Chinese Language Blog

Now that we’ve covered some basic tongue twisters, it’s time to ramp up the level of difficulty. Try saying these tongue twisters five times fast. See if you can get as good as Jackie Chan:

青青山上一根籐

青籐地下掛銅鈴

風吹籐動銅鈴動

風停籐停銅鈴停

qīng qīng shān shàng yī gēn téng
qīng téng dǐ xià guà tóng líng
fēng chuī téng dòng tóng líng dòng
fēng tíng téng tíng tóng líng tíng

Translation: On a green mountain grows a vine. Under the vine there hangs a copper bell. When the wind blows, the vine moves, and so does the bell. When the wind stops, the vine stops, and the bell stops too.

老頭兒端湯上塔
湯燙
塔滑
湯灑
湯燙塔

lǎotóur duān tāng shàng tǎ
tāng tàng
tǎ huá
tāng sǎ
tāng tàng tǎ.

Translation: An old man, holding (a bowl of) soup, climbed up a tower. The soup was hot. The tower (steps) slippery; (so) the soup got spilt (and) the soup scalded the tower (steps).

黑蝴蝶飛，
灰蝴蝶飛，
黑蝴蝶飛完，
會蝴蝶飛。

hēi húdǐe fēi,
hūi húdǐe fēi,
hēi húdǐe fēiwán,
hūi húdǐe fēi.

Translation: The black butterfly flies, the gray butterfly flies, after the black butterfly flies, the gray butterfly flies.

村前有个颜圆眼
村后有个颜眼圆
不知颜圆眼的眼圆
还是颜眼圆的眼圆？

cūn qián yǒu gè yán yuán yǎn
cūn hòu yǒu g4 yán yǎn yuán
bù zhī yán yuán yǎn dē yǎn yuán
hái shì yán yǎn yuán dē yǎn yuán?

Translation: In front of the village there is a Yan Yuanyan. Behind the village there is a Yan Yanyuan. Don’t know if Yan Yuanyan’s eyes are rounder or Yan Yanyuan’s eyes are rounder.

红凤凰

黄凤凰

粉红凤凰

粉凤凰飞

Hóng fènghuáng
huáng fènghuáng
fěnhóng fènghuáng
fěn fènghuáng fēi

Translation: Red phoenix, yellow phoenix, pink phoenix, pink phoenix fly.

How’d you do?

Learning Mandarin Chinese, especially as a native English speaker, is doubly difficult because you’re learning both a new phonetic system (pinyin) and a new alphabet  in the form of characters. It becomes a lesson in duality as both right and left brain are active when learning pictograms and their corresponding pronunciation and tones. But unlike alphabetized languages, which build from a foundation of limited characters and logic, Chinese is not so simple, as there are thousands upon thousands of unique characters with different meaning and different pronunciation at your disposal.

Sometimes I stumble across a character that I have no idea its meaning. Sure I may recognize parts of the characters which are called radicals, but that doesn’t give me the full picture. For example: taking the word 明天 (míng tiān), which means tomorrow, and focusing on the first character, we see that 明 is a combination of 日, meaning sun or day, and 月，meaning month or moon. Now if you didn’t recognize that character, but recognize the radical, you’d have some idea of its meaning. Taking a guess, you’d figure that it has the radicals for sun and moon in it, so it most likely relates to a date, so you’ve got half of the word down.

But notice how this information, while shedding light on the meaning of the word, does not help you out with the pronunciation of the word. This is where Chinese becomes very difficult as a non-native speaker and is the main reason why foreigners have trouble primarily with tones. You either know it, or you don’t. Sure sometimes a radical will help you out with the pinyin if you get lucky, but odds are it won’t help you at all with the tones.

So how do you get over this rather difficult hump in your Chinese learning? Other than practice and rote memorization, you are pretty much on your own. You can try learning how to use a Chinese dictionary, which relies upon radicals, number of strokes and order, but learning that is like learning a new language in itself–and very slow going at that. My advice: wing it. You’d be surprised at how many words you can fake/fumble your way through, and still be understood.

Chinese is a very logical language, especially when regarding modern era words (relating to the last two centuries). “Make fly machine” is airplane, or 飞机， mótuōchē is motor bike, and even proper names can come close to their English meaning or pronunciation. For example, Hillary Clinton is 希拉里·克林顿 (Xīlālǐ·Kèlíndùn). Sound pretty spot on? The trick is learning the pinyin pronunciation and training your brain and tongue to pronounce Chinese sounds. After which you can take a guess, replacing English sounds with Chinese ones and boom, you just faked your way through a language. It’s not exact, but it gets you in the ball park.

One of the first challenges for the Western speaker of Chinese to overcome in learning to speak Mandarin Chinese is the introduction of tones to a language. In English, a rising or falling tone does little other than indicate emphasis: The whiny “What do you waaant?” as opposed to “What do you want!?” Not so in Chinese. Differentiating between tones is the difference between knowing, for example, whether a person is asking the whereabouts of your mother, your hemp, or your horse. Misunderstand one sentence and you suddenly find yourself in a very confusing situation, especially since most conversations consist of much more than one lingering sentence. Picture the situation:

Xiao Zhang (speaking Chinese of course):
“Do you know where I can rent a horse? I’d like to take a horse along the Great Wall. Want to come along?”

You:
“Um. Run that by me one more time?”

While in practice, context makes a huge difference and it becomes relatively easy to know that Xiao Zhang doesn’t want to rent a mother to take up to the Great Wall, not hearing or saying the correct tone more often than not just leads to confusion. To avoid this awkward situation, here’s a brief primer for how to pronounce the tones in Mandarin Chinese.
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