Introduction to Putonghua, "The Common Speech"

More than 70 percent of Chinese speak standard Chinese, putonghua. Still, there are many dialects spoken in China. The main difference among the various dialects is the pronunciation, as the grammar stays very much the same. The differences in pronunciation can be quite significant, and people from the Northern parts of China cannot really follow the speech of a person from Southern China. The written language is the same all over China, so there exists a "common language" among the Chinese after all.

Putonghua, aka Mandarin Chinese, is used in schools and in media. Every Chinese is supposed to master it, but in practice many Chinese are kind of bilingual, as they study Mandarin Chinese in school, and speak a local dialect at home amongst the family.

The term Mandarin dates from the end of the Qing dynasty period (1644 - 1911), when a court-language was developed for official use. The word mandarin refers to court officials. Current Mandarin Chinese is not the same language that was spoken in imperial courts, but the word Mandarin has remained to describe it.

Standard Chinese was subject to an active reform during the beginning of the last century, as Chinese society was also going through some major changes. Classical Imperial Chinese was considered too old and outdated to fit modern life.

The standard Chinese we hear today in mainland China was officially implemented after the revolution in 1949. Since then it has been used as official language in schools and in media all over mainland China. Putonghua is based on Beijing and Northern Chinese dialects.

Pinyin-romanization

Chinese use characters for writing. Each character has a meaning of its own, and in modern Chinese, words are usually a compound of one or two characters.

Only about 4 percent of the characters are purely pictographic, i.e. represent the object as a picture. Most of the characters are picto-phonetics, meaning that a part of the character indicates the meaning and the other part refers to its pronunciation. In most cases you could not know simply by looking at the character exactly how it is pronounced – you just have to learn the characters one by one and memorize them.

For centuries the Chinese – and foreigners – have made many efforts to turn the characters into a phonetically applicable form. Many systems have been developed and used, and nowadays the most common romanization method is the so called pinyin-method. Pinyin-method was created in 1958 and is based on the Latin alphabet. It is used in Chinese primary schools as well as in teaching Chinese to foreigners. English–Chinese–English dictionaries also follow pinyin-logic, which means that it is possible to make use of a dictionary even without mastering the characters. But, in order to really master the Chinese language, it is worth the effort to learn to write... or at least read!

In our web-lessons we use pinyin as the teaching language. You can also find related characters in each lesson. If you only wish to master some spoken Chinese, learning pinyin is absolutely enough.

In Mainland China, and also in most foreign countries, the pinyin method is quite widely used. But for example in Hongkong, Taiwan and among Chinese immigrants around the world, you can find a variety of phonetic writing systems. This is the reason why Chinese names might be written in quite many ways.

Tones

In the Chinese language, each word is pronounced in a specific tone. There are four tones in Mandarin Chinese, and these tones are marked by the numbers 1 to 4. There is the first, second, third and fourth tone. In addition to these, there also exists a so-called fifth, i.e. neutral, tone, but it is not specifically marked and thus can be counted out.

In pinyin writing, the tones are marked above the words.

1st tone is high and even
2nd tone rises from down to up
3rd tone first goes down and then raises up
4th tone goes down quite fast

We can practice tones by pronouncing the word “ma” in all four tones:
mā, má, mă, mà

The meaning of the word “ma” changes as you pronounce it with different tones. Mā with first tone means "mother," má means "linen," mă is "horse" and mà stands for "cursing." Keeping the right tone really makes a difference!

Just for the sake of phonetic practice we can repeat the words ni and hao in all four tones.:

nī, ní, nǐ, nì
hāo, háo, hǎo, hào

If you are not used to paying attention to tones in your voice, please try to "overdo" it a bit, just to make a difference. In the beginning it might be quite a challenge to hear the difference between the tones. Please note that the first tone is relatively high and even, and the fourth tone goes down rather swiftly and sharply.