Taiwan Today

It's Not Easy but Neither Is It as Difficult as Some Would Have You Believe, and You Can Take This Vocabulary With You To Cheek on Accent, Tone -- and If All Else Fails, on Meaning

Most tourists have heard so many stories about the "incredible difficulty" of the Chinese language that they make no attempt to communicate in it. Actually, spoken Chi­nese is not nearly so difficult as it is made out to be. To read and write, several thousand characters must be memorized. But to speak, one need only listen and practice. Although command of a language is not to be expected in days or weeks, the visitor will derive immense satisfaction from direct com­munication and will learn a great deal more about the Chinese people and nation.

This article sets forth a tourist's vocabulary of essential words, phrases, and places in the Mandarin dialect, which is understood by most Chinese in Taiwan. It is suggested that the material be used as a simple text, so the visitor can venture forth and speak Chi­nese on his own. However, the vocabulary also includes the Chinese characters and can be used as a handy pocket translator or for clarification when a word or phrase is not understood.

Before being introduced to the Chinese language, the tourist or casual reader may be interested to know a little about it.

The various dialects of Chinese are spoken by more people than any other lan­guage in the world. Because the characters are the same throughout China, written communication is possible no matter how different the spoken sound. In recent years, Mandarin (the dialect of Peiping and large areas of northern China) has become the national language. All education in the Republic of China is conducted in Mandarin. Eventually the effect will be to eliminate other dialects or to reduce them to the status of secondary tongues. This is similar to the evolution of the Spanish language in the American south­west.

Continued dialectical differences must be noted, however, because the tourist who ac­quires a working knowledge of Mandarin may bump into a stone wall of non-compre­hension in southern Taiwan, for example, where only Fukienese or Hakka may be spoken by older persons. Or he could have the same difficulty in a Hongkong shop, where the Cantonese-speaking clerks may know more English than Mandarin.

Spoken Chinese has some elements that make learning easy, others that make it difficult.

Elementary grammar is simpler than in most Western languages. Pronoun trouble is virtually non-existent. Verbs need not be conjugated. Word order is similar to English: subject, verb, and object. Adjectives precede the noun they modify. Statements are transformed into questions by addition of the particle "ma".

For the elementary student, the most dis­couraging aspect of spoken Chinese may be its very monosyllabic simplicity. In the Man­darin dialect, separate sounds—or vocables—number 410 (the count for English is some­where around 1,200). With these 410 sounds, you can say anything and everything in Chinese—and that's where the trouble begins.

Use of the Tones

Obviously, the language is overly well supplied with homonyms. Context helps a lot, but confusion would be compounded were it not for the "tones" of Chinese. Mandarin has four tones, which means the same monosyllable can be pronounced in four different ways. Thus the 410 vocables immediately become 1,640, a fact which increases language precision and at the same time poses more than passing difficulty for the student.

Tones, however, are more frightening in the telling than in the pronunciation. Western languages also have accents and stresses which are similar to tone and which may radically change the meaning or use of words. Similar­ly, the inflection of Occidental tongues can be supremely important in determining meaning.

One way to describe or represent the tones is on the musical scale, thus:

In the Chinese vocabulary set forth in this article, the superscript numerals 1, 2, 3, and 4 will designate first, second, third, and fourth tones. The tones are variously de­scribed in various texts. Here is one way:

First tone: Oh (slight surprise).

Second tone: Oh? (question).

Third tone: O-Oh? (doubt).

Fourth tone: Oh! (emphasis).

This is another approach:

First tone: high, level, and slightly prolonged, as in answering "yes" to a rollcall.

Second tone: rising inflection, as the automatic, semi-conscious "yes" when someone knocks at the door while you are absorbed in a book.

Third tone: beginning moderately high, dropping rather low, and then rising slightly at the end—as in the slow, hesitant "ye-es" to a statement that is dubiously accepted.

Fourth tone: brief and falling to a full stop, like the end of a sentence; this is the certain, positive, unqualified "yes!"

Still another description is of the first tone as "high level", the second as "high rising", the third as "low rising", and the fourth as "falling".

They Are Indispensable

Whatever the system employed to master them, the tones are indispensable. Understanding cannot ensue without them. Here is why:

The monosyllable shih means "to lose" or "poetry" in the first tone. In the second tone, it may be "ten", "time", "to recognize", "rock", "to gather", and "real". As a third-tone word, it is either "to begin" or "history", and in the fourth tone it represents such varied meanings as "to be", "affair", "to try", "world", and "city". As is clearly evident, things are bad enough with the tones; without them, the Chinese language becomes chaos.

In the vocabulary that follows, the Eng­lish word is given first, followed by the Romanized pronunciation according to the Wade-Giles system and including the tone in superscript, and then by the Chinese characters themselves. Thus the learner who is not yet sure of the pronunciation may use this text with the person to whom he is speaking, thereby making sure that he is understood and perhaps obtaining correction of his faulty tone or accent.

As for the Wade-Giles rules of pronun­ciation, here a few simple guidelines, keeping in mind that every spoken language is unique and that strictly speaking, there are no equivalents in another language:

1. Ch, k, p, and t are written with and without an apostrophe. These letters are said to be aspirated or ch'u-ch'i when used with the apostrophe, and unaspirated, pu-ch'u-ch'i, without. Their approximate pronunciations in English are:

ch' like "tch"

k' like "k"

p' like "p"

t' like "t"

ch like "dj"

k like hard "g"

p like "b"

t like "d"

2. Ü has the sound of the German umlaut-u (ü) as in "Bücher" (books) or of the French "u" as in "Dumas".

3. Cho, shu, chu and ch'u (but not chü or ch'ü) are pronounced much as though writ­ten with a "w". Thus, cho sounds like djwoäh; chuo like shwoäh; chuang like djwäng; ch'uang like tchwäng; etc. The w-sound should not be overemphasized.

4. Sh is pronounced as in English.

5. Hs is pronounced as though spelled "hsh" in English, the first "h" being decidedly aspirated. When the following vowel is either i or umlaut-u (ü), the spelling is always hs; thus hsiao, hsü, etc. The only exception is shih. When the following vowel is a, o, or u, the spelling is sh. This difference between sh and hs is important. In English, words like "show", "shall", etc. may be carelessly pronounced as "shee-ow", "shee-al", etc., with­out danger or being misunderstood. In Chinese careless pronunciation is more dangerous as indicated in the words hsiao, meaning small, and shao, meaning a few. Shao pronounced as "shee-ao" would be understood to mean small (hsiao) instead of "a few". There are many similar cases.

6. Ou has a sound much like the "o" in "go".

7. Final o has the sound of "oäh" in English, the "o" being pronounced as in "go". Ho and ko are exceptions, being pronounced approximately as though spelled "he(r)" and "gue(rdon)" in English.

The third tone again, please.

- ti⁴ san¹ sheng¹ tsai⁴ lai² yi¹ tsu⁴

A tourist's vocabulary of Chinese follows:

Numbers:

Zero - ling²

One - yi¹

Two - erh⁴

Three - san¹

Four - szu⁴

Five - wu³

Six - liu⁴

Seven – chi¹

Eight – pa¹

Nine - chiu³

ten – shih²

Eleven – shih² yi¹

Twelve - shih² erh⁴

Twenty - erh⁴ shih²

Thirty - san¹ shih²

One hundred – yi¹ pai³

One thousand - yi¹ chien¹

(Note the simplicity of counting. You don't have to see forty listed to know it is szu⁴ shih² — or four-ten(s). To form ordinal numbers, simply add hao⁴ after the number. Thus first, yi¹ hao⁴, second, erh⁴ hao⁴, and so on. For times, tien³ is added after the numeral. Thus yi¹ tien³ for one o'clock, etc. To differentiate a.m. and p.m., shang⁴ wu³ is placed: before the number for morning and hsia⁴ wu³ for afternoon hours. Minute is fen¹. One minute will be yi¹ fen¹, five minutes wu³ fen¹ and so on.)

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As the Chinese say—
Chio² fu⁴ nan² wei² wu² mi³ chih¹ chui¹
Even a clever daughter-in-law cannot cook without rice.

Western equivalent—
You can't make something out of nothing.