Who Am I? - Family and Personal Characteristics

Reading Chinese

Chinese is written with characters: each character is one syllable and carries meaning, so there is no alphabet to sound out. To help learners, we also use pinyin, which spells the sound in our letters with tone marks. In this module every word is shown three ways: character, pinyin, and English.

Your first words

Six words to introduce yourself and your household. Read the character, then the pinyin, then the meaning, in that order, every time:

Match each word to its meaning

English says "brother"

This is the point where Chinese asks you for information English never bothered to collect:

Which sibling?

A brother born before you is _____, and a brother born after you is _____. A sister born before you is _____, and a sister born after you is _____. There is no way to say simply "brother" or "sister".

A sentence you cannot translate yet

An English friend messages you: "I have a brother." You want to write the same thing in Chinese, and you find you cannot until you ask her something. Why?

• Chinese has no age-neutral word for brother, so until you know whether he is older or younger than she is, there is no word you can legitimately write
• Chinese word order puts the family member first, so the sentence has to be rearranged before it can be written
• You need to know his name, because Chinese always names the person referred to
• 哥哥 and 弟弟 are the same word said with different tones, so you need to hear her say it

The four tones

Mandarin has four tones, shown by a mark over the vowel in pinyin: 1st high and flat mā, 2nd rising má, 3rd dipping mǎ, 4th falling mà. The tone is not an accent added to a word. It is part of the word, in the same way a consonant is: mā can mean mother and mǎ means horse, and they are no more the same word than "bat" and "bad" are. This is why the pinyin in this module always carries its tone marks. Pinyin stripped of them is genuinely ambiguous, not merely untidy.

Why the marks are not optional

Somebody sends you a message written in pinyin with all the tone marks left off. Reading it is far harder than reading English with the accents dropped. Why?

• The tone is part of the word rather than a decoration on it, so a syllable written "ma" could be any of four or more entirely unrelated words
• Pinyin uses fewer letters than English does, so its words repeat more often by chance
• Without the marks you cannot tell where one syllable ends and the next begins
• Tone marks show which syllable to stress, and Chinese changes meaning through stress

Read the introduction

Wang Xiaoming introduces himself. Tap the THREE parts that name a member of his family. (nǐ hǎo! wǒ jiào Wáng Xiǎomíng. zhè shì wǒ de jiā: wǒ de bàba, wǒ de māma hé wǒ de mèimei.)

• 你好！
• 我叫王小明。
• 这是我的家：
• 我的爸爸、
• 我的妈妈
• 和我的妹妹。

What did he tell you?

Based on Wang Xiaoming's introduction, select ALL THREE statements that are TRUE.

• The sister he mentions is younger than he is
• He does not mention a brother at all
• He gives his own name, using the phrase that means "I am called"
• He has an older sister
• He introduces a friend as well as his family
• He describes his family but never says his own name

Build the introduction

Build the sentence so it says hello, gives the name Wang Xiaoming, and then introduces a YOUNGER SISTER.

Introduce yourself

Choose the right word at each step to introduce yourself and your family.

• To say "I", which word do you use?
• To say "I am called / my name is", which word?
• Your sister is three years older than you. Which word do you need?
• Your friend is not a relative. Which word do you use for her?

Chinese summary

Chinese is written with _____, and pinyin shows how to say them using four _____, which are part of the word rather than decoration on it. Family words carry age order, so an older brother is _____ but a younger brother is _____, and no age-neutral word exists.