Word order in Chinese sentences

In the Chinese grammar, there are no morphological changes in person, tense, gender, number and case. However the word order is very important to convey to different meanings.

In Chinese, generally, the subject is always placed before the predicate.

Subject	Predicate
你 nǐ	好 hǎo
我 wǒ	很好 hěn hǎo

Tones (声调 shēngdiào)

And that’s why Chinese is considered as a tonal language. The tones (声调 shēngdiào) are very important in a syllable. One syllable can be pronounced in different ways depending on the tones that convey differences in meanings. In common speech there are four basic tones.

I will use the syllable "ma" as an example to show you how it's pronounced;

1st tone - mā
2nd tone - má
3rd tone - mǎ
4th tone - mà

The graphic mark of the four tones is always put on vowels; if the syllable contains only a single vowel then the tone should be placed directly above the vowel letter, as we can see in “bù” and “hěn”. If the tone is dropped over the vowel “i” the dot should be replaced by the tone mark, for example, “nǐ”, “nín” and “bīng”.

When the final of the syllable is composed of two or more  vowel, The tone mark should be then placed above the one vowel pronounced with a widest mouth opening, example “hǎo”, “měi”.

Some syllables are pronounced slightly and briefly, without any tone. This phenomenon is called “neutral tone”. It is located by the absence of a tone mark on the syllable. Example: “ma”, “ne”...

When there is one syllable with the third tone followed immediately by another syllable with a third tone as well, the first syllable should be pronounced in the second tone while the tone mark remains unchangeable.

For example:

nǐ hǎo            ---->    ní hǎo

hěn hǎo        ---->    hén hǎo

yě hěn hǎo   ---->    yé hén hǎo

Initials and Finals

In the history of Chinese language there was a lot of transcription systems established in order to pronounce Chinese. Nowadays, there is the official alphabetical transcription called Pinyin (拼音 pīnyīn). Adopted in China in late the year of 1950, the Pinyin is now commonly used in the international community.

The basic phonological unity in Chinese is a syllable. A Chinese syllable has a fixed structure.

In Standard Chinese (called also “Mandarin” or “Common Speech = 普通话 pǔtōnghuà”) a syllable is made up of a maximum of 4 elements.

Chinese syllables can be analyzed into 3 parts; Initial (声母 shēngmǔ), Final (韵母yùnmǔ) and Tone (声调shēngdiào). Beginning with an initial, the rest is the final and the whole syllable pitch a tone.

For example, in the syllable “bīng”, “b” is the initial and “ing” is the final. Sometimes, a syllable stands without an initial, like “yě” for example. But all syllables must have a final.

In Modern Chinese there are 21 initial and 38 final.

Here is a table of combinations of Initials and Finals in Putonghua:

Chinese Language: Introduction

Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) (Also called 汉语/漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语/華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family that forms one of the branches of the Sino-Tibetan language. The Sino-Tibetan language form a language family composed of, at least, the Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 language of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia.

In addition to the Chinese mainland and Taiwan Province of China, Chinese is also located in Singapore, Malaysia and other places. There is around 13 billion person who speaks Chinese.

Chinese is one of the six official languages for the United Nations.