Chinese (Mandarin)
From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection
Version 0.2 March 17, 2006
Note: current version of this book can be found at
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_(Mandarin)
Table of contents
Introduction / 介绍
About Chinese
中文是什么？
How to use this textbook
如何使用这本教科书
How to study Chinese
如何学习中文
Pronunciation
Pinyin Pronunciation Basics
Pronunciation of Initials
Pronunciation of Finals
Possible Initial-Final Combinations
Using Tones
Lessons / 课程
Lesson 1: Hello!
第一课：你好！
Lesson 2: Are you busy today?
第二课：今天你忙不忙?
Lesson 3: An introduction to particles
第三课：助词
Lesson 4: Word order and Verbs
第四课：词序和动词
Lesson 5: Measure words
第五课：量词
Lesson 6: More on interrogatives
第六课：疑问助词
Lesson 7: What's this?
第七课：这是什么?
Introduction / 介绍
About Chinese
The Chinese language (汉语/漢
語, 华语/華語 or 中文) is a
member of the Sino-Tibetan
family of languages. Chinese is a
tonal language, meaning that
pitch is used to distinguish
words. About one-fifth of the
world speaks some form of
Chinese as its native language,
making it the most common language in the world. The Chinese language (spoken in its
Standard Mandarin form) is the official language of the People's Republic of China and
the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of four official languages of Singapore, and one of
six official languages of the United Nations. It is also the form of Chinese that will be
taught in this wikibook.
Chinese is considered by many to be a language that is difficult to learn, mainly because
its grammar operates along very different principles compared to European languages
(for example, you will see no tenses, plurals, or subject-verb agreement, but you will see
counter words, reduplication rules, and verb completion/direction suffixes). In addition,
Chinese is one of the few languages in the world that does not use an alphabet or a
syllabary; instead, thousands of characters are used, each representing a word or a part of
a word. The government of China has deve