-Why Mandarin Chinese is Easy to Learn - Yoyo Chinese.

Hello, nǐ hǎo, welcome to YoYo Conversational Chinese. In this video series, we're only going to focus on spoken Chinese. At the end of the series, you should be able to conduct basic conversations with Chinese people. But before we move on, I'd like to tell you why I believe Mandarin Chinese is a conquerable language for you after all. First, Chinese grammar is relatively easy and straightforward. The word order of a simple Chinese sentence is exactly the same as it is in English. For example, I or me in Chinese is wǒ. You in Chinese is nǐ. The word to love in Chinese is ài. To say I love you, you say wǒ, ài, nǐ. To say you love me, you say nǐ, ài, wǒ. You can just translate all the simple English sentences word by word to Chinese and you'll get the right Chinese sentences. And when it comes to long and complicated sentences, you just need to remember a few rules as to where to put time and location and then you're all set. Also, unlike many other European languages, Chinese people don't conjugate verbs, which means that Chinese verbs don't change form based on subject or when the action is taking place. For example, when you say she is, he was, I am or we are, the Chinese word order for the verb to be doesn't change and stays the same for all of them. In addition, unlike many other languages such as French and German, there's no gender in Chinese. Isn't that great? Ok, let's move on. The second reason why I believe Chinese can be easy to learn is that the more you learn, the easier it gets. What do I mean by that? Well, Chinese words are very transparent and logical. The way a Chinese word is formed tells you a lot about its meanings. For example, in Chinese, movie is diàn yíng, which literally means electronic shadow. The old black and white silent films appeared like cast shadows on the screen and that's where the word is from. Telephone in Chinese is diàn huà, which literally means electronic speech. Computer is diàn nǎo, which literally means electronic brain. So when you see the Chinese words for movies, telephone and computer, you know they're all related to electricity and that will help you memorize the words. One more example here, a cellphone is shǒu jī, which means hand machine. An airplane is fēi jī, which means flying machine. And a helicopter is zhí shēng jī, which literally means straight ascending machine. That's what I mean by the more Chinese you learn, the easier it gets because the more Chinese you learn, the more building blocks or language components in a word you will acquire and then you can just put together the old pieces and make up new ones. In this video series, I'm going to try my best to make your learning process as easy and fun for you as possible. So in our next lesson, we're going to learn the Mandarin Chinese tone. Take care, zài jiàn.