Learn to Speak Basic Chinese (Mandarin) Words and Phrases

The Chinese Language and dialects

Each province, each city and even each village speaks their own dialect. There are hundreds of Chinese dialects in China so much so that each dialect speaker is not likely to understand another dialect speaker from another village or city. Fortunately, Mandarin, the official dialect, is understood by all dialect speakers.

Let’s learn a few useful basic and common Mandarin words and phrases that will help you break barriers with your Chinese friends.

How are You? -Ni Hao Ma

Also commonly shorten to Ni Hao.

This is likely to be the first Mandarin phrase that you will ever learn. Useful as a greeting or a ice-breaker. Suitable for use with all ages and professions.

Thank You -Xie Xie.

Another polite term that is easy to remember and use.

Very Good -Hen Hao.

This is useful when giving praise for a job or task well done. Also useful as a reply to anyone who says “Ni Hao Ma?’ to you.

Ni Hao Ma? (How are you?)

Hen Hao (Very Good)

No Good -Bu Hao.

This is useful when there is a need to comment on a shoddy or incomplete job or task. Can also be used as a reply to Ni Hao Ma? but may not be such a good reply.

Ni Hao Ma? (How are you?)

Bu Hao (No Good)

Very Expensive -Hen Gui.

When bargaining at the shops, this is the best term to use when driving a hard bargain.

Don’t want or No -Bu Yao.

This is the best term to use for touts - street hawkers who approach you at every tourist stop to ask you to buy things. Bu Yao….will stop them in their track.

This is beautiful -Hen Piao Liang.

Use this phrase to praise something that is nice or beautiful. May also be used when meeting a pretty girl too!

Taxi -De Shi.

De Shi is the correct term but you should be understood even if you use the English word for Taxi. They sound alike anyway.

Good Bye or See You Again -Zai Jian.

Well, I guess this is another term that will be easily understood even if the English word is used.

Excuse Me -Jie Guo.

There is always a crowd in touristy areas. There are so many Chinese who wants to see the same monuments too. Rather than push your way through the crowd, using the term Jie Guo may just open the path ahead for you!

Receipt -Fa Piao.

Always ask for the receipt or Fa Piao at the shops or from a taxi. This may be useful if you need to complain about a fraud or shoddy product. Also useful if you leave behind your bag or camera in the taxi.

I don’t want -Wo Bu Yao.

Useful when refusing a tout or when offered a drink too many at the Dinner table.

Ken Cheong lived, worked and travelled in China for the last 7 years. You may find more such articles at his websites. Feel free to distribute these articles as long as you mention his websites at: http://www.chinese-culture.net and http://www.quick-pain-relief.com

The Nature of Language

I have come to the conclusion that cyberspeak is an enjoyable language. It allows one to break the rules of grammar and punctuation without penalty. Language, especially English, has always been an organic substance. In other words, the diction, syntax and rules of any natural mode of communication, such as English, have always morphed and evolved as humans put input into it.

Strict, mechanistic rules in language are only formalized in order to ease communication among the elite. The important thing to remember is that certain individuals are naturally elected the right to challenge this order. They do so by being creative.

If we are going to fertilize this organic thing called English, then we have to be willing to see through to the real meaning of the shackles of formalization, and see that these strict rules are really a form of enslavement. Particularly what is enslaved is your creative spirit.

Of course, average ordinary casual speakers know instinctively that language is organic. There are zillions of microcosms, families, sub-families, neighborhoods, clans, groups, sub-cultures, elite and scrubbers, all of which secretly defy convention. Human beings, lurking in their sub-culture, decide willy-nilly to make their own personal language.

The most spectacular recent examples of sub-cultures that have gone far beyond the casual and ordinary in language refinement are the hip-hop culture and the cyber culture.

The language wizards in hip-hop are creative creatures morphing vocally inside your ears. Your average rapper says defiantly, “I make my own world. I/We live by my/our own rules. If you dig us, join our party, help us create a new way to talk, listen and understand the way we talk, rap with us and be free in body, spirit, mind and soul!”

Purveyors of cyberspeak are very similar in their sentiments. Countless kids can break every English rule in the book behind their teachers’ backs and be rewarded for their intelligent creativity at inventing new language terms and acronyms. By being hip to the standard argot of particular chatters, a cyber-geek gets instant status.

Language is a give-and-take game. If what you write is cool and others like it and decide to create a world of communication around your introduced terms and styles, then they will have organically taken what you have offered and helped you to grow a new branch on the language tree. What is so great about such givers like cyber-heads and rap-geeks is that they are bringing much-needed foliage to a tree with a big, fat (not phat)trunk that has grown from the soil of the powered elites, such as traditional novelists, bureaucrats, lawyers, editors, politicos, etc.

Now I do not think these groups of powered elites are completely evil because everyone has the possibility of becoming a member of the elites if they are not oppressed and possess talent. (Let us be honest: the hip-hop world and cyber world are full of elites and strict hierarchy.) The problem I have with any elites is that their formalized world stultifies outsiders. If, for whatever reason, you could not join the necessary hierarchy of your chosen field or avocation, you will find that you are a fool to the elites of this world because you will not be hip to the definitions of correct communication in it. Knowing the proper language games by the right powered elites is what matters.

If I tried to rap, I would be one whack motherfu#$%er. When I try to throw my 2 cents into cyber-culture sites on the net, such as chat rooms, forums, game sites, link dumps, tech sites, etc., my money is usually ignored. I can subtly feel the geeks recoiling in horror. They are repulsed by me because I do not deserve respect in a world that I have not sweated the proper amount of blood and tears for. They cannot accept me because I have not been properly vetted in the rules of their language games.

What I usually do when I am rejected is say, “Hey, I’m a maverick, a free radical, a writer looking to heal the word wounds between competing sub-cultures. I am a universalist. I am not working for the old fat tree of knowledge. I wanna grow a new phat tree, not just branches, and only a universalist can do this.”

Christopher K Haan is a free-radical blogger and e-ranter who dreams of one day saving the world. He is not ashamed of such a wild dream because he knows that personal delusions sometimes actually affect outside reality. E-rants.
Feed Your Blog Over the Web.

The (de)Evolution of the English Language

Never before in history has a single language been as widely used as English. The number of English users in Asia alone is more or less equal to the number of Native English speakers worldwide: 350 million, more or less the combined populations of the United States, Britain and Canada.

The advent of the Internet has boosted English even further, about eighty percent of the world’s electronically stored information is in English, and this widespread use of the language has caused an increase in the demand for English courses. An estimate by the British Council reports that today more than 1 billion people are learning English for work, study or leisure. China is strongly pushing English language in its schools, there are more Chinese children studying English as second language than there are Britons.

Those among the native English speakers who believe their language will soon be the standard for worldwide communication should think again:

Firstly, it can hardly be considered their language anymore, since the vast majority of English users are not native speakers. English is a living language and like all languages it evolves, it changes and adapts itself according to its environment and - especially - the cultural and historical background of its speakers, often mingling with idioms and linguistic structires of the local language. There is no longer one English, but rather various adapted forms of the language, often with dramatic changes in spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.

Secondly, the Internet fastlane is producing an even more interesting phenomenon, when one would imagine such a widespread resource as the Web to become a solid reference for spelling and grammar, we are met with quite the opposite, English over the Net is evolving, or rather de-evolving towards a more simplified form.

More and more frequently we encounter what might look like harmless spelling mistakes; blogs, newsletters, chats and forums are full of them. At a closer look we might notice that some of these altered forms are consistent across the Web, in some cases we might encounter simplifications, such as there used indifferently as ‘there’ or ‘their’, or phonetic shifts, caused by the natural tendency to spell similar sounds the same way: thus unstressed _ent and _ant both sound the same and tend to be spelled _ant e.g. consistant.

Other changes might involve the tendency to either spell ’s no matter what grammar is involved, two chair’s or the opposite, its for ‘it is’ pronoun + verb or ‘its own’ possessive pronoun.

The result of this might be surprising and, for the purists, rather unsettling. If there ever will be a common world language, it won’t look or sound much like English anymore. Current trends might produce a language with simplified grammar, she look chair, phonetic spelling ther is a tendansy to bad wether and foreign words Hungry kya ‘Are you hungry?’ a mixture of English and Hindi found in a recent ad for Domino’s pizza in India.

Being a living language, the de-evolution of English seems unstoppable, in a certain sense this is a signal of its good health and of its massive usage in today’s world. Only dead languages never change.

Ian Lahey has the Italian equivalent of an MA in Language and Literature, he is currently living in Italy where he runs a small English language school and a second business for his other great love: computers and multimedia. He can be reached at ian@activeonline.it

How to Gain Instant Rapport With Language

I went to the theatre at the weekend to watch a stage version of a favourite film of mine. The film is called ‘East is East’ and is nothing short of hilarious throughout. The stage show is wonderful too.

The idea behind the film is about a mixed race family where the strict father from Pakistan has raised his children with his northern English wife in a working class environment. The father expects his sons to agree to an arranged marriage and is infuriated when they do not want to do so. I shall not go on in too much depth about it, but if you get the chance to see it, you will laugh out loud at times.

The things that make me laugh about it so much is the way in which language is used. There is a very specific language that incorporates many factors that is used by the father; the way he talks envelopes a northern English accent, Pakistani mannerisms and traits and a wonderful working class profanity that is the hallmark of this brilliantly written script.

However, I still find myself finding the way the father communicates verbally to be very aggressive and direct; his language is hilarious, but it is never going to win him many friends upon an initial meeting!

It got me thinking about how to use language to build and develop rapport with other people and using your language to enhance relationships with people right from the start.

I am not going to write about the content of your language; the subject matter is not what I want to highlight today. I want to highlight how to be aware of how others use language. Then you can very cleverly reflect their style of language back to them in your own communication to build rapport beautifully.

Think about noticing and considering the words people are using. We all use words every day to communicate with those around us in our daily lives. Just take a moment now to think of some of the occasions where you failed to get the result you wanted by using the wrong words, or where you could have got a better result if the words had been more suited to the person you were talking to.

Each individual can only get information by seeing sights, hearing sounds, touching, smelling, tasting or having someone else describe it. Any experience, memory or processing of information has to be done through one or more of these six channels:

Visual (sights); Auditory (sounds); Kinaesthetic (physical feelings); Olfactory (odours); Gustatory (tastes); and digital (words). So, if you are eating a meal in a restaurant, you might see the food and the variance of colours on the table and other people around you; hear the clinking of their cutlery on the plates; smell the various aromas of the foods as they are served up; taste the flavours of the food that is eaten; be aware of conversations around you in the room.

Each experience or memory in our minds may include some or all of these elements. We each tend to have a pattern of which element we use the most or which we use first. We can only consciously use one element at a time, so we can easily notice which gets primary usage by anyone that we come into contact with. The patterns that we use the most then tend to show up with more frequency than others in our use of language. The markers are the descriptive words that I am going to highlight in a moment. Most people show a clear preference for one of the three main sets of visual, auditory or kinaesthetic words. The set used most by any individual is referred to as their primary system.

Let me give you an example of the kind of words I am talking about here;

Examples of Visual words are; see, look, flash, glare, shiny, brilliant, view, bright, picture, fade, ray etc.

Examples of Auditory words are; hear, sound, whisper, noise, quiet, listen, dissonant, song, thunder etc.

Examples of Kinaesthetic words are; feel, touch, grasp, tickle, hold, pressure, weigh, strike, painful etc.

A way to find out yours or a friends lead system is to talk for two minutes on a topic that you like and then for another two minutes about a topic you do not like, do it with a friend or record yourself and then note down all the words you used and put them into categories to note the main system that is used. It is good practice to look for what you use most and those that are used in conversations you have all the time with other people. This way you will heighten your own sensory acuity and sharpen your ability to spot those used by others more and more easily.

So the next stage of rapport development is to then begin to match the words used by those that you wish to gain with rapport wit in much the same way that we matched the non-verbal communication before. Develop a more appropriately frequent use of their primary system; punctuate your sentences with those types of words.

What you are doing here is stepping into their map of the world and demonstrating unconsciously that you are listening and valuing what they say and how they say it.

Once you have sufficiently matched and developed the primary system for developing rapport more easily, you can start doing some other things to develop rapport with language.

One thing to do with your language is to demonstrate that you are aware of their on-going reality. The most effective way to do this is stack truisms together. Let me explain that. By truism, I am referring to making a casual statement in a sentence that is true about the person that you are communicating with. For example; You are reading this article, you are breathing and you have yours eyes open. Now these are rather crudely obvious.

I entered a restaurant a little while ago and the staff were very pressured and busy. As we entered I said to the lady that greeted us “Hello there, I spoke to you earlier and booked a table in the name of Eason, I see you are very busy tonight, but I can tell that you are coping very well by the way everyone on that table you just served is smiling.” Here, I stated 3 truisms, when you state three truisms, the other person will unconsciously process this as recognition that you sincerely see things from their perspective. We got some fantastic service that night I can tell you, and it was all founded on making that immediate rapport connection. I could have been an awkward customer from then on, but the waitress would still have enjoyed serving us as we had perfect rapport from the beginning.

Then you can think about how you can develop rapport by stating truisms (statements that cannot be disputed or argued with) about their experience in that moment. Notice and employ these very simple basic strategies and notice how rapport begins to happen much more easily.

Please visit Adam’s website for a vast range of resources from the fields of hypnosis, personal development and human potential and to receive your amazing, free, instantly downloadable hypnosis session for relaxation: http://www.adam-eason.com

Writing Japanese: What is Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana

The Japanese language is so fascinating. The tonal qualities of the language is quite unique and the inherent politeness of the Japanese people is translated well into its language which is in turns elegant and stylish and drips with respect.

Japanese writing is also a very elegant script and it has evolved from its original Chinese script beginnings to become something that is intrinsically Japanese. There are actually different types or ways of writing Japanese characters and it has been a source of confusion for people who are not familiar with Japanese culture or for students of Japanese culture who have not yet fully researched the intricacies of the Japanese written language.

The three ways of writing Japanese characters are Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana, with another version called Romaji being used for special purposed.

Kanji

The word kanji is a Japanese derivative of the Chinese word hanzi, which translates to “Han characters”. The word Han pertains to the Han Dynasty and is also the name that the Chinese use to refer to themselves.

Using Kanji would mean employing between 5000 to 10000 Chinese characters. This meant that writing in this form was very difficult. In 1981, the Japanese government, as a measure to simplify how Japanese is written and read, intrduced the j?y? kanji hy? or List of Chinese Characters for General Use. The list includes 1945 regular characters and 166 special characters that has a use only for writing people’s names. All official documents, as well as newspapers, textbooks as well as other publications only use this form.

Hiragana

Chinese characters are considered as the source for Hiragana syllables. Hiragana – which means “ordinary syllabic script” — was referred to originally as onnade or “women’s hand” because women used this form the most. Men are known to write in Kanji and Katakana. But usage of Hiragana evolved through the centuries, and by the 10th century, it was being used by both men and women.

The earliest versions of hiragana had diverse characters that represent the same syllable. The whole system was simplified however in order to make it easier to use by establishing a one to one correspondence between the written and spoken syllables.

Katakana

The Katakana “alphabets” have a very storied history. It was taken from abbreviated Chinese characters that were used by Buddhist monks. They used Katakana in order to illustrate the correct pronunciations of Chinese text back in the 9th century. Initially, there were so many different symbols used just to represent one syllable that it became quite confusing. But through time, it became more streamlined. Katakana was initially thought of as “men’s writing” but over the centuries it has been used to write onomatopoeic words, foreign names, telegrams, and non-Chinese loan words. Katakana contains about 48 syllables.

There is also another script used in the Japanese language called Romaji. It is basically used to write the Latin alphabet into Japanese characters, especially for English or Latin alphabet-spelled words that do not have a direct Japanese translation.

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