Chinese For Dummies (13 page)

The new Communist government decided to simplify the writing process by reducing the number of strokes in many characters.
Table 2-2
shows you some examples of the before (traditional characters) and after (simplified characters).

Simplification of the Chinese writing system has political overtones, so if you're planning on doing business in Taiwan, for example, make sure your business cards and other company materials are printed with traditional Chinese characters.

Using a Chinese Dictionary . . . without an Alphabet!

Whether you're looking at simplified or traditional characters (see the preceding section), you don't find any letters stringing them together like you see in English. So how in the world do Chinese people consult a Chinese dictionary? (Bet you didn't know I could read your mind.) In several different ways.

Count the number of strokes in the overall character.
Because Chinese characters are composed of several strokes of the writing brush, one way to look up a character is by counting the number of strokes and then looking up the character under the portion of the diction­ary that notes characters by strokes. But to do so, you have to know which radical to check under first.

Determine the radical.
Each radical is itself composed of a certain number of strokes, so you have to first look up the radical by the number of strokes it contains. After you locate that radical, you start looking under the number of strokes left in the character after that radical to locate the character you wanted to look up in the first place.

Check under the pronunciation of the character.
You can always just check under the pronunciation of the character (assuming you already know how to pronounce it), but you have to sift through every single
homonym
(characters with the same pronunciation) to locate just the right one. You also have to look under the various tones to see which pronunciation comes with the first, second, third, or fourth tone you want to locate. And because Chinese has so many homonyms, this task isn't as easy as it may sound (no pun intended). (You can read more about tones in
Chapter 1
).

I bet now you feel really relieved that you're only focusing on spoken Chinese and not the written language.

 Fun & Games

Fill in the blanks below to test your knowledge of the Chinese writing system. Refer to
Appendix D
for the correct answers.

1. The Chinese written language contains _____ radicals.

a) 862    b) 194    c) 214    d) 2,140

2. The origins of the Chinese writing system can be found on _____.

a) oracle bones    b) bronze inscriptions    c) chopped liver    d) rice cakes

3. The direction of Chinese writing is _____.

a) right to left    b) left to right    c) top to bottom    d) all of the above

4. The most complicated radical to write (
é¼»
) means _____.

a) eye    b) ear    c) nose    d) throat

5. Chinese characters that are simple line drawings representing an object are _____.

a) ideographs    b) compound ideographs    c) pictographs    d) phonetic compounds

Chapter 3

Warming Up with the Basics: Chinese Grammar

In This Chapter

Getting the hang of the parts of speech

Making statements negative or possessive

Discovering how to ask questions

M
aybe you're one of those people who cringe at the mere mention of the word
grammar.
Just the thought of all those rules on how to construct sentences can put you into a cold sweat.

Hey, don't sweat it! This chapter can just as easily be called “Chinese without Tears.” It gives you some quick and easy shortcuts on how to combine the basic building blocks of Chinese (which, by the way, are the same components that make up English) — nouns to name things; adjectives to qualify the nouns; verbs to show action or passive states of being; and adverbs to describe the verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. After you know how to combine these parts of any given sentence, you can express your ideas and interests spanning the past, present, and future.

When you speak English, I bet you don't sit and analyze the word order before opening your mouth to say something. Well, the same can hold true when you begin speaking Chinese. You probably didn't even know the word for grammar before someone taught you that it was the framework for analyzing the structure of a language. Instead of overwhelming you, this chapter makes understanding Chinese grammar as easy as punch.

If you're patient with yourself, have fun following the dialogues illustrat­ing basic sentences, and listen to them on the accompanying audio tracks, you'll do just fine.

The Basics of Chinese Nouns, Articles, and Adjectives

Admit it. Most of us took the better part of our first two years of life to master the basics when it came to forming English sentences. With this book, you can whittle this same skill in Chinese down to just a few minutes. Just keep reading this chapter. I promise it'll save you a lot of time in the long run.

The basic word order of Chinese is exactly the same as in English. Hard to imagine? Just think of it this way: When you say
I love spinach,
you're using the subject (I), verb (love), object (spinach) sentence order. It's the same in Chinese. Only in Beijing, the sentence sounds more like
Wǒ xǐhuān bōcài.
我喜欢菠菜
. (
我喜歡菠菜
.) (waw she-hwahn baw-tsye.).

And if that isn't enough to endear you to Chinese, maybe these tidbits of information will:

You don't need to distinguish between singular and plural nouns.

You don't have to deal with gender-specific nouns.

You can use the same word as both the subject and the object.

You don't need to conjugate verbs.

You don't need to master verb tenses. (Don't you just love it already?)

How could such news not warm the hearts of all those who've had grammar phobia since grade school? I get to the verb-related issues later in the chapter; in this section, I pull you up to speed on nouns and their descriptors.

The way you can tell how one part of a Chinese sentence relates to another is generally by the use of particles and what form the word order takes. (
Particles,
for those of you presently scratching your heads, can be found at the beginning or end of sentences and serve mainly to distinguish different types of emphatic statements but can't be translated in and of themselves.)

Nouns

Common nouns represent tangible things, such as
háizi
孩子
(hi-dzuh) (
child
) or
yè
叶
(
葉
) (yeh) (
leaf
). Like all languages, Chinese is just chock-full of nouns:

Proper nouns for such things as names of countries or people, like
Fǎguó
法国
(
法國
) (fah-gwaw) (
France
) and
Zhāng
Xiānshēng
张先生
(
張先生
) (jahng shyan-shung) (
Mr. Zhang
)

Material nouns for such nondiscrete things as
kāfēi
咖啡
(kah-fay) (
coffee
) or
jīn
金
(jin) (
gold
)