many of these “look-alike” characters are pointed out and drilled in this textbook, but you may also wish to keep your own collection in a separate notebook.
8. The best method for learning characters is to study several new ones every day. Daily study of a few new characters (and regular review of “old” characters) is far more productive than cramming the night before a test.
9. One of the most effective ways of learning characters is to test yourself frequently. After you’ve studied several characters and the words written with them, fold a separate sheet of paper down the long end and cover up the left-hand side of the page where the Chinese is. Now test yourself to see if you can write the Chinese by looking at the English. With a pencil, put a small “X” by those items you still have problems with and review them later. Then retest yourself.
10. Wherever you go, take along a couple of dozen Chinese character flashcards from Basic Mandarin Chinese Reading & Writing Practice Book. Use “empty” time you spend waiting in line or before classes begin to study the flashcards. Your goal should be to identify those characters and words you still have problems with and remove them from the larger set for special attention.
11. Both the ability to read Chinese out loud with correct pronunciation and phrasing and the ability to read Chinese silently at a reasonable rate of speed are important. When reading the sentences, conversations, and narratives in this textbook, first read them out loud once or twice, and then read them again silently once or twice.
12. To attain a high level of Chinese reading proficiency, it’s important to do two types of reading: intensive reading, where you read slowly and carefully, trying to understand and master every new character, word, and grammar pattern; and extensive reading, where you read faster and in greater quantity but read only for the general meaning, not bothering to look up every unfamiliar item unless an item is crucial to an understanding of the passage. While the majority of readings in this course will be of the intensive kind, you’ll have some opportunities to experience extensive reading also.
13. Having urged you to practice writing characters, we now need to warn you against going to extremes. Some learners are tempted to spend a lot of time “playing” with characters, to the extent that other kinds of class preparation (such as drilling with the audio recordings, memorizing conversations, or studying the grammatical and cultural notes) are neglected. Certainly, Chinese characters are an art form and we encourage you to write them as beautifully as you can, but don’t go overboard. Stay aware of your priorities: listening and speaking must come first, then reading. These three skills are almost certain to be more useful to you—and they are easier to develop—than the skill of writing.
14. While it’s true that, among the writing systems of the world, Chinese characters are unique in some ways, and while it can be interesting and helpful to study the structure and development of individual characters, it’s also important not to become “fixated” on characters. For the most part, Chinese characters are neither more nor less than written symbols used to represent speech, and it’s best to take a matter-of-fact attitude toward them. Even more important than learning the individual characters, you need to focus on the other aspects of Chinese that are essential for attaining reading proficiency: the words written using characters, punctuation, written-style vocabulary and grammar, reading fluency, the ability to read between the lines, skimming, scanning, and so forth. Good luck to you in your studies of written Chinese!
Footnotes
1 Cf. Eleanor H. Jorden and A. Ronald Walton, “Truly Foreign Languages: Instructional Challenges” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 1987.
2 The two introductory units take up numbers, personal names, and place names and are designed to familiarize learners with the basic strokes of characters while they (in many cases) are learning pronunciation and romanization from Basic Mandarin Chinese Speaking & Listening. One advantage of numbers and names, besides their obvious utility, is that they can occur by themselves and require no grammatical knowledge to be understood.
3 On the rare occasions when there were no appropriate characters in the Basic Conversation of the corresponding lesson, characters from the Supplementary Vocabulary of the corresponding lesson were chosen, or characters from previous lessons where there had been an excess of appropriate characters.
4 Be aware that, when reading characters out loud, Chinese readers have a tendency to give syllables their full tone, so that some syllables that are neutral tone in conversation are pronounced with a full tone instead (e.g., 朋友 “friend” may be read off as péngyŏu instead of péngyou). Our advice in such cases is to follow the pronunciation of your teacher, mentor, or the audio recording that accompanies this text.
5 The main exception to this is Unit A, which is exactly the same in simplified and traditional characters; therefore, it is presented only once, in horizontal format. Although in this book simplified characters are presented in horizontal format and traditional characters are usually presented in vertical format, which reflects general practice in the Chinese “real world,” learners should be aware that simplified characters can also be printed or handwritten in vertical format, and traditional characters can also be (and not infrequently are) printed or handwritten in horizontal format.
