Introduction in the Chinese language
Introduction in the Chinese language |
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Ni hao! - Hello
Who plans a longer stay in Shaolin has to learn the fundamental basics of the Chinese language. There is at maximum one Chinese who can speak or understand English. However their English is awfully bad and the most simple communication can last hours. We were the lucky ones who had the following conversation with a group of Chinese:
1. I am a chinese.
2. I live in china.
3. I sit on a bank.
4. I have shoes.
This conversation took us over half an hour.....
In Shaolin only Chinese is spoken. This means that for each meal, for each small shopping tour or for each sight seeing tour in Shaolin the Chinese language is absolutely necessary!
Most of you will travel to several parts of China too. Unfortunately the north and south dialects (Mandarin and Cantonese) differ considerably, so that your Chinese knowledge is useless in any another region.
And now a little lesson:
The Chinese writing consists of several thousand characters. In the 60's many complicated characters were simplified and the so-called abbreviations are far common now. However a daily paper exists of approx. 2000 characters and the Chinese need at least 5 years intensive learning in order to understand daily news. Therefore the foreigners should learn first the fundamental basics of the language and then the characters.
The official phonetic transcription of the People's Republic of China is called "Hanyu pinyin". This phonetic transcription tries to convert the Chinese characters into our well-known latin letters, however this is not completely possible. The largest learning effect arises as a result of listening and speaking.
Nearly every Chinese syllable possesses its own meaning and its own character. Chinese is written not word by word but syllable for syllable.
The Chinese is a tone language, i.e. each syllable can have one of four possible tone intonations. So, if a word is stressed wrongly, it will get a completely different meaning. Here a small example, in order to clarify the four tones of the Chinese.
Two people look at an airplane, which they can only hear, but not see. A sees it first and calls with joy "there" - B looks in completely different direction and asks doubting with rising tone process "there?" - A is annoyed at B's ignorance, it says mocking "there", then he points at the airplane and repeats with forced intonation "there". Chinese would understand the terms as the following: to set up - dozen - strike - large.
1. Ton: The syllable is spoken high with a flat process, e.g. the word "game" in the sentence "Baseball is a fantastic game."
2. Ton: This is a rising tone like an asking "Yes?".
3. Ton: The syllable is deeply spoken, i.e. neither with a flat nor a high tone, e.g. the syllable "well" in "well done".
4. Ton: This is a falling tone like an aggressive "no!".
In the Chinese language there are scarcely 1600 acoustically distinguishable syllables.
Grammar
There is no special grammar in Chinese language, i.e. conjugation and declination are completely unknown. This simplifies the learning of the language immensly. Nevertheless the construction of the sentence plays an important role.
Ni hao - "Hello" is one of the most important empty phrases and can be used every time.
Tài guì - "Too expensive" each foreigner should know this phrase since every ignorant foreigner must pay a much higher price.
Lao Wài - "Foreigners, you will hear those 2 words at least every minute.
Since it is not possible to summarize the Chinese language on a few sides, we would like to refer to further sources for learning the Chinese language.
The "Nín hao! - a practical Chinese course for beginner"(ISBN 3-8018-0055-5) with audio tapes offers an ideal start for learning the Chinese language. Various high schools use this book as basis.
A very handy dictionary is from Langenscheidt - Learning Chinese (ISBN 3-468-22091-X). The small dictionary is clearly written and by presenting the Chinese characters, also an untrained Chinese-speaking person can communicate. This book is absolutely necessary for every the journey.
Under Links. You'll find some multimedia Freeware here, which teaches each Lao Wài the Chinese language.
Yi Lù Píng an! - Bon Voyage!
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