The Chinese Crash Course I Never Had
I’ve spent 10 months teaching myself Chinese. Here’s what I’ve figured out.
I’ve been living in Shanghai for almost a year, working crazy hours at a neat young company, and figuring out life, independence, and interconnectedness on the far side of the world. So far, so good.
One of my big projects has been to learn Chinese. I set myself the goal of passing the 汉语水平考试 — the test of Chinese fluency for foreigners — at level 4 (of 6) before hitting my one year mark in September. It’s an ambitious stretch goal, and I’m coming into the final sprint.
Due to the time constraints of startup life, I’ve been almost entirely self-taught so far (with frequent Q&A support from my lovely friends and colleagues). Tonight, I finally start taking proper lessons with an honest-to-God Chinese instructor. I’m pretty pumped.
Before I came to China, my cousin gave me Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows, which I devoured on my trans-Pacific flight and found to be a useful primer on Chinese lifestyle. Consider this my language appendix to that book, as I try to distill the things I’ve figured out about Chinese so far into a resource for people like my younger self.
Some Orienting Ideas on Chinese
All characters are one syllable.
Yup, the super simple characters and the super complex characters all represent sounds of the same length. The barebones 人 is one syllable, rén, meaning “person.” The much more ornate 赢 is also just one syllable, yíng, meaning “to win.”
Characters are inviolable: there’s no adding an extra squiggle to character to make a noun possessive or plural. All case action or verb conjugation happen by adding other characters around the core one. As a corollary, this means that similar-looking characters, like 太, 大, and 犬 are completely distinct entities.
A small number of characters have multiple meanings with different pronunciations. 行 can be xíng (“okay”) or háng (“profession”). Cases like this are infrequent and have rarely caused me any trouble, though.
Chinese has a very limited phonetic space.
There are an exceedingly finite number of syllable sounds in spoken Chinese. You can make a handy two-dimensional chart of every possible beginning of a syllable, and every possible ending for a syllable, and you get 2043 syllable sounds that are ever used in Chinese. That seems like a lot. But when you discount the archaic and rarely-used sounds, there are really only about 400 syllable sounds that are used in spoken Mandarin (contrast with about 4000 sounds in English).
Then you add the tones. There are four tones in Mandarin (different “dialects” can have fewer or more tones; more on dialects later). Each syllable can theoretically have any of the four tones, but the syllable-tone space isn’t completely filled either. Indeed, some common syllables are only really used in one tone.
To add another layer of density, some of Chinese’s already tight phonetic range is soaked up by very similar sounds like xu vs. shu and ju vs. zhu.
So, Chinese sounds get recycled a lot.
The result is that there can be dozens of characters with completely unrelated meanings that all sound exactly the same, including tone. Here are 34 characters, 12 of which are very common, that are all pronounced exactly the same way (shì):
士 氏 示 世 市 式 势 事 侍 饰 试 视
柿 是 适 室 逝 释 誓 拭恃 嗜 仕 贳
莳 轼 铈 舐 弑 谥 筮 奭 噬 螫
That means context is essential.
Clearly, Chinese people handle this phonetic density well; they have built a pretty enduring civilization. But as a non-native, I’ve found Chinese listening to be incredibly difficult because meaning is so context-dependent. As a result, once you lose the flow of a conversation, you no longer know which shì just went blowing by your ears. It’s much harder to listen for familiar words as a hook to reconnect to the gist of a conversation than it is with, say, French, where the words are longer and more phonetically diverse.
If you learn the word 记得 (“to remember”) and spend your day listening for jì de, you’ll hear the sounds jì and de traveling together all the time. But if your Chinese isn’t strong enough to follow the flow of the conversation, you’ll have no idea if the jì de you’ve heard is “to remember,” or if you’re hearing about “chicken’s anxiety” (鸡的急得, jī de jí dé).
Bigrams are the core building blocks of Chinese.
It took me a while to figure out how “words” work in Chinese, mostly because I was overthinking it.
There are no spaces in Chinese text, but a Chinese reader does not just see a stream of single characters — a Chinese reader sees words composed of 1-4 characters. Aside from some pronouns and other structure words that take 1 character, most Chinese words are bigrams, which are pairs of characters.
Each character has meaning, but that doesn’t mean each character makes sense when it stands alone. I think the best analogy here is to root words, prefixes, and suffixes in English: When we see the word “interdict,” we can break it into inter- and dict, and see how the two pieces bring their respective meanings together to form this new word. Each piece has meaning that we all understand and can describe, but isn’t really a sensible word when floating on its own.
A lot of Chinese is like that. A character does “mean” something, but it doesn’t always function well all by its lonesome.
With zero linguistic authority, I’ve divided bigrams into two classes in my mind. The first class are the ones where the two characters bring very different meanings together, and are generally decipherable.
复印 = again + to imprint = to photocopy
语法 = language + law = grammar
报名 = to report + name = to sign up
These are nice and clean.
The second type of bigram in my brain is what I’ve been calling the “semantic cluster” bigrams. These are groups of words that come from combining related characters differently. This is a cluster in my mind:
感，觉，性，心，想，信，任
to feel, to perceive, nature, heart, to think, true, to appoint
These characters can be paired up with each other in lots of permutations to cover a wide range of emotional and cognitive perceptions, including “to feel,” “to think,” “to intend,” “to trust,” “to believe,” “emotion,” “sexy,” and “sensitive.” The meaning emerges from which of these related characters you stick together in what order.
It’s helpful to think of this class of bigram in light of China’s incredibly tiny phonetic range: 牙 (yá)and 齿 (chǐ) both mean “tooth” on their own, but each character also shares its sound with dozens of other characters. That’s why you always use both together as 牙齿 when you need the noun “tooth:” yáchǐ is more phonetically distinct.
By the by, I’ve discovered I’m totally dyslexic in Chinese, frequently switching the order of characters in bigrams. Apparently I’m worse than most people about this, but it does happen to foreigners pretty often; don’t be ashamed. Just be careful about switching 感性 (“sensitive”) and 性感 (“sexy”).
Chinese people are confident the tones sound different, but you won’t be (at first).
Eventually you get the hang of it. But to some Chinese people (especially taxi drivers, it seems), the tones are so clearly different that they have trouble imagining how you could confuse them.
During my first few months in China, part of my morning routine was cycling through every tonal combination possible for “Da Xue Lu,” trying to communicate the name of the street where I work to a taxi driver. Despite that street being the heart of our neighborhood and it being only a mile from where I live, we could spend 1-3 minutes trying to understand each other, before I’d get close enough that my driver would have a flash of insight and repeat the name correctly.
To my untrained ear, all 64 combinations sounded the same. To my poor drivers, I was combining unrelated bits of meaning in ways that made no sense.
Parts of speech are pretty flexible.
Words can switch between being nouns and verbs even more easily than in English. Many of Chinese’s prepositions are also verbs. No big deal, but good to be ready for.
Chinese is very parsimonious.
Photo by the author.
Fewer linking words, fewer polite buffer words, fewer pronouns (“It” doesn’t rain in Chinese; we just say “Falling rain”). There’s almost no pluralization, except for personal pronouns. Even after a fair bit of practice, I’ve found that about 60% of the times that I’m trying to contort a complex English idea into Chinese, the correct thing to do is just to drop all the pronouns and prepositions and say it that way. That stuff is all implied.
Word order is similar to English…ish.
Simple Chinese sentences are Subject-Verb-Object, like simple English ones. That means there are fewer brain-hurting inversions than you’ll face in an Subject-Object-Verb language like Turkish. Hooray!
However, the order of everything else can be different. The best shortcut that I’ve come up with is that everything except the direct object usually comes before the verb.
So, “Today I went to the store with you” is:
我今天和你去了商店。
I today with you go [-ed] store.
The passive voice exists and is apparently pretty common, though it hasn’t been a big part of my experience. There is also a common structure to rearrange sentences that have a direct and an indirect object, which is often used in commands.
请把书给我。
Please [inversion particle] book give me.
So, be ready for that.
Proper nouns will completely ruin your day.
There’s no handy marker (like capitalization) for proper nouns in Chinese, and proper nouns are often composed of characters that are also ordinary words.
Take, for example, Xi Jinping, current President of PR China. His name, 习近平, is literally “to practice nearly flat.” Or consider 加拿大 (“jiānádà”), which translates to “increase hold big” — also known as “Canada.”
When you don’t yet know a proper noun, you can be completely confused while listening or reading; “Increase hold big’s winter is very cold” will really throw you off. As your Chinese improves, you start to realize that nonsensical interjections might be proper nouns, but it takes a while to figure that out.
Lies You Will Hear About Chinese
If you do any Googling, or talk to any humans (including Chinese ones), then you will almost certainly encounter lots of misinformation about Chinese.
“Chinese is a language.”
Not really. Chinese is a language family that has been politically cudgeled into a monolith for the sake of appearances. In point of fact, provinces (and many counties) all have different “dialects” that are wholly unintelligible to one another. They all use the same written characters today, but the pronunciation and grammar can be totally different. A neutral observer would conclude that if Spanish and Italian are separate languages, then the different versions of Chinese are separate languages; calling them “dialects” is all about PRC’s “one China” fixation.
Mandarin Chinese (mainland endonym 普通话/pǔtōnghuà, “common speech”) is the official language of mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore. It’s more-or-less the Beijing dialect, and it is inculcated in schools and used in essentially all mainland media.
However, tens of millions of people are native speakers of Cantonese and Shanghainese, ranking those dialects as among the world’s most spoken languages in their own right.
“There are no verb tenses in Chinese.”
For whatever reason, you see this claim a lot. I don’t know how a linguist would define a verb tense, but for a bootstrapper, the idea that Chinese doesn’t have tenses is just stupid.
What Chinese actually doesn’t do is conjugate it’s verbs, because characters aren’t ever modified by context. But Chinese does surround its verbs with auxiliary verbs, adverbs of time, and “aspect” to show tense.
It’s a bit like saying English doesn’t have a future tense, because we use “to go” or the auxiliary “will” verb to show the future instead of direct conjugation. Chinese just does that for all its tenses, along with using a couple characters that are analogous to the “-ed/-ing” suffixes in English.
Chinese uses some different verbs to indicate its tenses than English does. “To have” (有) can be used to set up the past, but it’s not quite the same as English. 将 is the closest fit for the auxiliary “will” verb, but it’s used less often to set up the future tense than 想, 要, and 会, whose primary meanings are “to think,” “to want,” and “to know how,” respectively.
“Chinese is phonetic and intuitive,” AND “Chinese is neither phonetic nor intuitive.”
You will hear both of these all of the time, and they are both useless.
Depending on how you define things, 80-95% of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds. That means they mash together two simpler characters (whose origins are often pictographic) to create a new one. The rule is that one piece brings the sound, and one piece brings the meaning.
手 ＋包 ＝ 抱
Shǒu (“hand”) + bāo (“to wrap”) = bào (“to embrace”)
This is a good case for the phono-semantic concept. When you first see 抱 as a new character, but you already know the more basic 手 and 包 components, you can guess that it sounds like “bāo” and has something to do with “wrapping” and a hand action. The tone is different, and “to embrace” might not be your first guess, but once you’ve decoded this compound it becomes easy to remember.
So, sometimes Chinese can be phonetic and somewhat intuitive!
But let’s look at another example.
手＋是 ＝提
Shǒu (“hand”) + shì (“to be”) = tí (“to raise”)
Well, there goes our helpful rule. You can tell yourself some story about how “hand” and “to be” can fit “to raise,” but it’s certainly not obvious. Moreover, none of the components sound alike. If you dig into Chinese etymology, sure, there was a time when 是 and 提 sounded more similar, but if you’re bootstrapping your Chinese, that’s not helpful to you today. Both the “phono-” and the “semantic” of this phono-semantic compound let us down.
Lots of times, Chinese can be completely non-phonetic and non-intuitive.
That’s All He Wrote
There are a lot of little things I could include, but my goal isn’t to teach anyone Chinese: it’s to help you get your brain ready to think about Chinese, and to let future me have a little record of where I once was.
I hope you found this helpful! If you’re smarter than me about Chinese (which is very easy to be), then please send me corrections. If you’re a fellow bootstrapper and you’ve found a different way of thinking about any of these questions, I’d love to hear it.
Interested in learning Chinese? Check out:
- Memrise, the web/mobile app that has taught me most of my vocabulary
- Chinese Grammar Wiki, a great resource for Chinese grammar/structure
- Go East, the awesome Shanghai-based Chinese-teaching startup where I’m now taking lessons. They do very well-reviewed online classes!
