INTONATION

Mandarin language distinguishes roughly three degrees of stress of polysyllabic words: main (or strong) stress, medium stress and weak stress, which can be distinctly differentiated in the pronunciation of a word of many syllables. Words of two, three or four syllables have a distinct strong stress on one of the syllables.

In most disyllabic words, the strong stress falls on the second syllable, and the first syllable is usually pronounced with a medium stress, e.g.:

汉语 hānyǔ
学习 xǔexí
再见 zàijiàn

A small number of disyllabic words have the main stress falling on the first syllable, and the second syllable is usually pronounced with a weak stress even though it is normally not the neutral tone, e.g.:

朋友 péngyǒu
认识 rènshi
大夫 dàifu
我们 wǒmen
先生 xiānshēng

When a noun is formed of reduplicated characters the first character receives a strong stress and the second one is pronounced in neutral tone, e.g.:

爸爸 bàbɑ
妈妈 māmɑ

FOUR TONES

Chinese language is tonal language. If you change tone of one word, its meaning changes. There are four basic tones in Beijing dialect (Mandarin), represented respectively by the following tone-graphs: “ - “ (the 1st tone), “ ˊ“ (the 2nd tone), “ ˇ “ (the 3rd) tone and “ ˋ“ (the 4th tone).

The following table is an example how a Chinese syllable, when pronounced in a different tone, has a different meaning.

Chinese Word Pinyin Meaning
妈 mā mother
麻 má hemp
马 mǎ horse
骂 mà scold
吗 ma (neutral tone) (used as last word of question)

CHINA’S DIALECT AREAS

The Chinese language has 8 (eight) major dialects. The eight dialect areas are: North China (for the Northern dialect), Jiangsu-Zhejiang (for the Wu dialect), Hunan (for the Hunan dialect), Jiangxi (for the Jiangxi dialect), Kejia (for the Kejia dialect, a form of Chinese spoken by descendants of the northerners who moved to Guangdong and nearby provinces centuries ago. Northern Fujian (for the Northern Fujian dialect), Southern Fujian (for the Southern Fujian dialect) and Guangdong (for the Yue, another name of Guangdong Province, dialect).

Of all the Chinese-speaking population, about 70% speak the Northern dialect (also known as Beijing dialect or Mandarin). It is the reason why Mandarin has been made the basis of the common speech (Putonghua) and also national language in China.

The vocabulary and grammar are basically the same in all the dialects; the main difference is their pronunciations. In order to remove barriers caused by the dialectal differences and to facilitate and bring about a further political, cultural and economic development, a nation-wide campaign has been done to popularize the common speech.

The Complex and Simplified Forms of Chinese Characters

The ultimate aim of the reform being carried in the Chinese writing system is to gradually replace the ideograms with a phonetic writing system. Before this can be done, the characters should first of all be simplified and the number of strokes of the characters reduced so as to relieve much of the burden of both users and learners of Chinese. The simplification of Chinese characters is two fold: reduction of the number of the characters (mainly through the elimination of the complex variants) and reduction of the number of the strokes of which a complex character is composed (by the popularization of the simplified characters). Since the 1950s and especially with the publication of the1964 list, the PRC (People’s Republic of China) has officially adopted this simplified form of Chinese Characters.

This simplification conforms entirely to the general tendency of development of the Chinese characters towards greater simplicity. The simplified forms, as compared with their complex equivalents, are much easier to learn, to memorize, to read and to write. A very few examples will help to show the advantages of the simplified over the complex forms: men 们 (們), ma 马 (馬), huan 欢 (歡), jin 进 (進).

Chinese Phonetic Alphabet

"Chinese Phonetic Alphabet” (known as Pinyin) which was adopted in 1958, is a set of symbols used to transliterate Chinese characters and combine the speech sounds of the common speech into syllables. This Pinyin makes use of the Latin alphabet, modified to meet the needs of the Chinese language.
Pinyin, which will form the foundation for the creation of a Chinese alphabetic systems or writing, is being used through-out the country to facilitate the learning of Chinese characters, help unify pronunciation and popularize the common speech. Pinyin has for years been used among foreign learner of Chinese as well and and has been found much useful and helpful.
Currently this Pinyin is used as one of the methods for typing Chinese Character in computers. So far, this typing method is the most popular method especially among the young Chinese generation as well as the foreigners who learn Chinese. It is because this typing method uses normal English keyboard - really convenient.

Learning Chinese Character (Hanzi / Kanji)

Learning Chinese for non Chinese speaking is admitly considered as a bit more difficult compared to learning other languages. The biggest burden is for memorizing thousands of Chinese characters. Surprisingly, actually it's not really a burden for a young child to study Chinese Language (including its characters) eventhough it's not their first language.

Actually if we study more deeply about Chinese, we can see lots of interesting background about it. Here are some of them:

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Chinese Language is one of the world’s oldest written languages, also the oldest ‘surviving’ writing systems. Unlike the other languages, Chinese language is formed of characters. Chinese character is known as Hanzi (in Mandarin Language) or Kanji (in Japanese language). Generally speaking, each character stands for a meaningful syllable. In order to understand reading and writing in Chinese for everyday use, one should understand about 3000 Chinese characters. Actually total number of Hanzi is more than 50,000 characters of which only 5,000 – 8,000 are still in common use now.

Chinese characters in use today developed from the pictographs cut on Oracle Bones dating from over 3,200 years ago and the pictographs found on ancient bronze vessels dating a little later. Only about 1,400 of the 2,500 known Oracle Bone pictographs can be identified with later Chinese characters and therefore easily read. These 1,400 pictographs include most of the commonly used ones. In the course of their history of development, Chinese characters evolved from pictographs into characters formed of strokes, with their structures very much simpler. Most of the present-day Chinese characters are known as picto-phonetic characters, each formed of two elements, with one indicating the meaning and the other the sound.

Chinese characters have made great contributions to the long history of the Chinese nation and Chinese culture, and Chinese calligraphy is a highly developed art. But Chinese characters have serious drawbacks. It is very difficult to learn, to read and to write and still more difficult to memorize. Reforms should be carried to make the characters easier.

(from many sources)
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