Mandarin: Easier than you Think
Mandarin: Easier than you Think
This post is for two kinds of people, those who’ve thought about trying Mandarin but think it’s impossible, and those who’ve already learned a little Mandarin but are frustrated. Good news for both of you: there are parts of Mandarin which are really easy.
Words don’t Change
In European languages, words change to fit with the words around them. They change to show tense (‘I see versus I saw’). They change to show number (‘One computer’ versus ‘Three computers’). You can have all the right words, but if their forms don’t fit together, nobody will understand you. ‘I not saw what she friends seen’ makes no sense because while the words themselves are basically right, the forms don’t fit together. It could mean ‘I have not seen what her friends saw’ or ‘I have not seen what her friend saw’ or ‘I’m not seeing what her friends have seen’, or a dozen other interpretations.
Here come the examples. If you don’t know how to pronounce the Mandarin words, don’t worry. We’ll teach you that another time.
In Mandarin, words never change. There’s a word which means ‘to see’: kan.
Say we’re speaking Mandarin. When did the seeing take place? Doesn’t matter, kan stays the same.
She sees. ta kan
She saw. ta kan guo
She will see. ta hui kan
And who saw? Doesn’t matter. ‘Kan’ stays the same.
I see. wo kan
He sees. ta kan
You are seeing. ni kan
Kan is always kan. Time and perspective change, but unlike in English, in Mandarin you only have to memorize one form of the word.
In order to show tense, you choose from a small pool of words and add that word before or after kan. More good news: it’s a really small pool:
zai right now
le just finished, or in progress
guo completed, done
hui will
There are others, of course, but using these four words you can communicate all the tense in Mandarin you’ll ever need to. You’ll never need to memorize different verb forms, never need to worry about which form matches up with which pronoun, and never be that person saying ‘I not see what she friends seen’ in Mandarin.
Five Mandarin Words Replace Seventeen English Words
Mandarin makes pronouns and possession really simple. With only 5 single syllable characters, you can express what we need 17 words to express in English.
There are three basic pronouns in Chinese: wo, ni, and ta. When you write ta in Chinese you write it differently to denote gender, but it’s pronounced the same regardless of gender. To pluralize any of these, add men after.
wo wo men I/me us
ni ni men you you (all)
ta (male) ta men him/he them
ta (female) ta men her/she them
To say that something belongs to somebody (an object…or blame) add de.
wo men de our/ours
ni de your/yours
ta men de their/theirs
Pop quiz: how would you say, “Mine!”?
Five single syllables: wo, ni, ta, men, and de. You’ll memorize them in two minutes. A little bit of practice, then for the rest of your life you’ll be ready to settle disputes over whose bag belongs to who at the airport in Mandarin.
Quiz answer: “wo de!”
Common Sense Vocabulary
There’s a Chinese character which means ‘vehicle’. It’s pronounced che. In Mandarin, the word for almost anything on four wheels ends with che. Once you’ve learned the basic word for vehicle, you’re halfway to memorizing a whole stack of transportation vocabulary.
‘Self propelled vehicle’ zi xing che bicycle
‘Public vehicle’ gong che bus
‘Fire vehicle’ huo che train
‘Running vehicle’ pao che racing car / racing bike
‘Pull stopped vehicle’ tuo diao che tow truck
‘Rent out vehicle’ chu zu che taxi (Mainland China)
‘Calculate trip vehicle’ ji cheng che taxi (Taiwan)
A lot of Mandarin vehicle words are derived from English. They’re a combination of characters which sound like their English counterpart, plue che.
Mo tuo che motorcycle
Ji pu che jeep
Tan ke che tank
How long do you think it’ll take you to memorize ‘Jeep’ in Mandarin? What we’ve said for vehicles applies to planes, fruit, jobs, animals, and electronic devices too. Building a deep vocabulary in Mandarin is easier than in other languages because of how often its words are just common sense combinations.
