Michael Kennedy, Author at Jinbupal | Page 3 of 3

Author: Michael Kennedy

Chinese Accents

March 6, 2019

At first glance, this topic might seem like it’s a little advanced and unnecessary right now, but knowing about at this from the very start will save you a lot of confusion in the long run. Just like an American southern accent differs a lot from a British accent, Mandarin Chinese varies with accents as well. When first starting out, I thought this was a detail I could save for later. In fact, I wasn’t even aware it was something I was ignoring. But, I quickly realized that it’s pretty important to understand accents in Chinese so that you avoid confusion when listening to audio or talking with someone from a southern region of China or Taiwan.

Like we discussed from the very beginning, the Chinese language is composed of many dialects, but education and media in mainland China is typically conducted in Mandarin. Near Beijing, people speak Mandarin, also known as Standard Chinese or pǔtōnghuà (普通话) natively and with the official accent. But as you move away from Beijing (specifically toward Southern China and Taiwan), accents of spoken Mandarin Chinese change based on the influence of regional dialects. For a foreigner learning Chinese though, this effect can be mostly summed up with the differences between two particularly noticeable accents: Northern vs Southern accents.

The Northern accent follows the standard Chinese pronunciation common in Beijing. You are likely to hear this accent in most government broadcast shows, news, and podcasts. On the contrary, Southern accents can be pretty confusing when first learning because some separate sounds from the official accent are blurred together. Because of this, context becomes even more important in understanding what someone is saying.

Compared to a Northern accent, a Southern accent has these tricky characteristics:

  • less curling on the tongue for any pinyin with an “h”, such as: shi, zhi, chi, zhou, zhong, chu, zhe, she, et cetera.  The result is that the pronunciation essentially ignores the “h” in these pinyin. This can present some serious confusion to a new learner because these pinyin pronunciations can then be very easily confused with other pinyin that do not contain an “h” at all, such as: si, se, zi, ci, zou, zong, cu, ze, etc. Context is really important to understand what pinyin is actually being said.
  • almost no use of the “-r” sound common at the end of the pinyin shi, zhi, and chi. This is also primarily because these pinyin are pronounced the same as si, zi, and ci because of the previous bullet point.

To be clear, I know virtually nothing about pronunciations of local dialects of Chinese, but I have read that most of Southern regional dialects do not include tongue curling sounds in their lexicons. This is what leads to these notable aspects of the Southern accent for Southern Chinese when they speak Mandarin. I’d advise you not to worry about the different accents right now, but just keep this information in the back of your mind so that you understand what is going on when you hear a word pronounced completely differently from your expectations.

Now that we’ve covered most everything on the pronunciation front, it’s time to demystify tones.

Next up: Tones aren’t so scary.

How to get started learning Chinese Series

Background Understanding of the Chinese Language

March 1, 2019

To start off, it will be helpful to build up some basic understanding about what Mandarin Chinese is exactly. Not everyone realizes it, but the broad term “Chinese” is actually more like a group of Sinitic languages which all utilize Chinese characters, called hanzi (汉字). Although Mandarin and Cantonese are the most common dialects of Chinese, there are many different dialectics which all use the same set of written characters. Each dialect attaches their own pronunciation to these common characters. I’d recommend watching this video about the Chinese language which covers a great deal about the history and difference between these common dialects.

Sidenote: As you will come to find out from my other posts, I’m a big fan of saving time wherever possible. This includes searching for any way of making the learning process as efficient as possible. That being said, I would wholeheartedly recommend watching this video (and most of the others I recommend , for that matter) at 2x speed or more.

Alright, let’s discuss some more basics just to get a better understanding of how the Chinese language works.

Chinese is a monosyllabic language, meaning that words can be expressed in individual syllables. However, I find this term a bit misleading, because the vast majority of commonly used Chinese words are actually composed of two Chinese characters. These words are called bigrams and, in my experience, the actual challenge of learning Chinese is not learning the characters, but remembering the many unique meanings of combinations of characters and the subtle differences in their meanings.

Although words often consist of two characters, sentences do not contain any spaces between characters. You will eventually know from the context of a sentence which characters together form a word and which stand by themselves. Fortunately, doing this is a lot simpler to figure out than you might think. Words you are unfamiliar with will quickly begin to stand out quite prominently within a sentence.

I’ve been asked several times if Chinese is written right-to-left, so I think we should address that common question. Chinese was traditionally written from top-to-bottom and right-to-left in vertical columns of text. However, modern Chinese writing is aligned the same way as English or other Romance languages, top-to-bottom and left-to-right. The main difference is the lack of spacing we already discussed and that words may be broken between lines of text without any indication.

Additionally, the Chinese language has many idioms or phrases in form of four character phrases called chéngyǔ (成语). We have many of these in English as well, such as “a dime a dozen” or “miss the boat”; the main difference is that Chinese idioms usually follow the four-character structure. These phrases are quite advanced so it’s probably not necessary to think too much about them at the start and just be aware they exist.

What about words that aren’t of Chinese origin? Chinese often uses characters phonetically to produce a similar pronunciation as the word in it’s native language, such as English. Take the examples of the following words:

  • 华盛顿 – huáshèngdùn – Washington
  • 巴西 – bāxī – Brazil
  • 加利福尼亚 – jiālìfúníyà – California
  • 可口可乐 – kĕkŏu kĕlè – Coca-Cola

(You might be wondering what those marks over the vowels are. These are tone marks. But don’t worry, we’ll discuss them further shortly, so sit tight!) There’s a lot more to discuss about how Chinese characters and words are used to form sentences, but we’ll save these details for the grammar section of this guide. Now it’s time to tackle the topic that you might be most excited and (possibly) worried about…Chinese characters.

Next up: The Part You’re Excited and Worried About: Chinese Characters

How to get started learning Chinese Series

Welcome to JinbuPal!

February 22, 2019

Hello and welcome to the JinbuPal Blog!  

My name is Mike and I’ve been learning Mandarin Chinese for about three years now. I’m a mechanical engineer by trade and I am always trying to learn something new. Through my interests as an engineer, I’d worked on several side-projects in the past that I was seeking to get manufactured, potentially in China. I felt like I was already constantly scouring Chinese language websites looking for manufacturers and existing products in the marketplace. I figured things would be a whole lot easier if I could read Chinese, but I had heard (as I’m sure you have) that Chinese is incredibly difficult to learn. Spoiler alert, I’ve found over time this is a gross exaggeration.

In 2017, I went on a trip to South East Asia and visited Hong Kong. I loved it! The city and culture were so exciting. I was only able to stay in Hong Kong for a few days, but the city left a huge impression on me. At that time, I had absolutely no clue how the Chinese language even worked, much less how you could go about learning to speak it.

On my long and crammed return flight home, I happened to listen to a podcast by Tim Ferriss which touched on language learning techniques and how to incorporate the Pareto’s Principle (or 80/20 Rule) for rapid progress. Having enjoyed my time in Hong Kong and always seeking a challenge, I figured I would take Tim’s word for it and dive head-first into learning Mandarin.

I started studying within a few days of returning home and I still enjoy spending my free time reading and studying Mandarin daily. I will continue posting on this blog regularly, discussing tools, tips, and other things I’ve learned along the way. So stay tuned! My goal is to present Chinese learning in a way that allows anyone to feel confident in their ability and rapidly succeed. Learning a language (especially Chinese) isn’t exactly easy; but when you have the most efficient techniques on your side, you will be shocked by how much easier it can be than you might have thought!

The most important aspect to efficient language learning is that you are making daily meaningful progress from the very start. And not only do you need to make progress, you need to track your progress! This is the foundational topic that I will discuss in my next post.