Free audio CD with the Times on Sunday

The free CD with the times last Sunday can be downloaded from the times website. The Times has had a China week in celebration of the Chinese new year. There are also more resources on the Times website.

Communicate in Chinese from CCTV-9

The 'Travel in Chinese' programme on CCTV-9 which I have mentioned before is quite advanced and the pace of the learning is quite fast. The other problem is that there is not printed material to go with the series yet. The series of 'Travel in Chinese' will purchased on video or DVD until they have finished playing the series on CCTV-9.

However, CCTV-9 has produced a series called 'Communicate in Chinese' which has been out on DVD for a while. The 'Communicate in Chinese' series is a more basic introduction to Chinese, and is available in DVD format with a printed guide. There are 12 DVD's and four books that go with the complete series which means that it will take a few hours to watch.

As the new series is not available yet I have purchased a copy of 'Communicate in Chinese'. Unfortunately, I could not buy any copies in the UK and I had to purchase it from China and have it shipped in. I found a good store called HeyChinese on eBay which sells learning material for Chinese learners.

Lesson 1: For Starters

In the first episode of the Real Chinese series on the BBC we are introduced to Mandarin Chinese and its place within the languages of China. Mandarin Chinese is the official language of China, although there are several other languages spoken in China such as Tibetan and Cantonese.

In the first lesson we are also introduced to some basic phrases, such as saying hello, good evening, and goodbye. These simple phrases are meant to get people started in their learning of Mandarin Chinese.

The vocabulary introduced in the lesson is:

English	Chinese	Pinyin
Good	好	hǎo
Thank you	谢谢	Xiè.xie
Do you speak English?		Nǐ shuō Yīngwén ma?
I'm sorry		Duìbùqǐ

Introduction to Tones in Mandarin

The aspect of Mandarin Chinese that English learners have to a customise themselves to in addition to the Pinyin system is the fact that Mandarin is a tonal language. There are four different tones in Mandarin Chinese (five if you count the natural tone), and there are nine tones in Cantonese.

Foreign people tend to find it hard to get the tones right and end up speaking in a monotone voice. Also, as in many other languages, a slight difference in tone can have a huge impact on how it is interpreted, and this can be a problem.

The the tones in Mandarin goes as follows:

1. First Tone, or High Tone: A steady high sound.
2. Second Tone, or Rising Tone: A sound that rises from mid level to high.
3. Third Tone, or Low Tone: has a mid-low to low descent, if at the end of a sentence or before a pause, it is then followed by a rising pitch.
4. Forth Tone, or Falling Tone: Features a sharp downward accent ("dipping") from high to low, and is a shorter tone.
5. Fifth Tone, or Neutral Tone is unstressed.

It is interesting to note that Old Chinese dialects do not require a tone and that Chinese has developed these tones during historical times. Moreover, Mandarin Chinese is part of the group of languages called the Sino-Tibetan Languages because of its origin, and most of the languages in the Sino-Tibetan group have are tonal.

Learning Chinese on CCTV-9

One great resource for people wanting to learn Chinese and visit China is the China Central Television channel (CCTV-9) which is available on Sky Digital Channel 511. The channel has lots of news and China interest stories as well as a useful program teaching Chinese which is called 'Travel in Chinese'

The 'Travel in Chinese' program is on at 7:15pm every weekday. It is a very good learning resource because it informs the viewer about China while at the same time teaching the language. Every episode includes a some information about tourist places in China as well as some sample dialogue which is examined.

Introduction to Pinyin

One of the difficulties in learning any Chinese dialect stems from the nature of the Chinese character system that all Chinese is based on. Chinese characters, unlike those used phonetic alphabets, such as the Roman alphabet, do not tell the reader how they ought to be pronounced. Instead, Chinese characters represent an idea or concept.

The Chinese character system has its positive aspects, but it also has it drawbacks. One of the benefits of the Chinese character system is that people with hugely different dialects such as Mandarin or Cantonese can read and understand the same written characters and yet they pronounce them in very different ways. This flexibility has been one of the reasons why Chinese characters have had such an impact on writing in the east. Languages such as Korean and Japanese have in the past adapted the Chinese character system to suite their own language.

However, the drawback with Chinese is that because the character does not give you an idea about how it ought to be pronounced we have to have a different system set up in place to give us the phonetics – to tell us how to pronounce the character. There have been many such systems offering a phonetic alphabets to help people pronounce the different characters in their respective dialects.

Interestingly, in the 14th Century the Korean leader Se jong the great realised that literacy in Korea was not widespread due to the difficulty in learning the Chinese character system that they had inherited from the Chinese. King Se jong devised his own phonetic written language called Hangul which is easier for people to learn. The Hangul writing system is used throughout Korea today. The same sort of situation has arisen in Japan where a modified Chinese character system is used alongside phonetic systems.

The Chinese themselves have devised phonetic alphabets to help them with their own language. A system ‘Zhuyin fuhao’ meaning ‘symbols for annotating sounds’ – shortened to Zhuyin or Bopomofo – has been used by people in China, and has also found usage in writing down the native language found in Taiwan. However, the most commonly used system is the official one call Pinyin, which uses Roman characters to demonstrate to phonetics of the Mandarin Chinese dialect.

Importantly, the Pinyin system does not use the English phonetics (like the Wade-Giles system seems to), even though they are very similar in places, but, rather, it uses the Romanised phonetics. This means that it takes a little bit of effort for the English speaker to learn the Pinyin system.

The story so far

When I started learning Chinese Mandarin I enrolled in an introductory class in Mandarin Chinese. The Introductory class lasted 12 weeks and has given me an introduction to many aspects of Chinese Mandarin, such as conversational skills, Pinyin phonetics, Chinese characters etc.

One of the most important resources we used in the Introductory lessons was the BBC Real Chinese website, which is divided into several lessons with quizzes at the end of each lesson to test you learning. The website accompanies a T.V series which is shown late at night on BBC and is well worth watching. The next time the series will be shown is the 20th of February