Free Trial Chinese Lesson

This document provides an introduction to learning Chinese. It discusses common greetings and phrases, then gives an overview of Mandarin Chinese including the standard dialect called Putonghua. It introduces pinyin as the phonetic system for representing Chinese sounds. Finally, it briefly explains the four tones in Mandarin Chinese and how the meaning of a syllable can change based on its tone. The purpose is to give a newcomer to Chinese language learning some basic foundational concepts to get started.