Introduction lesson

Chinese has a special feature that is both its charm and its difficulty: the writing does not indicate pronunciation (or only slightly, and never precisely). So you can learn to speak Chinese without knowing how to read or write it. This course lets you learn to both speak and write Chinese, but some vocabulary characters won't be compulsory to learn, so that writing doesn't slow down your learning of the language.

Phonetic transcription: pinyin

Because Chinese writing does not record pronunciation, a phonetic transcription is needed. Since the 1950s, the official Chinese phonetic transcription has been pinyin, a word that means "to spell out the sounds" in Chinese. Before the 1950s, each country had its own transcription. This is why old books about China give transcriptions of Chinese words that do not match pinyin. For example, the capital of China used to be written "Peking" in English, whereas in pinyin it is written "Běijīng". In pinyin, the letter "u" is usually pronounced like "oo" in "food" (but sometimes like the German "ü" — we will see this in the coming lessons). Learning every difference in pronunciation between pinyin and English would be very tedious, even impossible, and utterly discouraging for a beginner. It wouldn't be very useful either. So this Chinese course will introduce the differences little by little.