Learning Mandarin with Greg

If you’ve heard about Chinese currency at all, you might have also heard it called several different names. That’s not surprising as we do the same with our money. While I might talk about the dollar (Australian, US, or other), and I might say “that’s 10 dollars”, I’m more likely to say “that’s ten bucks”. The same happens with Chinese currency, with the added complication that it has both Chinese names, and names that are used when referring to it in English.

2019-06-07

I’ve often heard that the best way to learn any language is to spend a lot of time reading the language, particularly books. I really think that’s true. So, given my interest in learning Mandarin (Chinese), I wanted to spend more time reading the language.

Now the challenge is always that until you know enough language, it’s hard to read books at all, and if you have to keep looking up all the words, that gets painful pretty quickly too. I’ve heard that ideally, you want to already know about 90% of the words. You want to already know almost all of the common words and need to look up the words that are harder for you.

2019-06-06

Most languages have expressions that are really massive exaggerations and Mandarin is no different. One of my favorites is the way they say:

死了 (Sǐle) which is basically like “to death”

An example would be:

我饿死了。(Wǒ è sǐle.) which is literally “I hungry death” followed by 了 (le) which some people regard as “past tense” but really is an indication that a state has changed. This sentence basically means “I’m starving” and so the state change is that I wasn’t starving but now I am.

2019-05-31

In my previous Learning Mandarin post, I discussed personal pronouns and adjectives. Additional useful related words are:

Him, her, it, they, and them

Similar to the way that we have male, female, and other genders for these pronouns, Mandarin has the same concept but what’s interesting is that the spoken words are the same for all of them. The written characters are different for each:

他 (Tā) is the word for “he”.

2019-05-24

In English, we have personal pronouns and adjectives like:

I, we, you, your, our, my

So what are the equivalents in Mandarin?

我 (Wǒ) means “I”. It’s pronounced pretty much like the English “war”. However, in English, a possessive form is my. In Mandarin, we use the same word as for I, but add on an indication that it’s possessive.

我的 (Wǒ de) means “my”. The de is pronounced a bit like “da” and

2019-05-17

In English, we can choose to write with an active voice:

The thief stole my bicycle.

We can also write with a passive voice:

My bicycle was stolen by the thief.

We could also write, somewhat awkwardly:

The thief, in relation to my bike, stole.

So the question is about whether the same thing appears in Chinese. And the answer is Yes.

Here is an active voice for the sentence above. It’s closer to the awkward third option above.

2019-05-10

I remember finding it strange when I was first learning about Chinese, that they really don’t have words for yes and no. It seemed obvious that any language would have that. Now I think they’re unnecessary words, and what the Chinese do is better.

If you type yes and no into Google Translate and ask for the Chinese equivalents, this is what you see:

But the translation of yes here is more like “is” and the translation of no here is more like “not have”.

2019-05-03

One aspect of Chinese that I love is how direct much of the language is. There is a particular pattern when this is really apparent.

We might say “Will you go or not?".  The Chinese pattern is:

你会不会去？(Nǐ huì bù huì qù?) 不 (bù) is basically “not”.

This is literally “you will not will go ?”

It’s a pattern that I should be using far more often than I do, but it doesn’t come as naturally to me.

2019-04-26

My wife is of Chinese descent. She actually speaks a Chinese dialect (not Mandarin). Locally, that’s often called Teochew but it’s better known to Chinese as 潮州话 (Cháozhōu huà which means tidal region language), or perhaps 潮汕话 (Cháoshàn huà).

I’m (very) slowly learning some Teochew. Even though it’s typically written as Teochew, when I hear speakers of it pronounce it, the name sounds more like “der jill”.

Counting aunties

When we were getting married, I noticed the long list of aunties and uncles that were coming to our wedding. I remember asking her if they were all closely related. What fascinated me was that my wife said yes, but when I asked what their names were, she referred to them by number i.e. Auntie Two, Aunty Three, and so on.

2019-04-19

In an earlier post, I finished showing how to count in Mandarin, including large numbers and some of the odd features of the counting, like the way that Chinese say two ten-thousands rather than twenty-thousand.

But another thing that I constantly messed up when first learning Mandarin was the word for two. And that’s because there are two words for two. I suppose that’s not surprising if you think about how many words we use for zero.

2019-04-12