Mandarin Chinese
Deconstruction: A Beginner’s POV
- Parimal Satyal
parimal@realityequation.net

Pǔtōnghuà ( )
Means ‘common speech’
‘Standard Chinese’, based on the dialect
of Mandarin spoken in Beijing
Standardized spelling/pronunciation

Tonal! Tonal?
5 tones
High, mid rising, dipping, high falling,
‘normal’
Different meanings
Common example: “ma”
mā ma mà mă ma? ( )

Sub-Vrb-Obj
Like English in this regard
Wo chi ying-guo cai
I eat England-food (English food)
But verb not always required

Nǐ hǎo ( )
The popular greeting Nǐ hǎo transliterates
to: ‘You good’
Basic descriptive words (adjc) don’t
require verbs (there are exceptions):
Wo è le — I’m hungry
Wo hen gāoxǐng — I’m happy

Minimalism
Most ‘words’ are monosyllabic/dysyllabic
Different words can sound the same (even
the same tone)
Same character can have different
meanings (and pronunciations)
Works: logic + context

Minimalist Grammar
Chinese doesn’t like redundancy
Anything–subject, object, pronoun–can be
dropped if understood in context.

Wǒ hěn hǎo (
I very well.
Wǒ mǎi diànhuà ( )
I buy phone (literally, electricity-words)

Logic
diànhuà - phone is ‘electric-words’
diànnǎo - computer is ‘electric-brain’
diànyìng - movie is ‘electric-shadow’
Not entirely ‘new words’, but the
combination itself is a new word, and
doesn’t make sense separated.
Essentially, these are new(er) words.

Xué (verb or noun)
Wǒ xué zhōngwén ( )
I study Chinese
Xiǎo xué ( )
Little-study meaning primary school.
Zhōng xué ( )
Middle-study meaning middle-school.
Dà xué ( )
Big-study meaning university.

No verb morphology
Words don’t change, regardless of tense,
voice, subject, plurality
The words for big (dà, ), middle (zhōng,
) and small (xiǎo, ) can be added as a
prefix to virtually anything that can be
placed on an order of magnitude.

Plurals
Xuéshēng ( )–
Wǒ – I
student(s)
Wǒmen – we/us
Xuéshēngmen ( )–
Nǐ – you students
Nǐmen – You (pl.)
Péngyǒu ( ) – friend(s)
Tā – him/her
Péngyǒumen ( )–
Tāmen – them
friends

Time and Space
Time/place words immediately after the
subject
Wǒ míngtiān qù shàng dà xué
( )
I tomorrow go up university.

China primarily uses their lunar calendar
system.
National holidays, harvesting day, festivals
are all seem to occur on different days (of
the Gregorian calendar) every year
China has of course embraced the
international solar calendar (Gregorian)
and has a unbelievably simple way to refer
to years, months, and days in this system.

Dates
The year is written either as 2009, or 09,
followed by nían ( ), months are referred
to by the number of the month, x,
followed by the word yuè ( )—months
don’t individual names— date followed by
hào ( , number ) or rì ( , sun)
Order: 2009 5 31 .

Questions
Straightforward: usually a matter of
replacing, adding, or repeating something
Jīntīan shì jǐyuè jǐhào?
( )
Jīntīan shì 5 yuè 31 hào.
( )

Yes/No
Nǐ yǒu gēge ma? ( )
You have elder-brother question?
Yǒu méiyǒu gēge? ( )
Have-no-have elder brother?

Classifers
Classifiers/measure words when
specifying quantity.
The measure word is used after the
number, or after demonstrative pronouns
like zhè ( , this) or nà ( , that).
Usually based on physical characteristics:
zhāng is used for flat objects (paper, CDs)
běn for bound stuff (books, magazines)

Examples
Yí gè rén ( , 1 ge person)
Sān zhāng zhǐ ( , 3 zhāng papers)
Wǔ běn shū ( , 4 běn books)
Bā kē shù ( , 8 kē trees)

More on my blog
http://realityequation.net/mandarin-
update-two-weeks-in or
http://bit.ly/ch-ovrvw
I’d love comments, ideas, feedback (if you
were at the talk), random hellos.