Research

Pinyin

• Definition:  A Guide to speaking mandarin with english letters and tones that dictate certain sounds the words make. 

• “p, t, c, ch, and k are aspirated and b, d, z, zh, and g are their unaspirated equivalents” 

• Tones

  • First tone: a flat tone with a higher pitch.

  • Second tone: an upward slope (a lower to higher pitch).

  • Third tone: pitch starts high then goes down, and after that goes back up again.

  • Fourth tone: pitch starts high and goes lower (force tone)

  • Fifth tone (neutral tone): has no marking on the letter.

  • Special tones: an example of a character that has a "special" tone is 女 nǚ woman. The tone has two dots below a 3rd tone, making you put your lips in an O shape to say the character.

Types of Characters:

• 象形 xiàng xíng Pictographic Characters 

• • Character looks like the object it is.

• 指事zhǐ shi Self-explanatory 

  • "Add a dot/line to a pictographic character to explain a detail or some complicated concepts.”

• 会意 huì yì Compound-associative 

  • “Combine 2-3 pictographic characters/pictures to stand for a verb/adjective”

  • 采 cǎi (example)

• 形声xíng shēng Picto-phonetic

  • “The character contains one component that stands for meaning and the other component that stands for sound.”

• 转注 zhuǎn zhù mutually explanatory characters

  • Before:考kǎo = 老lǎo

  • Now: 老人lǎo rén 考试kǎo shì

  • “Due to different dialects in China, some characters stand for the same thing. Later on, to avoid redundancy, one of the characters switched meaning to stand for something else.”

• 假借 jiǎ jiè Phonetic loan characters

  • “Some concepts are too abstract to be concluded in one or more picture/s. So, some characters that meant something else were borrowed to stand for an abstract concept.”