In my last Learning Mandarin post, I described how to say “what”. Another very common word in English is “how”. And again, it also has a simple translation in Mandarin. 怎么 (Zěnme) is the word for “how”. Similar to what I mentioned for “what”, you can use “how?” on it’s own, the same way we do in English. 怎么? (Zěnme?) is equivalent to “How?” Some more examples are: 你怎么样？ (Nǐ zěnme yàng?

2019-12-13

One very common word in English is “what”. It also has a simple translation in Mandarin. 什么 (Shénme) is the word for “what”. On it’s own, you can use it in a sentence the same way we do in English. 什么? (Shénme?) is equivalent to “What?” Some more examples are: 那是什么？ (Nà shì shénme?) is “What is that?” (Notice the order is different to English. Literally, it’s “that is what?”).

2019-12-06

An interesting pattern in Mandarin relates to how we translate the English “not only A but also B”. This is a good example of the fact that you can’t just try to translate words directly between languages. Here’s a Mandarin example: 他不但很帅，而且很聪明 。 (Tā bùdàn hěn shuài, érqiě hěn cōngmíng.) It’s “He is not only handsome but also very smart”. 不但 (Bùdàn) would literally translate to “not but”, and 而且 (Érqiě) is pretty much like anything from “and” to “moreover” or “in addition”.

2019-11-29

Another group of words that are probably best learned as a set are the ones that are related to things happening suddenly. And you’ll notice they are similar in one way. 突然 (Túrán) is basically “suddenly” but can also be used for “abruptly” or “unexpectedly”. 忽然 (Hūrán) is also “suddenly” or “all of a sudden”. But the difference is that it’s a bit softer. 突然 (Túrán) can be intended to be quite harsh or jarring.

2019-11-22

In English, the word not delivers the opposite meaning to other words, usually to verbs. So He is here becomes He is not here, and I do like it becomes I do not like it. But in Mandarin, there appear to be two words that are used in much the same way. 不 (Bù) and 没 (Méi) and both used to indicate “not”. And unlike in English, they go before the verb.

2019-11-20

I find that learning whole sets of words is useful, rather than just trying to learn words in isolation. A good example is that when I was learning colors, I’d just learn as many colors as I could, and I’d just look around me in whatever room I was in, and try to name the colors that I saw. A similar useful set is positions and directions. These are also good to learn as a set:

2019-11-15

The word 点 (Diǎn) is particularly useful. It basically means “a dot” like made with a writing brush, and from that, it means “a little bit”. I previously discussed how northerners (and Beijing folk) put “r” sounds on the end of many words. This is another one. So they’d often use 点儿 (Diǎn er) which is pronounced a bit like “dee-arrr”. There are two basic ways that点 gets used though.

2019-11-01

In many ways, verbs in Mandarin are easier than the ones in English. There’s no need to learn any equivalent of conjugation and tense. In English, we have a verb like make but then we have to learn made, making, and how to use will make, has been made, etc. In Chinese, there’s pretty much a single form of the verb, and there’s another character that is often used to indicate that an action is complete.

2019-10-25

I was at school a long time ago. For all the 5 years that I was at high school, I studied Japanese. In Brisbane in 1971 when I started studying it, I can tell you that doing so was a rare thing. In fact, studying any Asian language was pretty rare. The country has come a long, long way since those days. Curiously though, my Japanese teacher wasn’t Japanese. He was a Caucasian guy named Joe Geiger.

2019-10-18

I need to start by coming right out and saying that I don’t believe in things being lucky or unlucky. Many things that appear to have come from luck just haven’t. Sometimes things go the way you hope, and other times they don’t go the way you hope. And bad things can just happen for no good reason. What you can do is put yourself in a position where you increase your chances of a good thing happening.

2019-10-11