Why Mandarin Is Easier Than You Think (Start Here).

If you are learning Chinese Mandarin, this is the first video that you need to start with. In this video, we will cover pinyin, the tones, and then the characters. You can also check out the lesson 1 where we covered the sentence structure. Next video, we will talk about the four types of characters, different strokes, stroke order, how characters are made, and memory tips, what is radical, and easy grammar tips. One interesting thing about the Chinese Mandarin is there is no alphabet, but there is pinyin that helps you to pronounce the characters. It's like phonics in English. And the pinyin was adapted in China in 1958. And using pinyin, you pronounce it mao, mao, m-a-o, mao. What is actually pinyin and how to use pinyin? So in one syllable, sounds like ma. M is initial, which is starting. D is a final. It is the end of the word. Initials and finals. Initials are usually consonants like po, po, mo, po, do. And finals, we have the vowels a, ai, ou. In here, you will see the examples of pinyin, yi, zhong, sui, qiu, yue, qing, and pinyin pointers, which are known as tones as well. So there are four tones and one neutral tone. That's why we have the tones to differentiate between ma, ma, ma, ma. And then one neutral tone on the top. Pinyin pointers. Tones. You need to look at each word very carefully. They can look similar, but they have very different meanings. Let's say, and zuo. Zou is to walk and to leave. Zuo is to sit. So the first one is the third tone, zou. And then the second one is zuo. It's the fourth tone. And now let's read the examples. mao, cat, yue, moon, gou, dog, ren, person, shou, hand, shu, tree, chi, ka, yang, sheep, shu, book, mao, feather. As you see, if the tones change, the meaning of the word changes. Now let's read it again and listen carefully. mao, yue, gou, ren, shou, shu, chi, yang, shu, mao. Characters. We have two styles, simplified and traditional. Simplified is simple, easier to learn, and traditional. Traditional is a little bit more complicated, but depending where you're going, I would recommend you to learn different styles. If you are going to the mainland China, you should probably learn the simplified. Originally, characters were written top to bottom, right to left. Now we keep it the same order for the radicals when you're writing the character, but we're still keeping it as from left to right. In the next video, we will talk about the four types of characters, how you can build them, different strokes, stroke order, how characters are made, memory tips, what is radical, and some easy grammar tips.