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    Mandarin Chinese Characters Language Practice Pad: Learn Mandarin Chinese in Just a Few Minutes Per Day! (Fully Romanized)
    Mandarin Chinese Characters Language Practice Pad: Learn Mandarin Chinese in Just a Few Minutes Per Day! (Fully Romanized)
    Mandarin Chinese Characters Language Practice Pad: Learn Mandarin Chinese in Just a Few Minutes Per Day! (Fully Romanized)
    Ebook730 pages1 hour

    Mandarin Chinese Characters Language Practice Pad: Learn Mandarin Chinese in Just a Few Minutes Per Day! (Fully Romanized)

    By Xin Liang and Martha Lam

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    About this ebook

    Five minutes a day is all it takes to begin learning Chinese!

    The perfect guide for busy people who want to learn Chinese, Mandarin Chinese Characters Language Practice Pad helps even those completely unfamiliar with the language learn and write the 332 most essential Chinese characters--in just five minutes a day!

    Each page introduces one new character--showing how it is pronounced and written, along with its meaning and related vocabulary. The reverse side offers sample phrases and sentences to demonstrate how to use the words in their correct context. After studying the character and its compound forms, users can practice writing these in a notebook, with the ability to reference the mnemonic visual aids and stroke order included on each page. This is an ideal resource for HSK Levels 1 & 2 as well as AP Chinese Language and Culture Exam prep.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTuttle Publishing
    Release dateMar 6, 2018
    ISBN9781462919437
    Mandarin Chinese Characters Language Practice Pad: Learn Mandarin Chinese in Just a Few Minutes Per Day! (Fully Romanized)

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      Book preview

      Mandarin Chinese Characters Language Practice Pad - Xin Liang

      INTRODUCTION

      How did characters come about?

      Chinese characters, or Hanzi (汉字), have evolved over 5,000 years. While the earliest characters inscribed on oracle bones (1600–1046 B.C.) are mostly pictographic (象形), they only represent about 4% of the total number. The vast majority are pictophonetic characters (形声), consisting of a meaning and a phonetic component. The other two categories include indicative characters (指示) and associative characters (会意). Below are examples of the four categories:

      How are characters pronounced?

      Chinese is not a phonetic language and the romanization of a character usually bears no relation to its written form. This book adopts the Hanyu Pinyin, a special romanization system, created for learners of Chinese to aid pronunciation. Each Chinese character is pronounced using only one syllable. A syllable consists of an initial consonant, a final vowel, and a tone. Here is an example of the syllable mā.

      Chinese is a tonal language. Tone matters because a variation in tone implies a change in meaning. There are four main tones, plus a neutral tone, and each tone is marked by an accent over the vowel.

      How do I write Chinese characters?

      Chinese characters are squarish in appearance. In learning to write the characters try to visualize them as in a box each, and the proper rendering of each stroke should result in a neat character well proportioned and sitting right in the middle of the invisible box.

      Basic strokes Each character is composed of a number of basic strokes. Strokes come in various shapes and sizes: a stroke can be a dot, a horizontal line, a vertical line, a diagonal line or a line with a hook. The basic eight strokes are indicated in the character 永:

      Stre order Writing characters in the correct stroke order is important if the character is to have the correct appearance. To get it right, it is important to remember the 7 rules:

      Radicals Every Chinese character has a radical or is itself a radical. There are more than 200 radicals in Chinese. Take a look at these three characters:

      They have the same component 亻on the left-hand side. 亻is 人, which means a person. This component 亻is the radical for all the three characters above and it gives a clue to the meaning of the character.

      Knowing radicals not only helps us to guess the meaning of a character, but it also makes it easy for us to look up the meaning of a character in a dictionary. A radical list is included in the Practice Pad to facilitate your learning of the radicals.

      What are the main characteristics of Chinese grammar?

      Word order plays a key role in structuring ideas. The word order of the basic Chinese sentence structure is Subject–Verb–Object, which matches that of English (see Example 1). A question in Chinese follows the same word order of a statement (see Example.2).

      The significance of the word order emerges as we try to add more details to the basic sentence structure. For example, the notion of place goes before the verb (see Example 3).

      If we add a time notion to the above sentence, we can either put Time before Place (see Example 4) or put Time at the beginning of the sentence (see Example 5).

      There are always exceptions to the word order, depending on the different grammatical functions and the complexity of the sentence. For beginners, the above basic structures should suffice.

      Function words (虚词) play an important role in a sentence and unlike English, Chinese is not an inflectional language. The verb-form remains unchanged under all circumstances, and function words are added to indicate the subtle changes in meaning. Function words serve only grammatical functions and they often carry no meaning by themselves. They appear as adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and particles, interjections and onomatopoeias.

      For example, the function word 了 le is used to indicate past action.

      The function word 在 zài is used as a preposition in the example below:

      The Chinese language does not have tenses: the same verb 去 can be used for today, tomorrow or yesterday. To depict tenses, function words and other words can be used.

      For example, if you want to say I go to Beijing today, then the word 今天 (today) can be used to indicate the tense, as given below:

      If you want to say I went to Beijing, then the word 了 (a particle) is used to indicate a past action, as follows:

      If you want to say I will go to Beijing tomorrow, the word 明天 (tomorrow) is used to indicate future tense:

      How to use the Practice Pad?

      1. There are 334 main characters, which fully cover the basic characters required for the levels 1 and 2 of Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì (HSK). It is an international standardized examination that tests and rates Chinese language proficiency. Some characters are also chosen from HSK levels 3 and 4 because of their high-frequency usage in daily communication.

      2. One good way to learn characters is to practice writing every day, especially if you think about what each character means as you write it. If you are working on your own without a teacher, work through only a few characters at a time.

      3. The front of each page shows a single character, its pronunciation and English meaning. Where the traditional form differs from the simplified form, it is shown on the page. You should try to memorize the shape, ound and meaning of each character as a whole.

      The stroke order guide and the direction of each stroke are given just above the character. They show you the correct way to write each character and you can use the blank boxes to practice writing the character.

      Common words or phrases give examples of how the character is combined with other character(s) to make words. These common words or phrases are chosen because they are everyday words that are frequently used by Chinese speakers, and they are taken from HSK Levels 1–3.

      4. To help you use the main character, a short dialogue in Chinese, with pinyin romanization and English meaning, is displayed on the back of the page. The dialogue illustrates how the character and the main words are used in daily communication. The topics also include most language functions required at HSK levels 1 and 2.

      LIST OF RADICAL
      INTRODUCTION

      Mandarin Chinese Characters Practice Pad introduces 334 main characters, which fully cover the basic characters required for the levels 1 and 2 of Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì (HSK). It is an international standardized examination that tests and rates Chinese language proficiency. Some characters are also chosen from HSK levels 3 and 4 because of their high-frequency usage in daily communication.

      One good way to learn characters is to practice writing every day, especially if you think about what each character means as you write it. If you are working on your own without a teacher, work through only a few characters at a time.

      The front of each page shows a single character, its pronunciation and English meaning. Where the traditional form differs from the simplified form, it is shown on the page. You should try to memorize the shape, sound and meaning of each character as a whole.

      The stroke order guide and the direction of each stroke are given just above the character. They show you the correct way to write each character and you can use the blank boxes to practice writing the character.

      Common words or phrases give examples of how the character is combined with other character(s) to make words. These common words or phrases are chosen because they are everyday words that are frequently used by Chinese speakers, and they are taken from HSK Levels 1–3.

      To help you use the main character, a short dialogue in Chinese, with pinyin romanization and English meaning, is displayed on the back of the page. The dialogue illustrates how the character and the main words are used in daily communication. The topics also include most language functions required at HSK levels 1 and 2.

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