漢語第一課 The First Chinese Lesson ^ _ ^

奧運令北京日新月異.            (2008/5/8 參攷消息 )

奧運： ao yunˋˋ   Olympic games

令：lingˋ           make, render

北京：Bei jing ˇˋ   Beijing

日新月異：ri xin yue yi ˋ一ˋˋ  literally: daily new monthly different, means something changes very rapidly, especially when the change is a fantastic one.

Olympic games make Beijing change very rapidly.

    See? The sentence order is the same as the English version. It is generally acknowledged that Chinese has no grammar, it’s true, sometimes you just need to change the position of the characters in a sentence and the meaning will accordingly change, it’s a intriguing thing to notice that. For instance, ancient Chinese scholars often amuzed themselves by creating peculiar couplets, I can remember one :

客上天然居

居然天上客

    The order of the two sentences in this couplet are entirely different, yet they still have such a natural meaning. There’s a specific name for this : character game. They thought they were just playing a game with those characters.

    In fact, the traditional Chinese poems can also be seen as a kind of “character game”, since most of them were very short yet were meantime largely limited by the poetic style which had numerous limitations, limitations of rhyme, limitations of rhythm , of tone etc.  

Li Style of Chinese calligraphy

Xing Style

    Some basic knowledge of modern Chinese.

    Pronunciation: there are altogether five tones in modern Chinese, namely Ping,Shang,Qu,Ru and Qingsheng, as symbolized by一ˊˇˋ˙. Generally speaking, each character has a specific tone, only few of them have more than one pronunciation, (this ofen occurs when the characters are used in different contexts ) Foreigners who have tried to learn Chinese always found it hard to master the tones, once when I watched a TV programme in which some foreingers were also participating, I was amazed when those foreingers spoke with so fluent and idiomatic Chinese yet with so bad tones. Are the five tones really difficult to master? But there are only five tones. So I think it’s very important to master the tones at first, if you don’t want to cause too many misunderstandings in China ^-^ ( for example 盃子(cup) and 被子(quilt) are often mispronounced by foreingers ( thus Chinese people are confused by them) due to false communication of the tones.)

盃子 beizi

被子　beizi

(Which on earth do you want, beizi or beizi ? )

Grammar: the grammar of Chinese is not so clear as that of English or some other European languages. But what is a grammar? Grammar, in its broader sense, may represent a comprehensive system by which people create sentences. So from this perspective ,we may say every language has its own grammar, Chinese has its own grammar too. Generally speaking, Chinese sentence order is very much like that of English. As for regular / irregular verbs and present / past tense etc., Chinese has its own form to show. Here let me quote Gu Hongming, whose talent for language has made him so distinguished ( he’s said to have mastered “half a dozen” languages), to show you the paradox a foreigner was faced with when learning Chinese. 

“…Spoken language without case, without tense,without regular and irregular verbs; in fact without grammar,or any rule whatever.But people have said to me that Chinese is difficult even because of its simplicity; even because it has no rule or grammar.” ( The Chinese Language)

 Background: the May, 4^th movement in 1919 marked the beginning of modern Chinese. For the past 2 or 3 thousand years Chinese----in written form, changed very little. Experts say that in the very beginning written Chinese and spoken Chinese were the same, but as years passed by, the spoken Chinese was always changing while the written Chinese, due to Chinese people’s veneration of everything ancient, made little change. So the gap between written Chinese and spoken Chinese became larger and larger, till 1919, when the traditional written Chinese “ wenyan”was officially abandoned. Ever since then, modern Chinese, which has unified written and spoken language, quickly replaced the traditional Chinese. The relationship between traditional Chinese and modern Chinese can be regarded as father and son, they are closely related kins.^ - ^

previous form of Chinese characters, about 1000BC .

How to learn a foreign language?  I guess this is not a easy thing for most of us. There’s no easy access to the mastery of a language. But there are some methods to referred to though. I came across a seemingly good one several weeks ago. It is from a most distinguished scholar nowadays in China, named Ji Xianlin. He told that when he was in Germany ( he’s been in Germany for 10 years during World War 2 ) he decided to learn an already extinct Indian language ( only few experts can read it ) for scholastic reason. After taught some basic knowledge, he was then lead by his tutor directly to the panorama of this old, profound language. Of course he felt very uncomfortable at first, but after he himself became an expert of this language, he recalled that this method of learning really benefitted him very much. So, why not listen to some words of the “ already passed man”?

Add a comment