Before you start learning basic Chinese knowledge and special Wushu expressions at Flash Mavi, you need to know a few things about Chinese writing, grammar, and pronunciation. To learn more Chinese, visit: www.zhongwen.com. You will not find special Wushu vocabulary at Zhongwen.com.
About the Chinese Language
Chinese is written from left to right and top to bottom. Book pages are also numbered the same as in English. Japanese is different.
In Chinese, you have characters and pinyin. Characters are the symbols you see in Chinatown, and pinyin is the phonetic transcription in Roman letters. At Zhongwen.com, you can find a pinyin Chinese-English dictionary.
What if you don’t know how to pronounce a word or a letter
Example: If you don’t know how the "x" in xuan is pronounced, choose any word with "x" (for instance "xiao") on Zhongwen.com, open the pronunciation sound file, and listen.
In Chinese, there aren’t many different sounds, so it won’t take you long until you can say everything correctly.
Tones
But… there are 5 different tones:
0 – without tone or low tone
1 – First tone "–" high
2 – Second tone "" falling
3 – Third tone "v" up and down
4 – Fourth tone "/" down
Chinese Grammar and Writing
The Chinese language is not difficult at all. Don’t have too much respect for this language. Those who know Chinese and claim it to be the most difficult language just want to look smarter in front of others. Chinese is as easy as a simple computer language like BASIC. Its grammar is almost the same. Chinese only looks confusing at the beginning, but it’s very logical. There isn’t much grammar, and words are easy to remember.
There aren’t 50,000 different characters. There are only about 150 sub-letters that combine into bigger ones. There might be 50,000 words, 5,000 to 10,000 of which are used in this millennium. Just like in every other language. Those 5,000 to 10,000 words are made up of 400 to 800 syllables. Those 400 to 800 syllables have 60 different pronunciations, not including the different tones. So you only have to learn 60 different pronunciations to pronounce a word perfectly. English or German has many more.
The only thing you need to get used to are the tones. But not every pronunciation has all possible tones, and you usually get a word when you combine two or three syllables. So don’t be overly intimidated by the tones either.
Examples
The character "tree" consists of one syllable, which consists of one letter – a cross with two lines that go down from the middle (like a tree).
The character "wood" consists of one syllable, which consists of two letters → Two trees.
The character "jungle" consists of one syllable, which consists of three letters → Three trees, two on the bottom and one above.
The character "wood" is spoken "lin." But there are many words pronounced "lin." To avoid confusion, you specify: "Shu Lin."
If you know the syllable electric, you already know half of many other words:
Etc., etc. You never have to learn entire words, only at the beginning. The more you know, the easier it gets to learn Chinese. Eventually, you will only connect characters you already know.
Learning to write Chinese characters is easier because it’s more interesting. Chinese characters are painted.
Grammar Example
You don’t need to change the order of words to form a question or a past tense sentence in Chinese. For a yes/no question, you just say your sentence with a question mark at the end. In Chinese, the question mark is spoken:
Question mark = "ma"
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