Identify the pinyin and meaning for the following characters:

中文
你好
汉语
国语
名字
很好
看
懂不懂
停
安静
謝謝(谢谢)
好極(极)了
9/5

All about Chinese Pinyin

1. Where is Mandarin spoken?

2. What is Pinyin?

3. What are the 3 parts of every Chinese syllable?

4. Write an example of a Chinese syllable here:

5. What are some good tips for learning pinyin pronunciation?

3.
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All About Tones

1. Please draw the shapes for the tones here:

1st tone	2nd tone	3rd tone	4th tone

2. What is the secret 5th tone? (the light tone)

3. Why does Chinese have tones?

4. What happens if you change the tone on a syllable?

5. What is the trick for remembering the order of the tones? (what does the video compare it to?)

All About Initials

1. How many initials are there?

2. When we read the initials we put invisible finals (vowel endings) after them. What are they?

B___ P___ M___ F____

D___ T___ N___ L____

G____ K___ H____

J____ Q ____ X____

Z____ C____ S____

ZH____ CH____ SH___ R______

Y____ W____

3. What are the things we have to pay attention to when pronouncing these initials?

B P M F	Lips together then separated
D T N L	Tip of your tongue touches the back of your teeth
G H K	Use the back of your mouth
J Q X	Tongue touches back of your lower teeth, teeth are almost touching
Z C S	Top teeth gently touch your lower teeth
Zh Ch Sh R	Curl back your tongue (so it points up at the roof of your mouth)
Y W	Smile for the Y sound. W sounds like U.

All About Finals 1 (Simple finals)

There are 3 kinds of finals:

1. Simple finals

2. Compound finals

3. Nasal Finals

The simple finals are:

Pinyin Activity

1. With a partner, invent (makeup) up 20 pinyin syllables (initial + final + tone). Write them on a piece of paper.

2. Turn to the Pinyin Chart and cross off on your list any combinations that don’t exist.

3. Practice reading your syllables together.

4. When you feel ready, come read your syllables to me.

All About Finals 2 (Compound Finals)

üe

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According to the film, please tell us 3 important things about the Chinese Characters?

9/18

Stroke Order

The strokes in any given characters are always written in the same order.

This stroke order will help you in two ways; first, it is the fastest way to write the character, second, it is the way to write that makes the character look the best.

Chinese Characters Stroke Order and Why Do We Have to Follow Them?

9/19 Chinese character stroke order rules

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How do I remember Chinese characters?

There are three types of Chinese characters each with a different way:

1. Pictographs

These are characters that look like what they mean。For example, here is the ancient character for “elephant” and the modern character. If you can think about the picture of the elephant, it will help you remember the new modern character.

象

2. Stolen characters

These are characters that used to mean something, but over time became used to represent something else. For example, the character 来 (pronounced “Lai”) used to look like this

and meant “wheat plant”.

Over time it was stolen by the verb “to come” (also pronounced “Lai”).

If you try to think of how the character looks like the word “to come” that won’t work. So the best thing to do is memorize that 来 = come.

3. Meaning-Sound characters

These are characters made up of two (or more) different parts. Usually one part of the character will help you figure out its meaning, while the other part will help you figure out its sound. For example：第

4， One character is made up of different parts?

Yes! If you look at the characters below, you might notice that they all have something in common:

说语讲论

They are all the same on the left side. That is because the part of the character that looks like this 讠means “speech” and all of these characters have something to do with talking. 讠is what we call a the “speech radical”. Radicals are small parts that make up characters and give us a clue to the meaning. There are 214 radicals in the Chinese language. Just like the alphabet organizes English words, radicals organize Chinese words, so radicals are used to look up characters in a dictionary. Radicals are usually on the left side of meaning-sound characters.

We talked about how characters come in different shapes. For example 朋 is made up of two pieces side by side, and 忘 is one piece on top of another. Please sort the characters in the box at the bottom of the page by their shape. The first one has been done for you.