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.