How Chinese Works

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A Better Guide to Beijing

19 min readMar 20, 2017

Part of the Language section of A Better Guide to Běijīng

You may not want to learn Mandarin, and you certainly don’t need to learn the language in order to travel independently in China, but for those who’d like at least to have some idea how it works, here’s a rough introduction.

‘I speak Chinese’ is a statement that carries less meaning than might at first appear. There are perhaps seven major groups of Chinese dialects (linguists differ on the number) each group so different from the other that they are usually spoken of as different languages, and each of these has itself many dialects.

What makes a language different from a dialect is also a matter of some debate, but as a rule of thumb if you and I can’t understand one another at all then we’re speaking different languages. The Cantonese speaker at your local Chinese restaurant cannot be understood by a speaker of Mandarin, nor vice versa.

Mandarin is the everyday name for a language more accurately known as Modern Standard Chinese or Pǔtōnghuà (普通话, ‘common speech’). It’s a hybrid invention dating back only to the 1950s but which the Chinese often present as the same centuries-old language of officialdom during the imperial era, dubbed Mandarim (‘official’) by Portuguese missionaries. Properly called guānhuà (官话), this was a highly compressed language requiring detailed knowledge of the Chinese classics, used as a lingua franca by officials who were native speakers of any other form of Chinese. It performed much the same role as Latin in medieval Europe. Pǔtōnghuà was designed in modern times to be the official unifying language of the People’s Republic, and is used in schools across the country, all official communications, and almost all broadcasting.

It is commonly assumed by foreigners that Mandarin must be very difficult to learn, a view also appealing to Chinese amour propre. It’s common for them to express a sometimes smug superiority that the language is too much for mere foreigners.

This firm conviction has several odd side-effects. One is that if you don’t have a Chinese face, and merely say Nǐ hǎo (你好, hello) convincingly, you’ll often draw looks and exclamations of astonishment especially if you’re anywhere away from expat haunts.

‘Éi! How come you speak such good Chinese?’

Objecting, in Mandarin, that you’ve only said two words only leads to more consternation.

On other occasions Chinese listeners may simply refuse to accept your Mandarin as such, however fluent it may be, when it is coming out of a non-Chinese face. On the other hand visitors of Chinese descent who know no Mandarin often find many Chinese unwilling to accept that they don’t understand the language their faces suggest that they should.

In fact Mandarin is in many ways simpler than European languages. Sentences are often in the subject–verb–object form familiar to speakers of English. The grammar is both very straightforward and consistent. Verbs have a single form for all persons, and there are no tenses. With rare exceptions nouns have no plural forms or genders, and nothing else has to be modified to agree. There are no articles, definite or indefinite. The apparent complexity of Chinese, as least to foreigners, lies in the unfamiliar nature of its sounds, and its apparently inscrutable writing system.

Tones

Mandarin, like other forms of Chinese and several other Asian tongues, is a tonal language. Most of its sounds begin with a simple consonant and end with a vowel, or a vowel with a nasal finish n, or ng. Some are just vowel sounds on their own, but there are no combinations of consonants like the str in straight. To expand its limited range of noises, Mandarin has four different ways of pitching them (Cantonese, by the way, has eight).

1st: Mā, said with a high, sustained tone (妈, Mum)

2nd: Má, said with a rising tone (麻, hemp)

3rd: Mǎ, said with a falling and then rising tone (马, horse)

4th: Mà, said with an abrupt falling tone (骂, to swear’.)

Some sounds can also be said in a neutral toneless manner. A toneless ma (吗) at the end of a sentence indicates it’s a question rather than a statement.

If this seems bizarre, consider that many languages use tone or pitch to convey meaning, but in a different way. For instance:

Mm? (Sorry, what was that you said? I wasn’t paying attention)

Mm. (I’m listening to what you’re saying and I agree)

Mmmm. (That was nice. Do it again.)

Unfortunately even after multiplying its available sounds roughly by five, Mandarin still has too many homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings). Mā can also mean to wipe and mǎ can also indicate that something is a number, but each is written differently (抹 and 码). Context is usually enough in speech to make it clear what is meant — there aren’t many sentences in which you could substitute yard for number and still make sense. Where there is confusion during a conversation the speaker will describe the component parts of the character he means, sketch it in his palm with a finger, or give another example of its use:

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Tian Yi.’

‘Meaning “heaven-one”, and in “first under heaven”?’

‘No.’

‘As in “heaven and man unite as one”, then?’

‘No! It’s not “heaven-one”. it’s “heaven-cloth”. You know — “cloth of heaven”. as in “seamless lies the cloth of heaven”.

Mǎ Jiàn, Beijing Coma, London 2008

So it’s made clear that the speaker’s name is not 天一 but 天衣, as in the expression 天衣无缝, a chéngyǔ or traditional four-character saying, meaning flawless. Spoken Mandarin really isn’t the most effective tool for communication.

A good teacher has students singing the language to start with, exaggerating every tone until they become familiar. Accuracy with tones is vital since context can overcome errors only in some cases. In everyday speech tones on words whose meaning is obvious are often dropped, and those on the words essential to the overall meaning of what’s being said are stressed. Some tones, and particularly the third tone, may be adjusted according to what follows them. Commonplace nǐ hǎo (hello), for instance, has two third tones one after the other, and is instead pronouced with second then third: Ní hǎo. But this is quickly mastered.

Characters

The written form of the language is much more effective a means of conveying meaning, because all these homophones have different written forms. Unfortunately the writing system itself, while attractive, has its own problems.

There’s considerable disagreement among linguists, but written Chinese is essentially a phonetic system, although one that’s even less consistent and less effective than written English. A switch to a phonetic alphabet was proposed as far back as 1605, when Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (see Jesuit Cemetery) published The Miracle of Western Letters (西字奇迹, Xī Zì Qíjì), the first book to use Roman script to write Chinese. But it was another 200 years before some Chinese intellectuals began to argue in favour of letters rather than characters. By 1936 even literary luminary Lǔ Xùn (see Lǔ Xùn Museum) was remarking, ‘If the sinographs are not destroyed, China will certainly perish.’

The main cause of complaint was that whereas in societies using a limited number of letters to spell words literacy might be almost universal, in China a fifth of the population at most was literate, although many claimed the numbers to be even smaller, the limited availability of education and the lack of desire to educate girls at all playing a part.

The arrival of modern communications in the form of the telegraph seemed to suggest that change must come since each character had to be looked up in a table and converted to a numerical code before transmission. But the further development of technology and the ubiquity of the computer and ‘smart’ phone have now largely solved the problem. More people now know and use pīnyīn abbreviations to type in Mandarin words and phrases which the computer converts, merely asking them to select from a range of characters with the same sound. Or they draw characters on screens or trackpads which phones and computers then recognise. The characters may continue to change in the future, but they are not going to go away.

There are books that attempt to present all the characters as pictures, but this is entirely misleading. While some began that way, about 85% are made of up two parts: a radical and a phonetic, neither of those playing a picture role. The campaign to simplify characters for Modern Standard Chinese has also left many remote from their originals.

On closer examination, what at first seems to be an infinite variety of forms turns out to be constructed from a limited number of elements put together in different combinations. The radical part may give some indication of the class of idea with which the whole character is dealing, while the phonetic part may indicate that the whole character sounds something like the phonetic part does when it stands on its own.

Take the ma examples given earlier. Mǎ (马, horse) is functioning as the phonetic element in mā (妈, Mum) and ma (吗, question particle), standing on the right in each case. It’s also the bottom half of mà (骂, to swear). The radical element can be the left, right, top or bottom part of a character, or even something in the middle. In mā (妈) it’s the left half, which is the female radical and entirely appropriate for Mum. In ma (吗) it’s the ‘mouth’ radical, also on the left, as appropriate for the question particle as it is for mà (骂), to swear. Unfortunately while you can be fairly confident that any character containing 马 is some form of ma, there’s no information about tone, and when Mandarin is spoken with no tone there’s no meaning.

But it’s important not to mistake the phonetic element for the radical element, and 马 can function as a radical, too, such as in 驱 (qū, to spur on a horse). But the system frequently breaks down. 冯 is a common surname, and the two dots on the left are the ‘ice’ radical, leaving ma as the phonetic. But it’s pronounced Féng. There are various causes for these inconsistences, including drifts in pronunciation over the centuries, and problems introduced by the inconsistently applied and conflicting methods of simplification of the characters undertaken in the 1950s.

There are many other examples in which the supposedly phonetic element is less than clear. Most characters containing the zhōng (中) of Zhōngguó (中国, China) are also some sort of zhong, but can also be some sort of chong. When it comes to written Chinese there’s an unavoidable element of rote memorisation, similar to the fun of learning what to say for ough in each of rough, cough, bough, though, thorough, through, lough, etc. These only seem easy and obvious to those who’ve learned them from childhood. But learning Chinese characters is similarly a matter of effort, not intellectual challenge.

Just as the word horse can be combined with others in English to make new ideas (e.g. horseback, horse trough, horse hair) so can mǎ and other Chinese characters. Mǎ’ān (马鞍) is ‘saddle’, and mǎkù (马裤) are jodhpurs or riding breeches (horse trousers). Entertainingly mǎhū (马虎, horse tiger) is careless; mǎmǎhūhū (马马虎虎, horse horse tiger tiger) is not so bad, so-so; and mǎshàng (马上, on a horse) is immediately, which may tell you something about how quickly things get done in China.

Some characters are unable to stand on their own, but always appear in combinations with others. Some have more than one pronunciation. 觉 (jiào, sleep), may also be read as jué, to feel, but also means to wake up.

There have been many proposals to do away with the characters altogether, a policy once supported by Máo himself, and to replace them either with a phonetic system using Roman letters or, as in Japan, with a newly invented syllabary. The key difficulty is Mandarin’s innumerable homophones. See A Mouthful of Stones.

A Mouthful of Stones

From the Language section of A Better Guide to Běijīng

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Using Dictionaries

It is impossible to use a dictionary to look up a character you don’t know how to say unless you know how to write Chinese characters. It’s only necessary to master a small number of strokes to be able to write Chinese, but everyone is expected to make these strokes in the same way and in the same order when writing a character. In everyday handwriting the pen may often not be lifted from the paper between every stroke, and unless everyone used the same order and direction a wide variety of different squiggles would result although the same character was intended. Writing clear characters with individual strokes is like block printing (using capital letters) with the Roman alphabet.

The number of strokes is fairly well hidden in most printed forms. Kǒu (口), for instance, the little box often appearing as the ‘mouth’ radical, takes three strokes to write, not four. The first is the left side of the box, drawn downwards, the second is drawn across the top from left to right and then down the right side in a single stroke. The third closes the box from left to right.

The first task when using a dictionary is to identify the radical of the character you want to translate. At the front of the Chinese–English section you’ll find a table listing all the radicals in order of the number of strokes it takes to write them. There are typically a little over 200, although dictionaries vary. To look up mā (妈) you might well be confident that the radical would be nǚ (女), the female part on the left, which takes three strokes to write. Turning to the part of the table that lists three-stroke radicals and running your finger down the 39 possibilities until you saw the female character, you’d be referred to another table on the following pages, which would list all the characters which have the female radical in order of the number of strokes it takes to complete them. In the case of 妈 this would be three more strokes, and it would not be difficult to spot the right character amongst the eleven or so possibilities (depending on the size of your dictionary). You would now be given the number of the page on which to find it in the main body of the dictionary, or the pronunciation, written in pīnyīn. The rest of the dictionary is in alphabetical order of pīnyīn spelling, and then in order of tone: luò, mā, má, mǎ, mà, ma, mái, for example. (Note in passing that Mandarin hasn’t even employed all the possibilities open to it — there is no first tone māi, for instance.)

This procedure sounds complex, but a little familiarity with Chinese makes it swift and fairly straightforward, although there are many inconsistencies. To confuse matters further, dictionaries may differ on which is the radical for a particular character. Mà (‘to swear’), can be found in some dictionaries not under the mouth radical but the horse radical, although that is apparently the phonetic element, and the connection between horses and swearing is probably only apparent to jockeys and gamblers.

Computers and phones with Chinese dictionary software such as Pleco have now made life much easier, but even for those who wish to draw their characters on the screen, stroke order and direction still need to be reasonably accurate.

Those proud of the difficulty of written Chinese love to play up the number of characters that must be learned. The classic Kāngxī dictionary contains a little over 47,000 characters, some of them variant forms of a single character. But standard English vocabulary contains, without technical terms, about 250,000 words. Knowledge of all of these is not required for literacy or even for complicated and subtle communication. The Chinese government counts a knowledge of 2000 as sufficient for literacy, but as it manipulates figures for literacy as it does for everything else, 1500 is mysteriously sufficient in the countryside. And as has already been seen, readers need not only individual characters but the meanings that result from combining them with other characters. It’s true that only a few thousand characters are in everyday use, but it’s the Chinese government’s claims of mass literacy that need close examination, which constitute an attempt to hide the failure caused by its lack of investment in education.

Simplification

Originally, although Chinese people spoke several mutually incomprehensible languages (or dialects — but the Běijīng gospel of Hàn unity requires that in China at least they be regarded as dialects of a single unifying language) they could at least write to each other, since barring a few localizations and shorthand variations, they all wrote the same characters, and at least amongst educated people employed largely the same grammar.

The harmonization of the writing systems of individual kingdoms was enforced following the unification of China under the Qín dynasty (221–207 BCE). After the communist victory of 1949 this unity began to be dismantled, for the laudable purpose of increasing literacy by reducing the number of characters and making them easier to write. The result is that many of the characters in your local restaurant’s menu are often more complicated than the ones that you will see in mainland China, since most expatriate Chinese left long before the simplification began, or came from Hong Kong which despite the handover from British rule in 1997 has so far escaped it.

Take the character for ‘meal’, or ‘cooked rice’, for example: fàn. In Modern Standard Chinese it takes a mere seven strokes to write (饭), but in the original full form it took nine to write the radical alone (the left-hand side of 飯). This still appears in its original form when it stands by itself as shí (食), meaning ‘meal’ or ‘food’.

Several different simplification methods were used, including just abandoning some characters and substituting others with the same sound, and substituting shorthand forms, typically reducing the number of necessary strokes, but removing the characters ever further from their origins.

Full-form or traditional characters are making a come-back in the giant brass letters on new shop, hotel, and restaurant signs, and there was even recently a proposal that the ham-fisted and ineptly applied simplications should be abandoned altogether, although equally a proposal for a round of further simplifications. Signs, incidentally, are usually read from left to right, but some, like many older inscriptions on temples and gates, are read from right to left.

Mandarin in Roman Letters

The modern official Romanization system is Hànyǔ pīnyīn (汉语拼音), which means ‘Chinese language combine sounds’, and has largely replaced a variety of alternative systems. The most popular of the earlier versions was Wade-Giles, still preferred by those who studied Chinese before the sixties, and still in use in many important text books. It’s usually easy to identify because it uses apostrophes to indicate hard frontal sounds by placing them after consonants that would otherwise be relatively soft. For instance, p is sounded as b, unless it appears as p’. It may suddenly seem clear why Běijīng ended up as Peking in English — that’s how it was written in earlier transliteration, and only the language student would know to soften the initial p to a b, and the k to a j. The French developed the official Post Office Romanization of place names, influenced by the values of Roman characters in the French language, and this, too, contributed to the confusion.

A familiarity with pīnyīn is considerably easier to achieve than written Chinese and, since all important Chinese names and places are given in pīnyīn in this book, will be a great aid to communication. Unlike in earlier systems, most letters have values similar to those the English speaker would expect, although Mandarin does have some noises that are not found in English. It’s particularly important to grasp, for instance, that the zh in Lánzhōu (兰州, capital of Gànsù Province) is a soft kind of j, and the ou is the ough of dough. Ticket-sellers hearing ‘Lan-zoo’ or ‘Lan-chow’, common mispronunciations among foreign visitors, are not likely to understand. Something resembling ‘Lan-joe’ has a chance of success, even if your tones are less than accurate. For a guide to pīnyīn see below.

Apostrophes also appear in pīnyīn but only to make it clear where breaks in sound should come. The name of Cháng’ān Dàjiē, the Avenue of Eternal Peace in central Běijīng, is made from two characters for cháng (long) and ān (peace), not any form of chan and gan. The name of the ancient capital Xī’ān needs the apostrophe to show that it’s made from two characters and syllables, xī (west) and ān (peace), not a single xiān (pronounced differently and meaning ‘first’). There’s little consistency in how these apostrophes are used, but in general it’s best to add them wherever it helps to make the pronunciation clearer to those unfamiliar with Mandarin. Oddly, pīnyīn is rarely tone-marked except in language texts, rather defeating its object of helping you to say the right sound (but in this book every pīnyīn word is tone-marked).

There’s a lot of variation, too, as to how pīnyīn is used to represent longer strings of syllables — what should be joined together, and what separated. This book breaks things up whenever it will aid clarity and help you identify points of the compass, gates, and other common elements in street names, for instance. You’ll see pīnyīn on street signs and shop signs sometimes written as long strings and perhaps broken in the middle of a word to go to the next line. At other times it appears as a row of monosyllables.

Pīnyīn has been introduced to primary schools to aid children in producing the accurate sounds. Mandarin has only been the national language of China since the time of the People’s Republic, an invented amalgam Běijīng sounds (less some particularly local peculiarities), northern dialects, and the grammar of modern literature in the vernacular. Even today, a mere 100km from the capital the sounds made when speaking at home may vary quite widely from those of the schoolroom. But only younger adults educated after 1976 are likely to have any grasp of pīnyīn, and until recently swiftly forgot it as it played no role after early language learning, although now it may be used for computer input.

Questions

There are three main ways of asking questions in Chinese, and since you’ll want to ask quite a few, and will be asked many yourself, it’s worth at least learning to recognize a question from a statement. As in English, one way of asking questions is to use question words such as who, what, and where. You’ll frequently hear: Nǐ shì nǎguó rén? ‘You are which country person?’, to which the answer is Wǒ shì Yīngguó rén, ‘I am Britain person’, for example. Note that for all persons, singular or plural, the verb to be is shì. There’s no memorizing the conjugations of regular and irregular verbs in Mandarin: every one is of this one-size-fits-all kind.

Questions are also frequently asked by offering you a choice: Nǐ shì bú shì Měiguó rén?, ‘You are not are America person?’ If you are, the response is shì, ‘am’, and if you are not, the response is bú shì, ‘not am’. You’ll also often hear, Nǐ dǒng bù dǒng, ‘You understand not understand?’. If you did, say dǒng, and if not, bù dǒng. Mandarin doesn’t really have words for yes or no. The tendency is to concentrate on the main verb and affirm or deny it. Duì (对), meaning correct is the nearest thing to yes, and bù (不, sometimes bú, often toneless) is used in most cases to make verbs negative. The exception is the verb to have, yǒu (有), which is negated with méi (没). Méi yǒu is a Mandarin expression you’ll hear quite frequently during your trip: There aren’t any, We don’t have any, and Whatever you want to happen isn’t going to come to pass, although shāoděng yí huǐr (稍等一会儿, wait a moment), is becoming more popular.

The third main way of asking questions is to use the question particle, ma (吗). Add it to the end of any statement and you have a question. Tā shì Jiānádà rén ma? He is Canada person [question]? Chinese has several useful particles which go after verbs or at the ends of sentences, such as ba, used for making suggestions or propositions, and ne, indicating that there’s a continuing subject of conversation. For instance, Nǐ hǎo ma?, a standard greeting, You well [question]? is often answered, Wǒ hěn hǎo. Nǐ ne?, I very well. You [same topic]?

Time

Particles after verbs and sentences play a role in indicating time, since verbs don’t modify to show tense. Tā qù Zhōngguó, He is going to China, is also He will go, He went, etc. Extra terms such as tomorrow and before are usually added to give a sense of time: Zuótiān tā qù Zhōngguó le, Yesterday he went to China. Suffixes called aspect-particles, such as le and guo, clarify matters further. Chinese is mostly concerned with putting events in order, and with whether they are over and done with yet, or still continuing: Tā qù le Zhōngguó, ‘He’s gone to China’ (at a specific time, but he hasn’t come back yet), or Tā qùguo Zhōngguó, ‘He’s been to China’ (at some unspecified time and returned). Roughly, le at the end of a sentence or after a verb gives a sense of change or completion, and guo after a verb indicates that something happened over a period of time but it’s now finished. Another particle zhe is used to indicate that some action is continuing or that two actions are happening at the same time. This may sound odd at first, but with a little familiarity it makes English, French, and German look unnecessarily complicated.

Quantities

There’s no plural form for any nouns except a handful of personal pronouns and job titles, so indications of quantity are important, as are expressions such as ‘some’, ‘many’ and ‘a set of’. Tā mǎi shū ma? means Is he buying books? Tā mǎi yì běn shū ma? means Is he buying a book? All expressions of quantity require the use of a measure word. You can’t say a fish or two fish in Chinese; the required structure is number + measure word + noun. This is like saying a slice of toast or a round of ammunition in English, using simple expressions of quantity like a cup of, a kilo of, and using collective nouns like flock or shoal. There’s no real translation of běn in the sentence above that works in this context: Is he buying one volume book? is like the pidgin English that was used in the early days of British trade in Canton.

Objects with similar characteristics use the same measure word. Most things that are flat use zhāng (张) for example. Three tickets are sān zhāng piào and two tables are liǎng zhāng zhuōzi. Long and flexible things use tiáo (条). Sì tiáo yú are four fish, yì tiáo lù is a road. One of the pleasures of learning Mandarin is that since the Chinese have historically had little contact with the West they do not share the same metaphors or link ideas in the same way. To learn the language is also to learn new and often entertaining ways of looking at the world — you probably never thought of roads and fish being alike before.

Although there are large numbers of measure words, only a limited number are in everyday use and some can be replaced by the all-purpose ge. Most useful to the traveller are quantitive expressions like yì bēi chá (a cup of tea), liǎng wǎn bǎifàn (two bowls of rice), and Qǐng lái yí fèn huíguō ruò (Please bring a portion of ‘return-to-the-pot’ pork.)

A Few Sayings

The imagery of everyday expressions is often vibrant, particularly the four-character sayings called chéngyǔ (idioms or proverbs). Some refer to events in traditional myths and legends, but still pithily and unsentimentally capture the struggle of daily life, and human failings in general. Hǔ tóu shé wěi (虎头蛇尾), ‘tiger head, snake tail’, describes those who start projects enthusiastically but fail to finish them off. A person with limited experience or narrow views is described as jǐng dǐ zhī wā (井底之蛙), ‘a frog at the bottom of a well’. Those who practise self-deception are neatly captured in yǎn ěr dào líng (掩耳盗铃), ‘cover ears to steal bell’ — everyone is aware of the noise except the thief. An expression describing those who take action without noticing changes in circumstances is derived from the story of a man whose sword accidentally fell overboard during a river trip, so he made a mark on the boat to help him find it again. This idiom, kè zhōu qiú jiàn (刻舟求剑), ‘cut boat seek sword’, also indicates absurd levels of stupidity.