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).