Elementary Chinese- I, Study notes of Chinese

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Elementary Chinese I

Elementary Chinese I Copyright © 2022 by Wenying Zhou is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Image Credits viii Introduction 1

Part I. Introduction: The Basics of Chinese

1. Tones 5
2. Simple Finals and Initials 7
3. Compound Finals and Nasal Finals 9
4. Chinese Characters 11

Part II. Lesson 1: First Contact

5. Lesson 1 Dialogue 1: Meeting People for the First Time

6. Lesson 1 Dialogue 2: Where are you from? 30

Part III. Lesson 2: Family Members and

Occupations

7. Lesson 2 Dialogue 1: Talking About a Photo 43
8. Lesson 2 Dialogue 2: Talking About Family Members

Acknowledgments

This textbook would not have been possible without the funding from the Open Educational Resources (OER) Award Program at Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries. Special thanks goes to Regina Gong, the OER & Student Success Librarian at the MSU Libraries. I am very grateful to the training she and her team provided before I started this project because it equipped me with the skills necessary to start my work. Regina’s continuous support and guidance ensured the quality of this book. I would also like to thank my students, because their interest in learning Chinese has inspired and motivated me to create this resource to meet their learning needs. Lastly, I would like to thank two OER resources I remixed when creating this book. The first is “Gateway to Chinese“, which most of the dialogues in this textbook were adopted from. To make the resource better meet my students’ learning needs, I made them more authentic, created vocabulary lists, and added grammar explanations and culture facts that go with the dialogues. The other resource I adapted for my introduction chapter is Lin Hong’s “Beginning Chinese.“ Acknowledgments | vii

Image Credits

Cover Image

Cover design provided by MSU Libraries Publishing Services student intern Srividhya Pallay. “Chinese Dragon” by dgoomany is licensed under CC BY-SA 2. viii | Image Credits

2 | Introduction

PART I

INTRODUCTION: THE BASICS OF CHINESE

Learning Objectives:

After learning this lesson, you will be able to:

• know the four tones, neutral tones, and tone markers.
• pronounce consonants/initials and vowels/finals.
• understand the writing system, including basic strokes, character composition, and stroke order.
• learn some basic expressions that are often used in class. Introduction: The Basics of Chinese | 3

1. Tones

Chinese is a tonal language. Tones are used to differentiate the meanings between words that have the same syllable. There are four tones in Mandarin Chinese, as shown below: Watch the following video to learn how the four tones are pronounced: One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/chs101/?p=121#oembed- In addition, there is a neutral tone, which is pronounced quickly and lightly. Syllables with a neutral tone have no tone mark. Watch the video below to learn how to pronounce it: One or more interactive elements has been excluded Tones | 5

from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/chs101/?p=121#oembed- 6 | Tones

from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/chs101/?p=124#oembed- 8 | Simple Finals and Initials

3. Compound Finals and

Nasal Finals

There are nine compound finals in Chinese: ai, ei, ao, ou, iu, ui, ie, üe, and er. As you can see, -ao is a compound final made up of the two simple vowels a + o. When pronouncing such a compound, all you need to do is to glide your tongue from one simple vowel to the other (see the table below). Compound Finals Compare to English ai as the i in “b i ke” ei similar to “ey” in the English “hey” ao similar to “ou” in the English “loud” ou similar to “oa” in the English “boat” iu combine Chinese finals “i” and “ou” ui similar to the sound in “wait”. It is spelled as “wei” when it stands as an independent syllable ie similar to the ye in “ ye s” üe as a slide from pinyin “ü” to the vowel “e” er Roll up your tongue and keep it in the middle position of your mouth. Similar to the “ear” in the English “early”. Watch the video below and learn how to pronounce them: One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/chs101/?p=129#oembed- Compound Finals and Nasal Finals | 9

4. Chinese Characters

Brief Introduction:

Chinese characters, also called Hanzi, are the oldest continuously used writing system in the world. Unlike the Roman alphabets, Chinese characters are used to illustrate meaning rather than sound. That’s why learning to read Chinese requires a lot of memorization. There are over 100,000 different Chinese characters. It is actually impossible to count them all precisely. However, the good news is, for language learners, knowing just 2,000 to 3,000 characters will give you the tools to read most newspapers and magazines.

Character Composition:

The composition of Chinese characters follows a certain system. Most of the characters consist of two components, one phonetic component and one symbolic component (as can be found in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th, and 12th rows of the table below). The phonetic component indicates how a character is pronounced, and the symbolic component signifies the meaning of the character. For example, the character 姐 on the 2nd row consists of two components: on the left is the symbolic component “女”, meaning “female, woman”; on the right is the phonetic component “且”, with the pronunciation “qie”. The meaning of the character is “big sister”. Some characters consist of three components, as listed in the 4th and 5th rows of the table below. Some characters are single component ones, such as 口，大，水 , as listed in the first row of the table below. Chinese Characters | 11

Radicals:

Radicals are the essential components of Chinese characters. For example, in the Chinese character 你 (meaning “you”), the left part 亻is a radical that evolved from the earliest visual representation of a person. Radicals are often used to illustrate meanings. In the example of the character 你 , the radical 亻indicates “person”. 12 | Chinese Characters