Dialogue

Vocabulary

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Lesson Notes

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Lesson Transcript

Intro

Michael: What writing system does Chinese use?
Dehua: And has it changed over time?
Michael: At ChineseClass101.com, we hear these questions often.
Willa Washington, a college student, is in class with her friend, Zhenxuan Zhang. She is confused about the Chinese writing system, so she asks her friend,
"What alphabet do you use?"
华盛顿 薇拉: 你们使用什么字母表? (Nǐmen shǐyòng shénme zìmǔ biǎo?)
Dialogue
华盛顿 薇拉: 你们使用什么字母表? (Nǐmen shǐyòng shénme zìmǔ biǎo?)
张 振轩: 我们使用汉字。 (Wǒmen shǐyòng hànzì.)
Michael: Once more with the English translation.
华盛顿 薇拉: 你们使用什么字母表? (Nǐmen shǐyòng shénme zìmǔ biǎo?)
Michael: "What alphabet do you use?"
张 振轩: 我们使用汉字。 (Wǒmen shǐyòng hànzì.)
Michael: "We use Chinese characters."

Lesson focus

Michael: Unlike English, Chinese is not an alphabetic language. Instead of using a phonetic alphabet, Chinese is written using characters, which in Chinese are known as
Dehua: 汉字 (hànzì).
Michael: A character consists of a variety of strokes, or, in Mandarin,
Dehua: 笔画 (bǐhuà).
Michael: Although there are only about 30 different strokes in Chinese writing, all the different combinations of these strokes result in tens of thousands of characters being listed in Chinese dictionaries. Luckily, despite this, only a few thousand characters are commonly used in modern Chinese.
Michael: A Chinese character can have as few as one single stroke. An example of this can be seen in the number "one," which in Chinese is
Dehua: 一 (yī).
Michael: To write this character, you just need to write a single horizontal stroke.
Michael: Although there is no agreement on the character with the most strokes, among the most complicated characters, some have upwards of 50 strokes. Needless to say, it can be very time consuming to write such characters.
Michael: In addition, there is also a specific stroke order which one should follow when writing each character. Stroke order in Chinese is called
Dehua: 笔画顺序 (bǐhuà shùnxù),
Michael: or, in short,
Dehua: 笔顺 (bǐshùn).
Michael: Let's look at a simple example. The number "ten" in Chinese is
Dehua: 十 (shí).
Michael: The character looks like a cross, and it consists of two strokes. We start with a horizontal stroke, just as we did for the character for the number "one." This is then followed by a vertical stroke that cuts down through the middle of the horizontal stroke.
Michael: We hope that you now have a basic idea of how Chinese writing works. If you consider an individual character as a building, the strokes are like the building blocks that must be arranged in a particular order.
[Recall 1]
Michael: Let's take a closer look at the dialogue.
Do you remember how Willa said, "What alphabet do you use?"
(pause 4 seconds)
Dehua: 你们使用什么字母表? (Nǐmen shǐyòng shénme zìmǔ biǎo?)
[Recall 2]
Michael: Now let's take a look at her friend's reply.
Do you remember how Zhenxuan said, "We use Chinese characters."
(pause 4 seconds)
Dehua: 我们使用汉字。 (Wǒmen shǐyòng hànzì.)
Practice Section
Michael: Let's review the conversation in detail: I will say the English translation, and then you try to say the equivalent Chinese. Dehua will then model the correct answer and you can repeat after her, with the focus on your pronunciation.
How do you say, "What alphabet do you use?"
[Beep. Pause 5 seconds.]
Dehua: 你们使用什么字母表? (Nǐmen shǐyòng shénme zìmǔ biǎo?)
Michael: Did you get it right? Listen to Dehua again and repeat.
Dehua: 你们使用什么字母表? (Nǐmen shǐyòng shénme zìmǔ biǎo?)
[Beep. Pause 5 seconds.]
Dehua: 你们使用什么字母表? (Nǐmen shǐyòng shénme zìmǔ biǎo?)
Michael: Let's move on to the second sentence. How do you say, "We use Chinese characters."
[Beep. Pause 5 seconds.]
Dehua: 我们使用汉字。 (Wǒmen shǐyòng hànzì.)
Michael: Did you get it right this time? Again, listen to Dehua and repeat.
Dehua: 我们使用汉字。 (Wǒmen shǐyòng hànzì.)
[Beep. Pause 5 seconds.]
Dehua: 我们使用汉字。 (Wǒmen shǐyòng hànzì.)
Expansion
Michael: Considering that Chinese is not an alphabetic language, it takes a lot of effort to become literate in Chinese. Thankfully, in 1958, a romanization system was invented; this system is known as
Dehua: 拼音 (pīnyīn).
Michael: Pinyin is used to spell out all the Chinese sounds with Roman letters. This thereby allows us to write the pronunciation of any Chinese word without needing to know the character.
Michael: Generally speaking, the pinyin of a character consists of a consonant,
Dehua: 声母 (shēngmǔ),
Michael: a vowel,
Dehua: 韵母 (yùnmǔ)
Michael: and a tone mark,
Dehua: 声调 (shēngdiào).
Michael: Let's look at the example of the singular pronoun "you," which in Chinese is
Dehua: 你 (Nǐ).
Michael: The consonant for this character is "N," or as it's pronounced in pinyin,
Dehua: /n/.
Michael: The vowel for this character is "I," which in pinyin is pronounced
Dehua: /i/.
Michael: And lastly, we have the tone mark, which is placed on the vowel "i."
Because this character has a dipping tone, the tone mark is a tiny v-shape.
In Mandarin, this is the third tone, or
Dehua: 第三声 (dì sān shēng).
Michael: It may be nice to know that every Chinese character has just one syllable.
Michael: In the pinyin system, there are a total of 23 consonants, 24 vowels, and 5 tones.
While this may seem daunting, the number of combinations in pinyin is quite limited, so despite the large number of characters, there are much fewer sounds in Chinese than in other languages like English.

Outro

Michael: Do you have any more questions? We're here to answer them!
Dehua: 再见! (Zàijiàn!)
Michael: See you soon!

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