Written Chinese
Most languages with which we are familiar are written with an alphabet. The letters may be different from ours, as in the Greek alphabet, but the principle is the same: one letter for each consonant or vowel sound, more or less. Chinese, however, is written with "characters" which stand for whole syllables -- in fact, for whole syllables with particular meanings. Although there are only about thirteen hundred phonetically distinct syllables in standard Chinese, there are several thousand Chinese characters in everyday use, essentially one for each unit of meaning. This means that many words have the same pronunciation but are written with different characters, as tiän, "sky," Í, and tiân, "to add," "to increase," ZÉ. Chinese characters are often referred to as "ideographs„" which suggests that they stand directly for ideas. But this is misleading. It is better to think of them as standing for the meaningful syllables of the spoken language. Minimal literacy in Chinese calls for knowing about a thousand characters. These thousand characters, in combination, give a reading vocabulary of several thousand words. Full literacy calls for knowing some three thousand characters. In order to reduce the amount of time needed to learn characters, there has been a vast extension in the People's Republic of China (PRC) of the principle of character simplification, which has reduced the average number of strokes per character by half.
During the past century, various systems have been proposed for representing the sounds of Chinese with letters of the Roman alphabet. One of these romanizations, Pinyin (literally "Chinese Language Spelling," generally called "Pinyin" in English), has been adopted officially in the PRC, with the short-term goal of teaching all students the Standard Chinese pronunciation of characters. A 1ong-range goal is the use of Pinyin for written communication throughout the country. This is not possible, of course, until speakers across the nation have uniform pronunciations of' Standard Chinese. For the time being, characters, which represent meaning, not pronunciation, are still the most widely accepted way of communicating in writing.
Pinyin uses all of the letters in our alphabet except 3, and adds the letter The spellings of some of the consonant sounds are rather arbitrary from our point of view, but for every consonant sound there is only one letter or one combination of letters, and vice versa. You will find that each vowel letter can stand for different vowel sounds, depending on what letters precede or follow it in the syllable. The four tones are indicated by accent marks over the vowels, and the Neutral the absence of an accent mark:
High: mā
Rising: má
Low: mă
Falling: mà
Neutral : ma
One reason often given for the retention of characters is that they can be read, with the local pronunciation, by speakers of all the Chinese languages. Probably a stronger reason for retaining them is that the characters help keep alive distinctions of meaning between words, and connections of meaning between words, which are fading in the spoken language. On the other hand, a Cantonese could learn to speak Standard Chinese, and read it alphabetically, at least as easily as he can learn several thousand characters.
Pinyin is used throughout this course to provide a simple written representation of pronunciation. The characters, which are chiefly responsible for the reputation of Chinese as a difficult language, are taught separately.
Vocabulary