Moon Festival

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Date: 15th day of the 8th lunar month.Place: NationwideActivities: Dragon boat racing, enjoying the moonlight, and eating moon cakes
Remarks: People eat moon cakes under the moonlight with family members. Moon cakes are pastries filled with gooey sesame, red bean, and walnut meats.

This festival originated in a fairy tale. A hero names Hou Yi saved his people by shooting down the other nine suns that burned his people to death. He was then bestowed with the elixir of immortality by the Queen Mother of the West. He did not want to consume the elixir and leave his beautiful but very mortal wife, Chang Er, so he gave the elixir to his wife for safekeeping. Unfortunately, Hou Yi's disloyal apprentice forced Chang Er to swallow the elixir. She then became a supernatural being. She flew to the moon, and from there watched her husband. Knowing that his wife had now been separated from him, Hou Yi was crazed with grief. Looking up at the moon one night, he saw a figure like his wife. He hurriedly took cakes and succade (preserves in sugar, whether fruits, vegetables, or confections) as offerings to his wife. Upon hearing this, people developed the custom of watching the moon and eating moon cakes annually on this day.

There are other traditional festivals that have waned in recent years. The Double Seventh Day is China's traditional Valentine's Day. It is the day when a cowherd and his wife, a weaving maid and daughter of the Jade Emperor, met in the heaven on the Magpie Bridge. The Double Ninth Day used to be the day when people climbed into the high mountains, and there missed their families.



Source: travelchinaguide.com
Other Festival

Qingming Festival

People looking to celebrate the Qingming Festival began arriving in Shanghai from Taipei on Friday, with more flights scheduled in the next few days.
During the Qingming Festival or Tomb Sweeping Festival, which falls on April 5 or 6, Chinese people honor their ancestors or deceased relatives.
Last June, aviation organizations across the Taiwan Strait agreed to organize charter flights for festivals other than the Spring Festival.
Eleven airlines, five from the mainland and six from Taiwan, have scheduled charter flights from March 30 to April 8.
Shanghai is again the key hub, with tickets in short supply.
Besides the 14 flights between Shanghai and Taipei, other flights will carry mainland passengers in the next 10 days from Beijing, Guangzhou and Xiamen to Taipei and Kaohsiung and vice versa.
Bookings show that fewer Taiwanese on the mainland will take the flight to Taiwan during the Qingming Festival as many returned to the island during the seven-day family-reunion Spring Festival last month.
However, more passengers from Taiwan are flying to the mainland around the festival.
Experts on folklore are calling for flights scheduled for traditional festivals to protect the country's cultural heritage.
Cross-Strait charter flights will also be available during the Dragon Boat Festival, which falls on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month or June 19, and the Mid-Autumn Festival which falls on Sept. 25, both traditional Chinese festivals on the lunar calendar.
Mainland and Taiwanese airlines operated 72 charter flights during the 2006 Spring Festival, carrying 27,000 passengers, almost five times more than the previous year.
But regular charter flights across the Strait such as at weekends have yet to be realized.
The first non-stop charter flights across the Taiwan Strait were launched for Chinese Lunar New Year in 2005, the first direct air links across the Taiwan Strait in more than five decades.

Source: Xinhua
Other Festival

Dragon Boat Festival

Date: 5th day of the 5th lunar monthPlace: NationwideActivities: Dragon Boat races and eating of tzungtzu (pyramid-shaped rice wrapped in reed or bamboo leaves).

Remarks: The Chinese Dragon Boat Festival has the longest history of any of the festivals celebrated in China. Dragon boat races are held to the sounds of thunderous drumbeats. Racing teams row vigorously, sprinting forward to reach the finish line.


In Chinese tradition, the dragon boats attempt to rescue the patriotic poet, Chu Yuan. Chu Yuan drowned himself because his king would not take his advice. As a result, his kingdom was conquered. Chu Yuan drowned himself on the fifth day of the fifth month in 277 B.C. To save his body, people fed the fish cooked rice. They rowed boats and threw bamboo leaved filled with cooked rice into the water. Later, the custom of eating tzungtzu and rice dumplings became part of the festival.

Source: travelchinaguide.com
Other Festival

Lantern Festival

The Lantern Festival (Simplified Chinese: 元宵节; Traditional Chinese: 元宵節/元宵; pinyin: yuánxiāojié) or (Yuanxiao Festival), also known as the Shang Yuan Festival (上元节), is a Chinese festival celebrated on the fifteenth day of the first month in the lunar year in the Chinese calendar. It is not to be confused with the Mid-Autumn Festival, which is also sometimes known as the "Lantern Festival" in locations such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia.The Chinese Lantern Festival is the last day of the traditional Chinese New Year celebration period. The Lantern Festival is also known as the Little New Year since it marks the end of the series of celebrations starting from the Chinese New Year. Koreans celebrate this festival as the Daeboreum.During the Lantern Festival, children go out at night carrying bright lanterns. In ancient times, the lanterns were fairly simple, for only the emperor and noblemen had large ornate ones; in modern times, lanterns have been embellished with many complex designs. For example, lanterns are now often made in shapes of animals.



Traditionally, the date once served as a day for love and matchmaking. It was one of the few nights in ancient times without a strict curfew. Young people were chaperoned in the streets in hopes of finding love. Matchmakers acted busily in hopes of pairing couples. The brightest lanterns were symbolic of good luck and hope. Those who do not carry lanterns often enjoy watching informal lantern parades. Other popular activities at this festival include eating tangyuan (Simplified Chinese: 汤圆; Traditional Chinese: 湯圓; pinyin: tāngyuán), a sweet glutinous rice dumpling served in a sugary soup, and guessing lantern riddles, often messages of love.
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Source: Wikipedia and travelchinaguide.com
Other Festival

Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year (Simplified Chinese: 春节; Traditional Chinese: 春節; pinyin: Chūn jié), or Spring Festival or the Lunar New Year (Simplified Chinese: 农历新年; Traditional Chinese: 農曆新年; pinyin: Nóng lì xīn nián), is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. The festival proper begins on the first day of the first lunar month (Chinese: 正月; pinyin: zhēng yuè) in the Chinese calendar and ends on the 15th; this day is called the Lantern Festival (Simplified Chinese: 元宵节; Traditional Chinese: 元宵節; pinyin: yuánxiāojié).Chinese New Year's Eve is known as Chúxì (除夕). Chu literally means "change" and xi means "Eve".Celebrated internationally in areas with large populations of ethnic Chinese, Chinese New Year is considered a major holiday for the Chinese and has had a strong influence on the new year celebrations of its neighbours. These include Koreans, Vietnamese, Mongolians, Nepalese, Bhutanese, but no longer the Japanese since 1873.



In countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, The Philippines, Thailand, and other countries with significant Chinese populations, the Lunar New Year is also celebrated, largely by ethnic Chinese, but it is not part of the traditional cultures of these countries. In Thailand, for example, the true New Year celebration of the ethnic Thais is Songkran, which is totally different and is celebrated in April.
The period around Chinese New Year is also the time of the largest human migration, when migrant workers in China, as well as overseas Chinese around the world travel home to have reunion dinners with their families on Chinese New Year's eve. More interurban trips are taken in mainland China in this 40-day period than the total population of China.
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Source: Wikipedia
Other Festival

Festival

Chinese New Year
Lantern Festival
Qingming Festival

Dragon Boat Festival
Moon Festival

grammar

Highly inflected languages such as Latin and Russian make scores of additions to, or changes in, the sound of a word to indicate grammatical differences; modern Chinese, on the other hand, never changes, and seldom adds, sounds for such purposes. Because no inflection of nouns exists to show whether they are, for example, subject or object, and no indication is given that verbs, nouns, and adjectives agree with each other in number and case, word order is even more important than it is in English as an indicator of the relation of words to one another in the sentence. In broad outline, Chinese word order is quite like that of English: subject-verb-object, modifier-modified. On closer inspection, the grammar reveals greater differences between the languages. In English the subject is always the performer of an action, but in Chinese it is more often simply a topic set forth to be followed by a comment. An example is Nei-ke shu yezi hen da, literally "(As for) that tree, leaves very big," that is, "that tree has very big leaves." Further grammatical characteristics of Chinese are that, in general, verb tense is not expressed; and for lack of an equivalent of the English relative clause, quite complicated modifier phrases may precede the term modified. Jianle shu jiu mai de neige ren, "Having-seen-book-immediately-buy-is-that-man," is translated as "That man who instantly buys every book he sees." The Chinese written language is of an old and conservative type that assigns a single distinctive symbol, or character, to each word of the vocabulary. Knowledge of 2000 to 3000 characters is needed to read newspapers, and a large dictionary contains more than 40,000 characters (arranged according to sound or form). The oldest texts to have been discovered are oracular sayings incised on tortoise shells and cattle scapulae by court diviners of the Shang dynasty, from the early 14th century BC on; these are the so-called oracle-bone inscriptions. Although the writing system has since been standardized and stylistically altered, its principles and many of its symbols remain fundamentally the same. Like other scripts of ancient origin, Chinese is derived from picture writing; it grew into a word-by-word representation of language when it was discovered that words too abstract to be readily pictured could be indicated by their sound rather than their sense. Unlike other scripts, however, Chinese still works pictographically as well as phonetically. Moreover, its sound indications have not been adapted to changes of pronunciation but have remained keyed to the pronunciation of 3000 years ago. The building blocks of the system are several hundred pictographs for such basic words as man, horse, and axe. In addition, expanded, or compound, pictographs exist. For example, a symbol of this type representing man carrying grain means "harvest," and thus "year" (nian ).

pinyin

Pinyin uses Roman letters to represent sounds in Standard Mandarin. The way these letters represent sounds in Standard Mandarin differ from other languages that use the Roman alphabet. For example, the sounds indicated in pinyin by b and g correspond more closely to the sounds indicated by p and k in some Western uses of the Latin script, e.g., French. Other letters, like j, q, x or zh, indicate sounds that do not correspond to any exact sound in English. Some of the transcriptions in pinyin, such as the ang ending, do not correspond to English pronunciations, either.
By letting Roman characters refer to specific Chinese sounds, pinyin produces a compact and accurate romanization, which is convenient for native Chinese speakers and scholars. However, it also means that a person who has not studied Chinese or the pinyin system is likely to severely mispronounce words, which is a less serious problem with some earlier romanization systems such as Wade-Giles.

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Welcome to Learning Chinese Online Site

The majority ethnic group of China, including both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. Of China's more than 1 billion people, approximately 95 percent speak Chinese, as opposed to the non-Chinese languages such as Tibetan, Mongolian, Lolo, Miao, and Tai spoken by minorities. Chinese is also spoken by large emigrant communities in Southeast Asia, North and South America, and in the Hawaiian Islands. More people, in fact, speak Chinese than any other language in the world; English ranks second in number of speakers and Spanish third.

As the dominant language of East Asia, Chinese has greatly influenced the writing systems and vocabularies of neighboring languages not related to it by origin, such as Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. It has been estimated that until the 18th century more than half of the world's printed books were Chinese.

Introduction to chinese phonetics

index

Chinese (汉语/漢語, Pinyin: Hànyǔ; 华语/華語, Huáyǔ; or 中文, Zhōngwén) is a language or language family that forms part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world speaks some form of Chinese as their native language.
All varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. However, Chinese is also internally diverse. Regional variation is comparable to the Romance language family: many variants of spoken Chinese are mutually incomprehensible. There are between six and twelve main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme); the largest by far is Mandarin (c. 800 million), followed by Wu (c. 90 million), and Cantonese (c. 80 million). The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "languages" or "dialects" is a controversial issue. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3.
The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin, based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Standard Mandarin is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Standard Cantonese is one of the official languages of Hong Kong and of Macau.

History

Most linguists classify all of the variations of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, called Proto-Sino-Tibetan, analogous to Proto-Indo-European, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The relations between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages are an area of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The main difficulty in this effort is that, while there is very good documentation that allows us to reconstruct the ancient sounds of Chinese, there is no written documentation of the division between proto-Sino-Tibetan and Chinese. In addition, many of the languages that would allow us to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly documented or understood.
Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. One of the first systems was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in the early 1900s. The system was much revised, but always heavily relying on Karlgren's insights and methods.
Old Chinese (T:上古漢語S:上古汉语P:Shànggǔ Hànyǔ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese," was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BC - 256 BC), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters also provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. The pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean also provide valuable insights. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants, but probably was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists.
Middle Chinese (T:中古漢語S:中古汉语P:Zhōnggǔ Hànyǔ) was the language used during the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (7th through 10th centuries AD). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 AD), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. Linguists are confident of having reconstructed how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries, foreign transliterations, "rhyming tables" constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. However, all reconstructions are tentative; for example, scholars have shown that trying to reconstruct modern Cantonese from the rhymes of modern Cantopop would give a very inaccurate picture of the language.
The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most northern Chinese people, in Sìchuān and in a broad arc from the northeast (Manchuria) to the southwest (Yúnnán), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north China's plains. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China promoted linguistic diversity. The presence of Mandarin in Sìchuān is largely due to a plague in the 12th century. This plague, which may have been related to the Black Death, depopulated the area, leading to later settlement from north China.
Until the 20th century, most Chinese only spoke their native local variety of Chinese. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least during the officially Manchu-speaking Qīng Empire. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up orthoepy academies (T:正音書院S:正音书院P:Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) to make pronunciation conform to the Qīng capital Běijīng's standard, but had little success. During the Qīng's last 50 years in the late 19th century, the Běijīng Mandarin finally replaced Nánjīng Mandarin in the imperial court. For the general population, although variations of Mandarin were already widely spoken in China then, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various regionalects for every aspect of life. The new Běijīng Mandarin court standard was thus fairly limited.
This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of an education system based on Standard Mandarin as the language of instruction. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all people in mainland China[citation needed] and on Táiwān[citation needed]. At the time of the widespread introduction of Standard Mandarin in mainland China and Táiwān, Hong Kong was a British colony and Standard Mandarin was never used. In Hong Kong, the language of education, formal speech, and daily life remains the local Cantonese, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.

Lesson 5

生词 shēngcí New words

1. 她_______tā___________ she
2.谁_______shéi,shuí______who
3.妈妈_____māma_________mother
4.姐姐_____jiějie__________older sister
5.医生_____yīshēng_______doctor
6.商人_____shāngrén______businessman, merchant, trader
7.笔_______bǐ____________pen
8.知道_____zhīdào________know
9.学生_____xúeshēng______student, pupil,
10.的______de___________(possessive particle); of
11.书包____shūbāo_______schoolbag, satchel

课文 text
A : 她是谁?
B : 她是我妈妈。
A : 你妈妈是老师吗？
B : 不。 我妈妈是医生。
A : 你爸爸是商人， 对吗？
B : 不对, 我爸爸也是老师。
A :那是谁的书包？
B :那是我的书包。



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Lesson 4

生词 shēngcí New words

1. 他_________tā____________he, him
2. 我_________wǒ___________I, me, myself
3. 朋友_______péngyou______friend
4. 上_________shàng________go
5. 哪儿_______nǎr___________where
6. 哥哥_______gēge_________older brother
7. 爸 爸______bàba__________father
8. 同学_______tóngxué_______classmate, schoolmate
9. 我們_______wǒmen________we, us, ourselves
10. 商店______shāngdiàn______store, shop
11. 书店______shūdiàn________bookshop, bookstore, bookseller's
12. 再见______zàijiàn_________good-bye

课文 text
A : 这是我朋友。
B : 你好。
C : 你好。你们上那儿？
A : 我们上商店。你上哪儿？
C : 我上书店。再见。A , B : 再见。



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Lesson 3

生词 shēngcí New words

1. 这_______zhè________this, these
2. 是_______shì_________yes
3. 什么_____shénme_____what
4. 书_______shū________book
5. 那_______nà_________that
6. 也_______yě_________also, too
7. 桌子_____zhuōzi______table, desk
8. 吗_______ma________sentence final interrogative particle
9. 不_______bù_________no
10. 椅子____yǐzi________Chair
11. 对______duì________yes

课文 text
A : 这是什么?
B : 这是书.
A : 那是什么?
B : 那也是书.
A : 这是桌子吗?
B : 对 , 这是桌子.

发音 pronunciation
Pronunciation 不 (tonal mark 4) word follow with tonal mark 4tonal mark of 不 is change to tonal mark 2Example1.不是 = bùshì change to búshì2.不对 = bùduì change to búduì



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Lesson 2

生词 shēngcí New words

1. 你_____nǐ____________you
2. 好_____hǎo__________good
3.早上____zǎoshāng_____morning
4.老师____lǎoshī________teacher
5.晚上____wǎnshāng_____in the evening
6.你们____nǐmen________you (plural)
7.您______nín__________you (formal)

课文 text
陈 : 你好。
王 : 你好。
陈 : 早上好， 王。
王 : 早上好， 陈。
陈 , 王 : 李老师 ， 晚上好。
李 : 你们好。



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Classroom

Introduction to chinese phonetics

Lesson 1 Chinese number
Lesson 2 你好。
Lesson 3 这是什么?
Lesson 4 你们上那儿？
Lesson 5 她是谁?

Lesson 1

生词 shēngcí New words

1. 一____ yī_____one
2. 二____èr_____two
3. 三____sān____three
4. 四____sì_____ four
5. 五____wǔ____ five
6. 六____liù_____six
7. 七____qī_____seven
8. 八____bā____eight
9. 九____jiǔ_____nine
10. 十___shí____ten
11. 百___bǎi____hundred

Examples
11 = 十一
29 = 二十一
99 = 九十九
189 = 一百

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Introduction to chinese phonetics

Introduction to chinese phonetics

consonant
1. b p m f
2. d t n l
3. g k h
4. j q x
5. z c s
6. zh ch sh r
7. y w

vowel
1. a
2. o
3. e
4. i
5. u
6. ü

tonal mark
1. ˉ
2. ˊ
3. ˇ
4. ˋ

examples
1.你好 (Pinyin=nǐhǎo) = Hello
2.再见 (Pinyin=zàijiàn) = good bye