How to Learn
Mandarin Chinese

You probably know that Chinese characters are the standard for written Chinese, but they're not very helpful when it comes to pronunciation for beginners. As a newbie, your best friend is pinyin. Pinyin is a system for writing out the sounds of the Chinese language using the Roman alphabet. It's not a "pronunciation key," it's a way of representing the sounds of the Chinese language in a phonetic way. This means reading pinyin correctly will still require you to learn some new sounds. Mastering pinyin is an essential first step for learning Mandarin, so head over to ChinesePod's Pinyin and Pronunciation Guide for all your pinyin-related needs.

Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, which means that every syllable has a tone, and the meaning of each syllable can change, depending on the tone. This means that if you want to express yourself in Chinese and get the correct meaning across, you have to pay attention to those tones! There are four main tones in Mandarin Chinese, plus one "neutral" tone. The tones are simply referred to as "first tone," "second tone," "third tone," and "fourth tone." We could describe them here, but the best thing to do is to listen to them, and keep listening until they become familiar. Our pinyin guide has a section on tones that can help you with this.

You often hear about various "Chinese dialects," such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, and Hokkien, and you may imagine that they are as similar to each other as American English, Australian English, and British English. In actuality, they are as different as the Romance languages Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian. Mandarin is by far the most common of the Chinese "dialects" mentioned above, and is the official language in both mainland China and Taiwan. (Cantonese is the language of Hong Kong and Guangdong.) Mandarin is what is usually meant by "Chinese" in casual usage, and Mandarin Chinese is what is taught on ChinesePod.

You will sometimes hear mentions of "standard Mandarin" in discussions about learning Chinese. China was once fractured by innumerable dialects, and a unifying dialect helped bring the nation together. Standard Mandarin, or putonghua in Chinese, was originally based on the Beijing dialect in northern China, but has long since spread throughout the country. Just as a traveler in the USA will hear the difference in the local accents of Texas, New York, California, and Boston, a visitor to China will notice differences in the Mandarin of the residents of Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, and Sichuan. These differences add to the richness and variety of the language. The Mandarin taught on ChinesePod is the standard Mandarin of China (not just one city), with just enough variety to help the learner deal with real speakers of the language.