It might be helpful to give a quick overview the differences between Chinese and Japanese – just about everything. The only thing that Japanese and Chinese really share in common is a bunch of words that Japanese borrowed from Chinese and still writes using Chinese characters.

Unlike Chinese which is written purely in Kanji, much of Japanese is written in phonetic characters.  Kanji is the Japanese pronunciation of the Japanese word 漢字, which is a direct borrow from traditional Chinese and means Chinese characters in both languages.

The phonetic characters are the Katakana and the Hiragana. The Katakana look like this:
ア イ ウ エ オ
カ キ ク ケ コ
サ シ ス セ ソ
タ チ ツ テ ト
ナ ニ ヌ ネ ノ
ハ ヒ フ ヘ ホ
マ ミ ム メ モ
ヤ ユ ヨ
ラ リ ル レ ロ
ワ ヰ ヱ ヲ
And the Hirigana look like this:
あ い う え お
か き く け こ
さ し す せ そ
た ち つ て と
な に ぬ ね の
は ひ ふ へ ほ
ま み む め も
や ゆ よ
ら り る れ ろ
わ ゐ ゑ を

The two character sets both cover the same set of sounds. That is, for any Katakana there is a corresponding Hirigana with the same sound.

What does this have to do with Chinese?

Nothing!! But now you know and you should be able to easily tell the difference.  If you learn a lot of Chinese characters, you may be able to guess at the meaning of a lot of things in Japanese when its written with Kanji, but the grammar and pronunciation is entirely different.

When I started this site, I called it lyrical Chinese because my intention was to help people learn Chinese by listening to music.  Its a technique that has worked well for me and I want to share it.

Yesterday, I posted a set of lyrics from a Jay Chou song – 听妈妈的话 – “Listen to what your mother says.”  Jay Chou is very popular in China and as I remember, this song was quite popular.  I have included a link to to buy it on Amazon.  You can download the track for $0.99.  (At some point, the link may be an affiliate link for which I get a commission.  If it bothers you that I might make some money off it, just go search it on Amazon.)

Try listening to the song and following along.  You probably need to know at least 100 characters before this will work.  But if you know 100-200 characters, you will probably be ably to keep your self in sync with the lyrics.

There are a few things you will need to learn here.  At the beginning of the lyrics are two lines:
作词：周杰伦
作曲：周杰伦
You need to know 作 – which means to do or to make.  You also need to know 词 and 曲.    词 refers to the words and 曲 refers to the music. So 作词 is the person who wrote the words and 作曲 is the person who wrote the music.  周杰伦 is Jay Chou’s name in Chinese.  You won’t hear these two lines in the song, because they aren’t part of the song.  They simply indicate that the words and the music were both written by Jay Chou.

Another word you’ll probably want to learn is 歌词.   歌 means song and 词 as you saw above means words or lyrics.  so 歌词 means the song lyrics.   If you roughly know the title of a song, or even a few characters from a line from the song, if you use Google to search for those and add  歌词 to the search, you will likely find the lyrics to the song.

So, for example, try a Google search for “听妈妈的话 歌词” and you will probably find the lyrics that I have provided in my previous post.

If you have a market or store near you that sells Chinese CD’s, you can buy them, look up the lyrics and practice by listening and reading the lyrics.  This will help you learn lots of words easily.   If not, I will be posting links to songs and the lyrics for them, and you can download them and listen while using the lyrics I provide.

If you are just started learning Chinese, you might not realize that the are two different sets of characters – one called Traditional Characters  (繁体字 in Simplified Chinese, 繁體字 in TraditionalChinese) and the other called Simplified Characters (简体字 in Simplified Chinese, 簡體字 in Simplified Chinese)

Simplified Characters are used in Mainland China. Traditional Characters are used in most Chinese speaking countries and communities outside of China. Many will argue that the meaning of the Chinese charaters is lost in the simplified form. People from mainland China will often tell you that the Traditional Characters are much harder to learn.

As an example, the traditional character 門 which means door in English is written 门 in simplified form. The shape of a door is much clearer in the simplified character and perhaps that even aids in memory. On the other had, it takes only three strokes to write the simplified form and eight to write the traditional form.

I tend to agree that the Traditional Characters are harder to learn. But I agree they carry more meaning in the pictogram and that they are, in general, more beautiful and more balanced. On this website, I have chosen to use simplified characters because there are far more websites available using the simplified character and more material available for learning. When you learn Chinese reasonably well, you will likely be able to recognize the traditional characters from context and from a knowledge of how the characters are often changed.

What do you think?  Do you have a preference for which style of characters you learn?  Which do you think are more beautiful?

P.S.  If you answered, “I think these characters are a real pain in the a**!!”, you might want to switch to learning French.

When I first started learning Chinese, everything I read made a big deal about how Chinese is a tonal language and how important the tones are to the meaning. Its true to some degree. For example:

栗子 (chestnuts) and 李子 (plums) without tones are both pronounced lizi.  The two words can be distinguished only by the tone of the first character.

Another example is 买 (buy) and 卖 (sell) both of which are pronounced mai but with different tones.

So, the tones are really important, right?

Wrong.

In reality characters rarely appear alone. So, 买 will more likely appear as 购买 or in some other combination. That, coupled with the sense of the words around them will make it clear which word you mean. For example, lets use lizi, described above in place of the English words in two sentences:

I love to roast lizi.
The best thing about lizi is how juicy and sweet they are.

Which lizi is being used in each sentence? I think its pretty clear that the first is about 栗子 (chestnuts) and the second is about 李子 (plums).

So, you don’t have to make yourself crazy trying to get all the tones perfect. Its impossible anyway, it will take you at least a year of studying Chinese before the tones become clear to you.  And, you will be understood even if you butcher the tones completely, so long as you get the sound of the words right.

Why do you even need to learn the tones at all then? Its simple, you know the poeple whose foreign accent you laugh at or have to struggle a bit to figure out exactly what they’re trying to say? You can understand them, but it takes more work and they sound funny. Chinese are using to hearing the words pronounced a certain way, if you don’t pronounce the tones right, you will sound strange and be hard to understand, but you will still be able to get your point across.

The more and more you listen to Chinese the clearer the tones will become to you and you will start hearing where you pronounce things wrong and be able to correct in.  But don’t let trying to get the tones perfect or even close stop you from building vocabulary.   Once you build enough vocabulary and get practice listening, you will naturally hear where your tones are wrong and begin to correct it.

Good luck in your studies.  I’d love to hear your thoughts about this.  Please leave me a comment below  if you have the time.

When you want to learn a foreign language (and I’ve learned several – not mastered, but learned them well enough to communicate with the locals), its very important to tune your ear.   If you listen enough, your brain starts to filter out the noise and tune into the important sounds.

Just google Chinese Internet Radio and you will find lots of sources of Chinese talk and music to help you practice your ear.  I find music the easiest to listed to.  Just turn it on, enjoy and don’t worry about what it means.

Here are just a few that I found:
Live 365 – All Chinese Hits
lovechina.rad.io
Chinese Golden Oldies

If you are just starting out, you might have to be a bit careful to make sure you get a station that is really playing Mandarin.  After learning even about 100 characters, you should have little trouble knowing that you are listening to Mandarin and not Cantonese or another language or dialect.

The internet is changing fast.  Stations may come and go.  But if you try, you’ll be able to locate something that is easy to listen to and helps you train your ear.

Please, leave me your comments about what you were able to find and if it helps you hear the sounds of the language better.

When you first start to learn Chinese, you have the sense that every character has a meaning.  For example, 东 means east and 西 means west.  Easy!!  Then you come across 东西 which means “things” or “stuff” and have to figure out how the combination of “east” and “west” can mean “stuff”.

Its better to think of Chinese characters as sound units which generally correspond to a morpheme – a sub-meaning unit.    An example in English would be the “bi” in bicycle, biplane, and bilateral.   The “bi” would be written with one character in Chinese.  Of course, “buy” as in buyer has the same sound, but different meaning and so the sound would be written with a different character in those words.

Additionally, Chinese often build words using ellipsis  from longer phrases and also from entire stories in the case of Chinese idioms. For example – Beijing University – 北京大学 – may be simplified using ellipsis to 北大.  This will lead character dictionaries to say that 北 has “beijing” as one of its meaning senses in addition to the common  meaning “north”

Also, several characters may be put together to represent a foreign word phonetically.  In this case the characters have no real meaning (but often, especially in the business context, they may try to pick characters whose meanings do reflect something about the business)

A good example of the latter is 家乐福 – the Chinese name for the French company Carrefour.  “Jia Le Fu” is a reasonable translitteration of the sound of the French name.  But the sense of the characters “home happy fortune” also gives the name a positive sense.

In summary, its useful to get a sense of a Chinese character’s general sense as it will be helpful to guess the meaning of previously unseen combinations of the character.  Just remember that characters are most often not words.