Learn Simple Chinese before Traveling to China

Do you want to learn some useful Chinese phrases before starting your China tour? Now you are on the right place of free learning of useful Chinese phrases for travelers.

Many tourists think:"I will join a China travel package, so I don't need to learn Chinese". Even though you decide to join a tour to China. Learning some simple Chinese will help you have a easy trip in China.

Chinese is a tonal language, a language with many homonyms ( words of different meaning but with similar pronunciation ). Mandarin has four tones:

First tone ( - ): the voice is pitched quite high,High and level;

Second tone ( / ): the voice rises rather like asking a question,rises to the top;

Third tone ( V ): the voice dips and then rises;

Fourth tone ( \ ): the voice starts at the top, then falls away.

Below is an example of how the tones change the meaning:

Pinyin ( spell & sound )

In 1958 the Chinese offically adopted a system known as pinyin as a method of writing their language using Roman alphabet. Pinyin is a romanization and not an anglicization; it makes use of Roman letters to represent sounds in Standard Mandarin. The way these letters represent sounds in Standard Mandarin will be different from other languages that make use of the Roman alphabet represent sound. Pinyin is quite useful in China, especially in majior cities, on shop fronts, street names and advertising etc. When Chinese people write their own names in Englsih, they use Pinyin.

English: Where are you from?

Putonghua ( Mandarin ): 你从哪里来?

Pinyin: Ni cong nai li lai?

Pronunciation

The main purpose of pinyin is to help people learn Standard Mandarin pronunciation. Pinyin vowels are pronounced quite similarly to the vowels in Romance languages, and most consonants are also similar to English. But there are some pitfalls: the strange pronunciation of x, q, c, zh, and z and the unvoiced pronunciation of d, b, g, and j. The pronunciation of Chinese is generally offered in terms of initials and finals that represent the segmental phonemic portion of the language. Initials are initial consonants and finals are all possible mixtures of medials, the nucleus vowel, final vowel or consonant.

Useful Chinese Phrases: