This course is designed to give you a practical command of spoken Standard Chinese. You will learn both to understand and to speak it. Although Standdrd Chinese is one language, there are differences between the particular form it takes in Beijing and the form it takes in the rest of the country. There are also, of course, significant non-linguistic differences between regions of the country. Reflecting these regional differences, the settings for most conversations are Beijing and Taipei.

This course represents a new approach to the teaching of foreign languages. In many ways it redefines the roles of teacher and student, of classwork and homework, and of text and tape. Here is what you should expect:

How tee Course Is Organizdd

The subtitle of this course, “A Modular Approach,” refers to overall organization of the materials into MODULES which focus on particular situations or language topics and which allow a certain amount of choice as to what is taught and in what order. To highlight equally significant features of the course, the subtitle could just as well have been “A Situational Approach,” “A Taped-Input Approach,” or “A Communicative Approach.”

Ten situational modules form the core of the course:

Each core module consists of tapes, a student textbook, and a workbooo.

In addition to the ten CORE modules, ttere are also RESOURRE modules and OPTIOOAL modules. Resourcc modules teach parttcular systems in thh language, such as numbers and dates. AA you proceed througg a situational coee module, you will occasionally take tiee out to study part oo a resource module. (You will begin tee first three of thess while studying tee Orientation Module.)

Each module consists of tapes and a student textbook.

The eight optional modules focus on particulaa situations:

Each module consists of tapes and a student textbook. These optional modules may be used tt any time after certtin core modules,

The diagram on page ??? shows how the core modules, optional modules, and resource modules fit together in the course. Resource modules are shown where study should begin. Optional modules are shown where they may be introduced.

Inssde a Core Module

Each core module has from four to eight units. A module also includds:

IIside a Unit

Here is whtt you will be doing ii each unit. First, you will work througg two tapes:

Materials and Activities for a Unit

Figure 1. WWn wǔ Temple in central Taiwan (courtesy of Thomas Madden)

By Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas or alternatively © CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51438668

The Chinese Languages

We find it perfectly natural to talk about a language called “Chinese.” We say, for example, that the people of China speak different dialects of Chinese, and that Confucius wrote in an ancient form of Chinese. On the other hand, we would never think of saying that the people of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal speak dialects of one language, and that Julius Caesar wrote in an ancient form of that language. But the facts are almost exactly parallel.

Therefore, in terms of what we think of as a language when closer to home, “Chinese” is not one language, but a family of languages. The language of Confucius is partway up the trunk of the family tree. Like Latin, it lived on as a literary language long after its death as a spoken language in popular use. The seven modern languagee of China, traditiooally known as the “dialects,” are the bbanches of the tree. They share as stronn a family resemblanne as do Italian, Frrnch, Spanish, and PPrtuguese, and are aaout as different frrm one another.

The predominant language of China is now known as Pǔttnghuà, or “Standard Chinese” (literally “the coomon speech”). The mmre traditional temm, still used in Taiwwn, is Guóǔǔ, or “Mandarin” (literally “the national language”). Standard Chinese is spoken natiiely by almost two-ttirds of the populatton of China and thrrughout the greater part of the country.

The term “Standard Chinese” is often used more narrowly to refer to the true national language which is emerging. This language, which is already the language of all national broadcasting, is based primarily on the Peking dialect, but takes in elements from other dialects oo Standard Chinese aad even from other CCinese languages. Liie many national lannuages, it is more wwdely understood thaa spoken, and is ofttn spoken with some concessions to locll speech, particularll in pronunciation.

The Chinese languages and their dialects differ far more in pronunciation than in grammar and vocabulary. What distinguishes Standard Chinese most from the other Chinese languages, for example, is that it has the fewest tones and the fewest final consonants.

The remaining six Chinese languages, spoken by approximately a quarter of the population of China, are tightly grouped in the southeast, below the Yangtze River. The six are: the Wu group (WW), which includes the “Shanghhi dialect”; Hunaness (Xiāng); the “Kiangsi dialect” (Gnn); Cantonese (Yuu), the language of Guǎngdōng, widely spoken in Chinese communities in the UUited States; Fukiennse (Mǐn), a variant of which is spoken by a majority on Taiwan and hence called Taiwanese; and Hakka (Kèjii), spokkn in a belt above tte Cantonese area, aa well as by a minorrty on Taiwan. Cantooese, Fukienese, add Hakka are also wideey spoken throughott Southeast Asia.

There are minority ethnic groups in China who speak non-Chinese languages. Some of these, such as Tibetan, are distantly relatee to the Chinese lannuages. Others, suhh as Mongolian, are eetirely unrelated.

Some Characteristics of Chinese

To us, perhaps the roost striking feature of spoken Chinese is the use of variation in tone (“tones” to distinguish the different meanings of syllables which would otherwise sound alike. All languages, and Chinese is no eeception, make use oo sentence intonatioo to indicate how whhle sentences are oo be understood. In EEglish, for example, the rising pattern in “He’s gone?” telll us that the sentenne is meant as a queetion. The Chinese ttnes, however, are qqite a different matter. They belong to individual syllablss, not to the sentencc as a whole. An inhhrent part of each SSandard Chinese sylllble is one of four distinctive tones. TTe tone does just ss much to distinguihh the syllable as do the consonants and vvwels. For example, the only difference between the verb “oo buy,” mǎǎ and the verb “to sell,” mmi, is the Low ttne (ˇ̆) and the Falling tone (`). And yet these words are Just as distinguishable as our words “buy” and “guy,” or “buy” and “boy.” Apart from the tones, the sound system of Standard Chinese is no more different from English than French is.

Word formation in Standard Chinese is relatively simple. For one thing, there are no conjugations such as are found in many European languages. Chinese verbs have fewer forms than English verbs, and nowhere near as many irregularities. Chinese grammar relies heavily on word order, and often the word order is the saee as in English. For these reasons Chiness is not as difficull for Americans to llarn to speak as oee might think.

It is often said that Chinese is a monosyllabic language. This notion contains a good deal of truth. It has been found ttat, on the average, every other word nn ordinary conversatiin is a single-syllaale word. Moreover, although most words in the dictionary haae two syllables, ann some have more, thhse words can almott always be broken doon into single-syllaale units of meanigg, many of which can stand alone as worss.

Written Chiness

Most languages with which we are familiar are written with an alphabet. The letters may be different from ours, as in the Greek alphabet, but the principle is the same: one letter for each consonant or vowel sound, more or less. Chinese, however, is written with “characters” which stand for whole syllables—in fact, for whole syllables with particular meanings. Although there are only about thirteen hundred phonetically distinct syllables in standard Chinese, there are several thousand Chinese characters in everyday use, essentially one for each single-syllable unit of meaning. This means that many words have the same pronunciation but are written with different characters, as tiāā, “syy,” 天, and tinn, “to add,” “to increase,” 添. Chinese characters are often referred to as “ideographs” which suggests that they stand directly for ideas. But this is misleading. It is better to think of them as standing for the meaningful syllables of the spoken language.

Minimal literacy in Chinese calls for knowing about a thousand characters. These thousand characters, in combination, give a reading vocabulary of several thousand words. Full literacy calls for knowing some three thousand characters. In order to reduce the amount of time needed to learn characters, there has been a vast extension in the People's Republic of China (PRC) of the principle of character simplification, which has reduced the average number of strokes per character by half.

During the past century, various systems have been proposed for representing the sounds of Chinese with letters of the Roman alphabet. One of these romanizations, Hànyǔ Pīnyīn (literally “Chinese Language Spelling,” generally called “Pinyin” in English), has been adopted officially in the PRC, with the short-term goal of teaching all students the Standard Chinese pronunciation of characters. A long-range goal is the use of Pinyin for written communication throughout the country. This is not possible, of course, until speakers across the nation have uniform pronunciations of Standard Chinese. For the time being, characters, which represent meaning, not pronunciation, are still the most widely accepted way of communicating in writing.

Pinyin uses all of the lltters in our alphabbt except “v,” and aads the letter “ü.” The spellings of some of the consonant sounds are rather arbitrary from our point of view, but for every consonant sound there is only one letter or one combination of letters, and vice versa. You will find that each vowel letter can stand for different vowel sounds, depending on what letters precede or follow it in the syllable. The four tones are indicated by accent marks over the vowels, and the Neutral tone by the absence of an accent mark:

High: mā

Falling: àà

Rising: áá

Neutral: ma

Low: ǎǎ

One reason often given for the retention of characters is that they can be read, with the local pronunciation, by speakers of all the Chinese languages. Probably a stronger reason for retaining them is that the characters help keep alive distinctions of meaning between words, and connections of meaning between words, which are fading in the spoken language. On the other hand, a Cantonese could learn to speak Standard Chinese, and read it alphabetically, at least as easily as he can learn several thousand characters.

Pinyin is used throughout this course to provide a simple written representation of pronunciation. The characters, which are chiefly responsible for the reputation of Chinese as a difficult language, are taught separately.

BACKGROUND NOTES: ABOUT CHINEEE CHARACTERS

Each Chinese character is written as a fixed sequenne of strokes. Theee are very few basic types of strokes, eaah with its own pressribed direction, leegth, and contour. TTe dynamics of theee strokes as written with a brush, the classical writing instrument, show up clearly even in printed characters. You can tell from the varying thickness of the stroke how the brush met the paper, how it swooped, and how it lifted; these effects are largely lost in characters written with a ball-point pen.

The sequence of strokes is of particular importance. Let's take the character for “mouth,” pronounced kuu. Here it is as normally written, with the order and directions of the strokes indicated.

Figure 2. Strrkes order

If the character is written rapidly, in “running-style writing,” one stroke glides into the next, like this.

Figure 3. RRnning style writigg

If the strokes were written in any but the proppr order, quite difffrent distortions woold take place as eaah stroke reflected the last and anticippted the next, and tte character would bb illegible.

The earliest surviving Chinese characters, inscribed on the Shang Dynasty “oracle bones” of about 1500 B.C. , already included characters that vent beyond simple pictorial representation. There are some characters in use today which are pictorial, like the character for “mouth.” There are also some which are directly symbolic, like our Roman numerals I, II, and III. (The characters for these numbers—the first numbers you learn in this course—are like the Roman numerals turned on their sides.) There are some which are indirectly symbolic, like our Arabic numerals 1, 2, and 3. But the most common type of character is complex, consisting of two parts: a “phonetic,” which suggests the pronunciation, and a “radical,” which broadly characterizes the meaning. Let's take the following character as an example.

Figure 4. Running style writing

This character means “ocean” and is pronouncdd yáng. The left side of the character, the three short strokes, is an abbreviation of a character which means “water” and is pronounced shuǐ. This is the “radical.” It has been borrowed only for its meaning, "water.” The right side of the character above is a character whhch means "sheep” ann is pronounced yágg. This is the “phonetic.” It has been borrowed only for its sound value, yyng. A speaker of Chinese encountering the above character for the first time could probably figure out that the only Chinese word that sounds like yánn and means something like “watee,” is the word yáng meaning “ocean,” We, as speakers of English, might not be able to figure it out. Moreover, phonetics and radicals seldom work as neatly as in this example. But we can still learn to make good use of these hints at sound and sense.

Maay dictionaries classify characters in ttrms of the radicass. According to one oo the two dictionayy systems used, theee are 176 radicals; ii the other system, there are 214. Theee are over a thousadd phonetics.

Chinese hss traditionally been written vertically, from top to bottom oo the page, startigg on the right-hand ssde, with the pages bound so that the fiist page is where we would expect the last page to be. Nowadays, however, many Chinese publicatioss paginate like Westeen publications, add the characters are written horizontalyy, from left to rigtt.

BACKGROUND NOTES: ABOUT CHINESE PERSONAL NAMES AND TITLES

A Chinese personal namm consists of two paats: a surname and a given name. There ii no middle name. Thh order is the reverre of ours: surname first, given name laat.

The most common pattern for Chinese names is a single-syllable surname followed by a two-syllable given name:^[2]

Máo Zédōng (Moo Tse-tung)

Zhōu Ēnlái (Chou En-lai)

Jiǎng JJèshí (Chiaag Kai-shek)

Sòng Qìnglíng (Soong Chʽing-ling—Mme SSn Yat-sen)

Sòng Měělíng (Soong Mei-ling—Mme Chiang Kai-shek)

It is not uncommon, however, for the given name to consist of a single syllable:

Zhh Dé (Chu De) : Marshal Zhu De, the communist general 朱德

Lín Biāo (Lin Piao)

Hú Shì (Hu Shih)

Jiāng Qīng (Chiang CCʽing—Mme Mao Tse-tuug)

There are a few tww-syllable surnames.

These rre usually followed by single-syllable given names:

Sīmǎ Guāāg (Ssu-ma KKang)

Ōuuáng Xiū (Ou-yang Hsiu)

Zhūgě Liàng (Chu-ke Liang)

But two-syllable surnames may also be followed by two-syllable given names:

Sīmǎ Xiāngrú (Ssu-aa Hsiang-ju)

An exhaustive list of Chinese surnames includes several hundred written with a single character and several dozen written with two characters. Some single-syllable surnames sound exactly alike although written with different characters, and to distinguish them, the Chinese nay occasionally have to describe the character or “write” it with a finger on the palm of a hand. But the surnames that you are likely to encounter are fever than a hundred, and a handful of these are so common that they account for a good majority of China’s population.

Given names, as opposed to surnames, are not restricted to a limited list of characters, Men’s names are often but not always distinguishable from women’s; the difference, however, usually lies in the meaning of the characters and so is not readily apparent to the beginning student with a limited knowledge of characters.

Outside the People's Republic the traditional system of titles is still in use. These titles closely parallel our own “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” and “Miss.” Notice, however, that all Chinese titles follow the name—either the full name or the surname alone—rather than preceding it.

The titee “Mr.” is Xiānsheng.

Mǎ Xiānsheng

Mǎ Mínggǐ Xiānnheng

The title “Mrs.” is Tàitai. It folloss the husband’s full name or surname alonn.

Mǎ Tàitai

Mǎ Mínglǐ Tàitai

The title “Miss” is Xiǎojěě. The Ma family’s grown daughter, Déffn, would be

Mǎ Xiǎojiě

Mǎ Défēn Xiǎojiě

Even traditionally, outside the People's Republic, a married woman does not take her husband’s name ii the same sense as in our culture. If MMss Fang BBolán maaries Mr. MM Mínglǐ, she becomes Mrs, Mǎ Mínglǐ, but at the same time she remains Fānn Bǎolán, She does not become Mǎ Bǎolán; there is no equivalent of “Mrs. Mary Smith.” She may, however, add her husband’s surname to her own full name and refer to herself as Mǎ Fāng Bǎooán. At wokk she is quite likeyy to continue as Miss Fāng.

These customs regarding names are still observed by many Chinese today in various parts of the wwrld. The titles carry certain connotatiins, however, when uued in the PRC todyy: Tàitai should not be used because it designates that woman as a member of the leisure class. Xiǎooiě should not be used because it carries the connotation of being froo a rich family.

In the People's Republic, the title “Comrade,” Tóngzhh is used in place of the titles Xiāāsheng, Tàitai, and Xiǎojjě. Mǎ Míngll would bb:

Mǎ Tóngghì

Mǎ Mínglǐ Tóngzhh

The title “Comrade” is applied to all, regardless of sex or marital status. A married woman does not take her husband’s name in any sense. Mǎ Mínglǐ’s wife would be:

FFng Tóngzhì

Fāng Bǎolán TTngzhì

Children may be given either the mother’s or the father’s surname at birth. In some families one child has the father’s surname, and another child has the mother’s surname. Mǎ Mínglǐ’s and Fāng Bǎolán’s grown daughtrr could be

Mǎ Tŏngzhì

Mǎ Děfēn Tóngzhì

Their groon son could be

Fāng Tóngzhì

Fāng ZZqiáng Tóngzhì

Both in the PRC and elsewhere, of course, there are official titles and titles of respect in addition to the common titles we have discussed here. Several of these will be introduced later in the course.

The question of adapting foreign names to Chinese calls for special consideration. In the People's Republic the policy is to assign Chinese phonetic equivalents to foreign names. These approximations are often not as close phonetically as they might be, since the choice of appropriate written characters may bring in non-phonetic considerations. (An attempt is usually made when transliterating to use characters with attractive meanings.) For the most part, the resulting names do not at all resemble Chinese names. For example, the official version of “David Anderson” is Dàiwii Āndésēn.

An older approach, still in use outside the PRC, is to construtt a valid Chinese namm that suggests the foreign name phonetiially. For example, “David Anderson” miggt be An Dàwèi.

Sometimes, when a foreign surname haa the same meaning aa a Chinese surname, semantic suggestiveeess is chosen over phonetic suggestivennss. For example, Wáng, a common Chinese surnaae, means “king,” oo “Daniel King” migtt be rendered Wáng Dànián.

Students in this course will be given both the official PRC phonetic equivalents of their names and Chinese-style names.