Start Learning Chinese

It has been a long time since I had the idea to write a tutorial for my foreign friends to learn Chinese.

Now let's start Lession One.

This tutorial is only read and speak Chinese, not covering writing Chinese.

Writing Chinese is much more difficult than reading & speaking.

Reading & speaking Chinese starts from single Chinese characters.

A single Chinese characters may equal to a single English letter, or a word, or a phrase, or a sentence, or a paragraph, or an article. Most Chinese teachers may not emphasize on this big difference between Chinese and English. However now, you must keep it in your mind, then you will find out reading & speaking Chinese is totally not as difficult as it’s said.

Let’s take character “一”as an example. “一”means “one”，and sounds like letter “e”.

You see, you can guess the meaning of Chinese character. “一”stands for “one”，“二”stands for “two”, while, BINGO,  “三”stands for “three”.

Recognizing Chinese character is not a big challenge if you follow my tutorial.

The most difficult part of learning Chinese reading and speaking is to link the Chinese character to its pronunciation, however there are also some tricks to help you. And I will teach you step by step.

There are lots of Chinese characters, but don’t worry. You only need to master 100 characters for basic communication and 1000 characters for almost free communication with a native Chinese people.

And you also don’t need to worry about your pronunciation of Chinese characters, because just like you can understand my Chinglish, a Chinese native can also figure out what you want to say.

Before I ends up this first Chinese lesson, let’s study your first 3 Chinese characters.

“一”stands for “one”，sounds like “e”.

“二”stands for “two”, sounds like the “ir” in “bird”

“三”stands for “three”，sounds like “than” without “n”.

Let’s speak loudly, 一(e)，二(ir), 三(tha)

See you in the next lesion.