Readers should know about the basic features of the Chinese language as desbribed below:
The Chinese language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan Family. The Chinese language is being used by over 1.3 billion people, including people in mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, China Towns in major American and European cities. It is the official language of China, and one of the six working languages of the United Nations.
A. The phonetics of the Chinese language:
The syllable of Chinese is consisted of three parts:
1. Shéngmǔ--initial consonant,
2. Yùnmǔ--simple or compound vowel,
3. Shéngdiào--the four tones of classical and modern Chinese phonetics:
High and level tone—汤—tāng: soup
Rising tone—糖—táng: sugar
Falling-rising tone—躺—tǎng: to lie down
Falling tone—烫—tàng: hot
B. Grammar: most elements of Chinese language are of a single syllable, for instance 手(hand),洗(wash),民(people) and 失(lost). Two elements can be combined into a word: 马+路=马路(a road); 开+关=开关(a switch).Such disyllables take up a bigger part in Chinese words.
To compare with Indo-European languages, you find no suffix, such as “ness”, “tion”, “ment” in the Chinese.
In your language , the function of a word is rather simple, for instance, a noun can only be used as a subject or an object, but in Chinese, a word has more functions, for example, an adjective can be used as a predicate (这儿干净Here is clean.), an attribute (干净衣服Clean cloths), a complement (洗干净Wash it clean), a subject (干净最重要Cleanness is the most important thing) or an object (他不爱干净He does not like being clean).
The subject-predicate structure is quite loose in Chinese, you can put a comma after the subject, for instance 这个人呐,很会说话(This person, knows how to talk). Such a structure is always used as a predicate, for example 中国地方真大(The expanse of China [is] really big).
The verb-complement structure is quite unique in Chinese, for instance 听懂(listening comprehension).
C. The Chinese characters, which is called “Han Zi”, has been a tool to record the Chinese language and exchange ideas by the Han people since ancient times. The earliest Chinese characters that we were able to discover are those from the Shang Dynasty more than 3,000 years ago. Chinese characters are kind of syllabic words, one character represents a syllable in the language. A Chinese character is usually formed by a radical and a basic part, for instance, “江,jiang, river”, is formed by a water radical “氵“and a basic part “工“;”信,xin, trust” is formed by a people radical “亻“ and a basic part “言--words”. More than 80% of characters are “pictophonetic characters”, which means that one part of a character indicates meaning, and the other sound. For example, “座”, a seating place, pronounced as “坐 -zùo”, seating under a roof“广”; “鸠”—“九”indicates sound—“jiú”, “鸟”indicates meaning, a bird, the character means a turtledove.
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