Learning Chinese - A Few Thoughts on Mandarin and Pinyin

The official language of mainland China and Taiwan is usually referred to as Mandarin in the Western world. The Chinese however, depending on the country or region you are in, use different expressions to refer to Mandarin. Literally translated from Chinese, they call it common speech, Han language, national language or just plain "Chinese (language)."

Keep in mind that China is a vast country with about eight major dialect groups, not counting the languages spoken by the different ethnic minority groups. While the majority of Chinese can speak Mandarin, their accents will differ greatly, reflecting their local dialect and making comprehension difficult at times. It is generally acknowledged that the correct Mandarin pronunciation can be heard in and around the capital Beijing.

Another characteristic of the arguably correctly pronounced Mandarin is the rolling 'r' which gets added to the end of a lot of words and expressions. Again, this is the typical Mandarin you will hear in the Beijing region. A more common and also correct pronunciation of Mandarin is spoken in Shanghai and Taiwan.

To a Westerner, the hardest and trickiest part in learning Chinese is mastering the tones. The example that comes to mind is the word "ma." This word means mother in most western languages. To a Chinese-speaking person, depending on the tone, this word might mean mother, to scold, horse, hemp or just an interrogative particle.

That is why audio lessons play a very important role in learning Chinese. It is vital to have a good Chinese learning software program that includes audio lessons if you want to learn Mandarin through self-study.

Another extra hurdle to take for a Westerners is reading Chinese. Their written language consists of pictographs. Luckily, the Chinese government adopted a romanization system for their writing language, commonly named Pinyin. Its counterpart in Taiwan is a phonetic system called bopomofo. A student learning Chinese will have to master one of these phonetic writing systems before he or she can begin to read Chinese without being able to read the characters or pictographs.

The good news is that it is much easier to learn how to read and write Pinyin or bopomofo than to learn how to read or write the traditional characters. Unfortunately, different types of romanization systems have been used in the past and you will still find a lot of street signs on the mainland and in Taiwan which do not conform to standard Pinyin. A good example is Peking which in proper Pinyin became Beijing.

So for those of you interested in studying Chinese at home I would recommend you invest in some good Chinese learning software that teaches you proper Pinyin and offers relevant audio lessons.

If you're looking to learn Chinese and don't know where to start, or just want to start to learn for whatever reason, why not take a look at http://chineselearningsoftware.net.

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