Mandarin Chinese Weblog

好久不见！Long time no see!

I’ve been busy starting up my wealth management practice and haven’t had time to devote to this blog, but I’m still as into my Chinese studies as ever.

The managing principal at my firm is interested in learning Chinese and I’ve promised him that I can get him up and going in just 10 minutes a day for the next year. No problem!

So I’ll track our progress and what I go over with him. I’ll be writing stream of conscience style, so pardon the lack of detail, grammer mistakes and poor organization!

Day 1. Today I covered just 2 things.

1. Chinese is tonal. 4 tones. mā má mǎ mà with a neutral tone (ma) that is basically unstressed. If you can sing, you’re good because you’ll have an easier time recognizing the differences in the tones.

• mā is the first tone. Like a robotic voice.
• má is the rising tone, like when you say “what?” It’s called the second tone.
• mǎ is falling and rising, like when you sarcastically ask “AND???”
• mà is the 4th tone and is falling. My Chinese teacher used to say “it’s like when you’re swearing and yell “Dame!” I didn’t know that “dame” is a bad word, but I got the idea.

2. Chinese is a big bucket of languages. There are something like 5 main “dialects” which are all considered Chinese, Cantonese being the largest minority dialect. Mandarin is the most widely used dialect

So that’s day 1. 10 minutes. Tomorrow I’ll tell him about regional dialects, Putonghua and Beijinghua and some other interesting info.

再见！