Introduction
Translation: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Tongue of Fire’s Chinese course! We’re very excited to help you discover this beautiful language with us. You will learn concepts like the Chinese character system, the sounds of Chinese, numbers, essential grammatical words, how to ask questions, negation, and more! We hope that, after finishing this course, you’ll understand the essential concepts necessary to understand and use Chinese in your everyday life. Enjoy!
A bit about Chinese: Chinese is the most spoken language in the world with approximately 1.4 billion speakers. It’s also very old, having been developed over millenia since the days of ancient China. It has had a strong influence on the development of other Asian languages, and Japanese still uses characters taken straight from Chinese! Contrary to popular belief, most Chinese characters are not pictograms (pictures of the items they describe). Besides China, there are many countries where Chinese is commonly spoken, including Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Macau, and Hong Kong.
There is an enormous number of differences between Chinese and English. For example, Chinese is a tonal language, which means that the tone (or pitch) of a word is part of its pronunciation, and changing the tone of a word can change its meaning. Also, instead of using an alphabet, Chinese uses a collection of 50,000 different characters that each stand for a syllable and each have their own meaning. Since Chinese is so different from English, it will take some time just to understand the basic structures that make it up, which you will do in Unit 1. After that, we will move on to actual sentence formation in Unit 2.
Chinese is actually a family of languages, not a single, unified language. The version of Chinese supported on Tongue of Fire is Mandarin, which is the most widely spoken Chinese language as well as the language spoken in China. While we will refer to “Chinese” throughout this course, know that we are referring to Mandarin specifically.
This course is designed to help you understand all of the linguistic concepts that you’ll need to speak Chinese at an intermediate level. It teaches the overarching concepts and rules of Chinese grammar rather than individual words, which you can learn through our curriculum on the Words page. Please note that simply reading the lessons is not enough to learn Chinese: regular practice is essential to turning the knowledge in the course into practical skills. You can get that practice on the other pages of this site, such as AI, Word Drills, and Conjugation, as well as by immersing yourself in the language by talking with people in Chinese and by reading, watching, or listening to Chinese media. We also recommend taking notes and/or making physical flashcards to help yourself retain what you learn so that you can use it in real-life situations. Note that you can use the AI page to practice any specific concept you learn here by asking for it in the "note" text entry (ex. "Use aspect markers").
Throughout the course, we’ve styled all Chinese text like
We hope you find Tongue of Fire’s Chinese course clear, fun, and enlightening.