Learning Useful Chinese Phrases for Travellers

Do you want to learn some useful Chinese phrases before your planned travel to Beijing China? Now you are on the right page of free learning of useful Chinese phrases for travelers touring Beijing China. It is quite useful and practical to learn some useful Chinese phrases if you have the chance to visit China. Chinese is a difficult language for most foreigners. But with some efforts foreign people still can master some useful and daily life sentneces to be used in their trips to Beijing China. Learning some Chinese is a good way of understanding more of its culture. On this page you will learn some basic knowledge of Chinese languge. And we also has recommended you an useful Chinese phrase learning website for your practice. Never too old to learn. Don't hesitate! Let's start!

Language:
The official language of the PRC is Putonghua or " Common Speech ", usually referred to the west as " Mandarin Chinese".

Tones:
Chinese is a tonal language, a language with many homonyms ( words of different meaning but with similar pronunciation ). Mandarin has four tones:
First tone ( - ): the voice is pitched quite high,High and level;
Second tone ( / ): the voice rises rather like asking a question,rises to the top;
Third tone ( V ): the voice dips and then rises;
Fourth tone ( \ ): the voice starts at the top, then falls away.
Below is an example of how the tones change the meaning:

If you use the wrong tones, your listeners may not be able to understand you.

Pinyin ( spell & sound ):
In 1958 the Chinese offically adopted a system known as pinyin as a method of writing their language using Roman alphabet. Pinyin is a romanization and not an anglicization; it makes use of Roman letters to represent sounds in Standard Mandarin. The way these letters represent sounds in Standard Mandarin will be different from other languages that make use of the Roman alphabet represent sound. Pinyin is quite useful in China, especially in majior cities, on shop fronts, street names and advertising etc. When Chinese people write their own names in Englsih, they use Pinyin.

English: Where are you from?
Putonghua ( Mandarin ): 你从哪里来?
Pinyin: Ni cong nai li lai?

Pronunciation:
The main purpose of pinyin is to help people learn Standard Mandarin pronunciation. Pinyin vowels are pronounced quite similarly to the vowels in Romance languages, and most consonants are also similar to English. But there are some pitfalls: the strange pronunciation of x, q, c, zh, and z and the unvoiced pronunciation of d, b, g, and j. The pronunciation of Chinese is generally offered in terms of initials and finals that represent the segmental phonemic portion of the language. Initials are initial consonants and finals are all possible mixtures of medials, the nucleus vowel, final vowel or consonant.

Written Language:
Chinese language characters look like kind of pictures, and often referred to as a language of " pictographs". But many of the Chinese words are actually quite abstract and stylished pictures of what they represent. Very often it is difficult to guess the meaning from its characters. A well-educated Chinese People should master 6000 charaters. Students should learn about 2000 characters to read Chinese newpapaer and books.

Simplifications:
To raise literacy, China set up the Committee for Reforming the Chinese language in Beijing 1954. The committee has simplified over 2000 characters, reducing the number of strokes by about half. This reform is quite a success in the China mainland. But people in Taiwan and Hong Kong still use the traditional characters.

Useful Chinese Phrases:

To cope with your potential travel to Beijing China for the time being, we have listed a useful Chinese learning webite for your practice: