A Description of Mandarin Chinese from the Perspective of a Native English Speaker

I initially acquired some proficiency in spoken Chinese while teaching English in Henan Province, China from 2001-2003. I then continued in the UK, building on my immersion in the language during those initial two-years. Since then I have made two trips back to China in the summer of 2006 and the summer of 2007 where I had opportunities to practice my spoken Chinese. At present, I keep up my Chinese skills by writing emails and letters to students and friends in China while occasionally getting the chance to practice my spoken Chinese with native speakers in London.
In this essay, I first want to try and outline the main features of Chinese, then I will focus on three particular aspects of the language that have challenged and interested me, namely, the phonological system, transliteration of foreign words and abbreviation.

A Brief Overview

In terms of classification, Chinese is regarded as a Sino-Tibetan language, a group which includes Tibetan, Khmer and other Southeast Asian languages - but the term is now considered problematic by some scholars (Gao, 2000). Chinese has a written form expressed in ‘characters’ (pictograms and ideograms) going back at least 3,000 years (Gao, 2000, Kane, 2006). In this essay, I will write the Romanised rendering of each character in square brackets (each syllable separated by a dash), after the Chinese character examples. I use the simplified script used in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The simplified script in Mandarin is called 简体字 [jian-ti-zi] and in the PRC the language is variously called 中文 [Zhong-wen] (Zhong for ‘China’ and wen for script)，汉语 [Han-yu] (the ‘Han’ “ethnicity” and yu meaning ‘language’) and 普通话 [Pu-tong-hua] (Common speech). In Taiwan it is called 国语 [Guo-yu] (National Language). The more time I spent in China, and the more I attempted to use the language, it soon became clear that Chinese was not one homogenous language, and was fascinated to discover that Chinese, while having one written form of the language, in fact has eight major spoken forms.

To a linguist, it is plain that Chinese is actually a collective term for eight different languages as the ‘dialects’ are mutually unintelligible. The Mandarin of northern China is the most widely spoken language but other major cities and regions have their own ‘languages’, for example Shanghai has 吴 [Wu] while the economic powerhouse of the Pearl River Delta region of Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong has Cantonese 粤语 [Yue-yu] and Hakka 客家 [Ke-jia], while Fujian and Taiwan have North Min 闽北 [Bei-min] and South Min 闽南 [Nan-min] among others.

Syntactically, Chinese is a configurational language in that it relies a lot on word order for meaning. The word order is largely the same as English (SVO) but sometimes SOV is apparent. Chinese morphemes are the individual characters that make up the language (Gao, 2000). However, as I discovered, even though there is no inflection in the Chinese language, it does have characters that act as suffixes in combination with other characters, for example, 化 [hua] meaning ‘-ise/ize’ as in words like ‘nationalise’ i.e. 国家 [guo-jia] (country) becomes 国家化 [guo-jia-hua] (verb, to nationalise) or 者 [zhe] meaning ‘-er/-or’ as in ‘tailor’ or ‘player’ but in a text these are not connected to other characters, one just has to become adept at recognising the collocations - which are key in learning Chinese as in other languages. Chinese is an isolating language so in terms of reading a text with these isolated characters, it posed interesting challenges for me at first, such as wondering which combinations of the characters in a text made up different words, but after I was able to accept this aspect of Chinese, it has not been problematic.

In terms of orthography, there is the ‘Simplified script’ 简体字 [Jian-ti-zi] used in the PRChina and Singapore, and the ‘Traditional script’ 繁体字 [Fan-ti-zi], used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and other areas with Chinese-speaking communities. This spilt came about because from 1955, the Communist Chinese state sought to simplify about 1,700 of its characters which some people claim was an attempt to improve the literacy of the general population (Katzner, 2002:207) . Following this, scholars sought to Romanise the Chinese syllables into a system adopted and adapted from the Soviet Union called ‘Pinyin’ (拼音). Another system to transliterate Chinese phonemes called ‘Wade-Giles’ after the British scholars who invented it, had been developed in the 19th century. This system is still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong and many overseas Chinese communities today – hence personal names of Chinese from these places will be spelt differently from PRC Chinese. Books published on China in English now use the Pinyin spellings, and may refer to the Wade-Giles spellings only for historical reasons. As an example of the differences in spelling, if I take the common girl’s name 香 (fragrant) in Chinese, it would be romanised as [Xiang] in the P.R. of China and as [Hsiang] in Taiwan – the difference being [Hs] in the Wade-Giles system, compared to [X] in the Pinyin method used on the mainland. Both are unvoiced palatal initials. The final syllable [ang] remains the same in both systems

The Challenge of Chinese Phonology

Unsurprisingly, coming from a language that has no tones to distinguish morphemes, what I have found challenging in learning Chinese is that Mandarin has four tones to master. This phenomenon continues to cause problems in my comprehension of Mandarin speakers and my pronunciation and intelligibility when speaking Chinese. Chinese is a syllable-timed language as opposed to the stress-timed languages such as my mother tongue, English. Metrical phonology in the shape of stressed syllables within each ‘word’ does not exist in Chinese and what I found most difficult to accept when initially confronted with Chinese was that each ‘word’ or character, in effect has only one syllable. In addition, Chinese seemed to me to have a limited number of sounds and I initially found it quite difficult to distinguish words from each other. Mandarin has only six or seven vowels while English has around fourteen, (Rogers & Dalby, 2005), and Chinese has virtually no consonants at the ends of syllables as well as no consonant clusters. This is described by Gao as a ‘paucity of sounds’ but ‘compensated for by the tones’ (Gao, 2000). However, I would like to suggest that for beginner and intermediate learners of Chinese such as myself, this does not seem to be much of a compensation!

The tones of Chinese are: Falling tone (\), Rising tone (/), Level tone (-) and Falling and rising tone (v). There is also a fifth ‘soft tone’ where the syllable is not stressed (0). Differentiating them often takes a long time of exposure. As an example of the tones - I can take an unusual but illustrative sentence; “There is a squirrel in the pine tree”

松树 – Pine tree = song (-) shu (\)
松鼠 – Squirrel = song (-) shu (v)

The sentence in Chinese would look like this with tones underneath:

“松鼠在松树上” (songshu zai songshu shang)
(-) (v) (\) (-) (\) (\)

So, the first ‘shu’ (squirrel) should be said in a falling-rising tone whilst the second ‘shu’ (tree) should be in the falling tone. To me, the ‘shus’ are homophones but to a Chinese speaker they are not because the tones are different. But if a speaker gets the tones the wrong way round would their utterance be taken to mean that the pine tree is in the squirrel? Or would it not make a difference to the meaning or understanding because the context is obviously clear enough? Additionally, to confuse things further, what happens in practice is that some tones alter when preceded or followed by certain other tones, much like the principle of elision in English. Gao (2000) assures us that any ambiguity in Chinese is cleared away by the context, but there are many instances of this kind when I still cannot distinguish the words someone is saying to me, even with a context provided. It takes a lot of exposure and reinforcement to feel confident comprehending and producing the ‘right’ tones.

Because of the limited number of Chinese vowels in addition to the different tones, it also makes the problem of minimal pairs all the more acute for beginners. Chinese is no different from any other language in having minimal pairs, such as the vowel combination with final nasals such as郑 [zheng] and 张 [zhang], very common family names in China. Other sounds cause similar hurdles like the subtle difference between 早 [zao] ‘early’, and 草 [cao] ‘grass’. The /t/ and /c/ are in fact, both plain dentals (Kane, 2006) with the /c/ of ‘cao’ pronounced like the ‘ts’ in ‘its’.

In this next example of family names, there is the difference between 王 [wang] ‘King’ and 黄 [huang] ‘Yellow’, both being identical in pronunciation except that the former has the initial /w/ whereas the latter has the additional /h/ sound before the /w/. To confuse things further, in Hong Kong, because of the Wade-Giles system of transliteration, these two different family names would both be written as ‘Wong’. So if you meet a Mr or Mrs Wong from Hong Kong, they could be Mr/Mrs King or Mr/Mrs Yellow! ‘Mrs Wong’ may not actually share the same name as another Mrs Wong in written Chinese, but bizarrely in Wade-Giles transliteration to English they find themselves as namesakes!

Lexis - Borrowings and Transliteration of Foreign words

Because of the Peoples’ Republic of China’s isolation from the world and only relatively recent opening up, there are a multitude of country names, world cities and towns, company names, concepts and foreign personal names that are just ‘queuing up’ to be rendered into Chinese characters and the sound system. This made me wonder how for instance would ‘St Vincent and the Grenadines’, or ‘Hewlett Packard’ or ‘Llandudno’ be translated into Chinese? How would ‘David Beckham’ or ‘Englelbert Humperdinck’, indeed, how could my own name be expressed?
Transliteration of ‘foreign’ names by way of finding the closest equivalents in Chinese sound syllables often sound funny and vaguely familiar i.e. ‘David Beckham’ becoming大伟 [Da-wei] 贝克汉姆 [Bei-ke-han-mu], Tony Blair’s family name becoming 布莱尔 [Bu-lai-er], or my name becoming 罗毅 [Luo-yi] (Roy), 威尔逊 [Wei-er-xun] (Wilson). From the last example I want to highlight the creativity of transliteration into Chinese as I chose the characters myself to match the sounds in my English name.

The classification of the adoption of 外来词 [Wai-lai-ci] (‘foreign coming words’) into Chinese has been discussed by Chinese scholars such as Wang, (2004) and Zhou & Jiang, (2004). What I discovered by living in China is that some words appeared to have been translated in terms of calques such as the term ‘Blue Tooth’ becoming literally 蓝牙 [lan] ‘blue’ + [ya] ‘tooth’ or email 电子邮件 becoming [dian] ‘electric’ + [zi] ‘word’ + [you] ‘postal’ + [jian] ‘document’ and ‘Honeymoon’ as 蜜月 [mi-yue] (honey + moon). Others have been translated in terms of the original sound, much as how Japanese has adopted foreign words using its special Katakana system. Chinese has taken a different approach and not created a whole new ‘alphabet’ or ‘code’ with which to accept foreign words but rather, has used its existing script to adopt the sounds and meanings from abroad such as 可口可乐 [ke-kou-ke-le] (Coca Cola), or the car manufacturer 奔驰 [Ben-chi] (Benz). Other cultural concepts such as 伊斯兰 [yi-si-lan] (Islam), and even furniture such as 沙发 [sha-fa] (sofa).
Other loan word transliterations seem to reflect the sound of the original word and also take on a charming new meaning in the Chinese. This is because all Chinese characters contain a sound syllable that can be used to represent a syllable from English or Italian or whatever language the loan word is from and furthermore, each character has a meaning all of its own. So, for example, the word 黑客 [Hei-ke] is a transliteration of the English word ‘Hacker’ but 黑 means ‘wicked’ in this context, and 客means ‘guest’ hence the interesting term ‘wicked guest’ which is what a hacker is in terms of your computer! Not all translations of foreign words capture the sound and meaning, but when they do, it is quite an achievement of the language to be able to do that. What is interesting is the seemingly random way in which this is done and the haphazard way these translations are altered and eventually accepted into the language.

Just to briefly mention here another related interesting phenomenon is the blending of English ‘Letter words’ with Chinese characters which has been written about (Wang & Yang, 2006) and is something Chinese speaking young people in particular do all the time, for example, my friend in Shanghai wrote an email to me and used the expression ‘AA制 [zhi]’ to mean ‘going Dutch’. It is now commonly used in spoken and written discourse in China but I do not know why that particular combination has been chosen and why there was no direct semantic translation of say; 当荷兰的 [dang He-lan de] “as Dutch”. Many such new features and trends in Chinese are now being documented (Kane, 2006, Gao, 2007).


Lexical - different verbs

There are specific words which are directly equivalent to English and then there are instances instances where there is divergence and where Chinese seems to have a more specific vocabulary. One example is of the verb ‘play’玩 (wan) which in English can be used in many combinations of nouns, e.g. golf, footbal, rugby, tennis, chess, etc... However, Chinese distinguishes between a verb (ti = play) in 'to play football' = 踢 足 球 (ti zuqiu) and using a different verb (da = play) to express 'to play table tennis' = 打 乒 乓 球 (da pingpangqiu). So the verb ‘to play’ a sport can become ti/踢 or da/ 打depending on which sport one is playing and which part of the body one is using to play it. In some instances, Chinese has specific terms, in others it does not. Of course, English also has distinctions of ‘to kick’ and ‘to hit’ but in English you would not say: “Would you like to kick football with me?” or “Would you like to hit table tennis with me?” In Chinese you would.

Abbreviation

I have come to love the compactness and economy of the written Chinese characters - for example, labelling things is much more economical in Chinese than in English as they take up less space. Moreover, texting on mobile phones, as I did in China, is easier in Chinese because selecting words takes a shorter time and a longer message can fit on the screen. However, the phenomena of abbreviating in Chinese also causes problems for speakers of languages that favour a more ‘lengthy’ style of expression.

“Sentences in Chinese are often dependent on the context for meaning, and abbreviated sentences are therefore extremely common, particularly in speech, since in clearly contextual utterances some language features can become redundant.” (Yip & Rimmington, 1998:51)

As can be seen from the above quote, abbreviation is common in Chinese but it is also thus a potential issue for learners of Chinese, and I am still trying to feel competent in knowing when to use abbreviations (one character) or the full form (generally two or three characters). For example; ‘The Chinese Communist Party’ consists of five characters in full form – “中国共产党” (Zhong-guo Gong-chan Dang) but the abbreviated form consists only of two; 中共 (zhong-gong). In this case, the first characters of each “word” [zhong-gong] meaning ‘China’ and [gong-chan] meaning ‘Communist’ are taken, while the 党 [dang] ‘party’ is completely dropped. This is generally like the initial letter of each word in English being taken to make up acronyms or abbreviations such as ‘CCP’.

Another example is the ‘World Trade Organisation’ 世界贸易组织 [Shi-jie Mao-yi Zu-zhi]. The ‘jie’ of World is dropped and the ‘yi’ of Trade is also dropped to form ‘Shimao Zuzhi’ - 世贸组织. However, what often happens in conversation is that I am anticipating the full form of words to be uttered but never or rarely hear them, whereas in fact the speaker has already uttered the abbreviated form. This is a problem when I listen to the radio or watch the T.V. in Chinese. It is a matter of knowing the abbreviations and then recognising them in spoken discourse. In my experience Chinese learners of English have the opposite problem when they do not hear ‘The World Trade Organisation’ to mean ‘WTO’ as I believe they tend to learn the English abbreviations easier than the full forms.

Abbreviation of adjectives also occurs, such as 忙碌 [mang-lu] (busy). As an example, I once received an email from a student and they wrote; 我也很忙 [Wo ye hen mang] (I am also busy). I wondered why my friend had not written the full form of the adjective as above. It turned out that abbreviations can be used in written Chinese because there is less room for ambiguity, but, I noticed that people also used the same abbreviations while speaking. This commonality of abbreviations coupled with the amount of homonyms and subtle tones in Chinese potentially make life even harder for a learner of Chinese. Would it not create ambiguity to use the abbreviated form if the character could also be confused with homonyms? If learners of Chinese look in the dictionary, they will find another [mang] 盲 - 'blind' with the same rising tone (/) as the word for ‘busy’ (as above). Then there was another [mang] 茫again, with a rising tone meaning ‘hazy’ or ‘puzzling’. This is not an isolated coincidence as such homonyms are the norm in Mandarin Chinese. Other characters may have 4 or 5 other characters which match the phoneme and tone but all have different meanings. So I have always wondered about the potential for confusion and miscommunication in spoken Chinese. Do people always know which ‘mang’ is being expressed from the context? Not a problem according to Yip and Rimmington (1998) above. Perhaps that is what language learning is also about, intuitively knowing the meaning when one has been exposed long enough to a language. Similar frustrations and nagging questions also present themselves for learners of English.

The realisation that I was not speaking in an ‘authentic’ way in my use of abbreviations made me realise that the major remaining challenge for me is recognise the discrepancy between 书面语 [shu-mian-yu] (written discourse) and 口头语[kou-tou-yu] (spoken discourse) which seems to be much wider than in English in terms of register, appropriateness and selection of words.

Local Accents

In my experience living in a provincial town in central China’s Henan province, (part of the northern Mandarin linguistic region), Mandarin was considered the lingua franca but there were heavy accents and dialectal features which made it sometimes impossible for me to follow conversations. Listening to my students speak Mandarin was easier than listening to their parents speak with dialects of Mandarin. For an English learner of Chinese like myself, this can both be fascinating and frustrating as one struggles to understand and be understood outside the major metropolitan areas.

Reading

reading is still a challenge for me simply because of the number of unfamiliar characters. Words are not formed from a ‘base’ of 26 letters but rather, there are thousands of separate characters, each with their own specific meaning. Each character is then combined with other characters to form ‘words’ or grammatical elements. Also, if I look at a page of Chinese writing, say, a newspaper article, differentiating words while reading is difficult at first, working out which characters are words and which are grammatical elements. There are many collocations and possible combinations. Knowing how to read a Chinese text needs knowledge of many possible combinations of characters. However, I have noticed a new trend among some Chinese youth is to select a character which is a homophone of a character when typing emails or texting which is the Chinese equivalent of texting “C U later 4 a cup of T”. For example, my friend who is called 李晗 [Li Han] often signs his emails 里含 [Li Han] because those two homophones of ‘Li Han’ are the first two characters that come up on the list of characters in the computer software for inputting Chinese into Word documents and emails. This is also done with words other than proper nouns and perhaps this is ‘in vogue’ but it is somewhat annoying from my point of view as I am trying to get to grips with character recognition and painstakingly write emails and letters to friends using all the correct characters whilst they respond with a mishmash of characters that is an added dimension to decode.

Overall, my feelings from learning Chinese is that it is often a very ‘economical’ language (very useful for Twitter!) and this very economical use of characters and expressions is what makes it both fascinating and quite difficult to learn. It is clear that I would need to be exposed to the language for longer than I have been so far as I still have a long way to go to reach a higher competency in speaking and aural ability.


References

Dalby, A. (1998)
Dictionary of Languages
Bloomsbury, London

Gao, M.C.F. (2000)
Mandarin Chinese, An Introduction
Oxford University Press, Oxford

Gao, L. (2007)
Chinese Internet Language; A Study of Identity Constructions
Lincom-GmbH, Münich

Kane, D. (2006)
The Chinese Language: Its History and Current Usage
Tuttle Publishing, Tokyo, Vermont, Singapore

Katzner, K. (2002)
The Languages of the World
Routledge, London/New York

Rogers, C.L. & Dalby, J. ‘Forced-Choice Analysis of Segmental Production By Chinese-Accented English Speakers’ in Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, April 2005, Vol.48, pp.306-322

Wang, H. (2004) ‘Loans from the Middle Kingdom revisited’ in English Today , 77, Vol.20, No.1, January, pp47-49

Wang, H. & Yang, Y. (2006) ‘Using letter words in China’ in English Today, 87, Vol.22, No.3, July, pp.47-50

Yip. P.C. & Rimmington, D. (1998)
Intermediate Chinese; A Grammar and Workbook
Routledge, London & New York

Yule, G. (1996) (2nd ed.)
The Study of Language
Cambridge University Press

Zhou, C. & Jiang, Y. (2004) ‘Wailaici and English borrowings in Chinese’ in English Today, 79, Vol.20, No. 3, July, pp45-52

Chinua Achebe and World Englishes

“So my answer to the question 'Can an African

ever learn English well enough to be able to use it

effectively in creative writing?' is certainly yes. If

on the other hand you ask 'Can he ever learn to

use it as a native speaker?', I should say, I hope

not. It is neither necessary nor desirable for him

to be able to do so. The price a world language

must be prepared to pay is submission to many

different kinds of use”  

Chinua Achebe in Transition (Journal), 1965:29-30

The above quote, though dated now,  is interesting for the statement it makes about a world language and what a language opens itself to in terms of diversity of varieties, when it becomes a 'world language'

Mencius  孟子 [Meng-zi]

"Mencius said, 'A gentleman teaches in five ways:

The first is by a transforming influence like that of timely rain
The second is by helping the student to realize his virtue to the full
The third is by helping him to develop his talent.
The forth is by answering his questions.
And the fifth is by setting an example others not in contact with him can emulate.

These five are the ways in which a gentleman teaches"

Paragraph 40, page 155 of  Mencius, Penguin, translated by D.C. Lau (1970) (Revised edition 2003)