About Chinese Language

Chinese is not a phonetic language. If you never learn Chinese, you won’t know how to pronounce a Chinese character by just looking at the character.

• For example: How to pronounce “花”?

Chinese is a tonal language. Each sound can have up to 4 different tones. The detail with be further elaborated in the section of pronunciation.

Chinese language is said to have less “noise”, as almost all Chinese characters' sounds end with vowel sounds, except some end with -n and –ng sounds.

Each Chinese character can have one or more meaning, even though it is written and pronounced similarly.

• For example: 花 (pronounced as "huā") could mean

1. Flower (noun)
2. Spend (verb)

A similar Chinese character can have more than one sound, which carry different meanings.

• For example: 还 could be pronounced as

1. huán : return (verb)
2. hái : still (adverb)

Every single Chinese character usually has a meaning. However, there are some characters that could not be used alone and need to combine with other character to form a meaningful word.

• For example: 蝴 has no meaning alone, but when it is combined with 蝶to become 蝴蝶, which means butterfly.

Learning Chinese is not easy, just like learning any language. It requires patience and hard work. If you wish to learn some common Chinese conversation instantly, this site may not be ideal. But if you want to learn from basic, this site’s step by step learning program may be beneficial to you.