I know that one of the few things I learned in middle school about China was that the Chinese language has many “dialects.” I had never been clear on what a dialect really was, often people say that it’s like an accent, and for a few of them that’s correct. In many cases though “dialects” are completely different languages that are based on the same written system. That means even if you couldn’t understand what the person was saying you could read what they wrote. This is most likely the result of China’s vast lands and difficult terrain that made travel rare. This limited direct communication and made writing invaluable. In this video my former students count from 1-10, first Mandarin (the official language), then […]

So far we’ve looked at speaking Chinese, and the basics of forming characters (which are complete words themselves), so today we’re wrapping up the series and looking at compound words. Compound words are formed by putting two characters together to create a single, new meaning. For example 中国zhongguo (China) separately they mean “middle” and “kingdom,” but by putting them together they take on a new meaning. We can take it a step further and say 中国人zhongguoren(Chinese person), or 中国菜zhongguocai (Chinese food). Now the vocabulary is growing, for 7 words we’ve had to learn 4  characters. Now I can teach you one more character 美mei(beautiful), but we can make 美国meiguo(America), 美国人meiguoren(American person), and 美国菜meiguocai(American food). So now we are at 5 characters, but 11 words. This […]