Chapter 0 Basic Knowledge

I used to try learning many languages but gave up at the last. After that I gradually realized that if there is a tutorial written by a native speaker, it must be of great help. With such an idea, I decided to make a Chinese tutorial.

The basic unit of a Chinese sentence is words, and the basic unit of a word is characters. Though Chinese character is hard to master, you can still freely express yourself by only learning about 3000 frequent character.

Classifications of words(词性)

In Chinese, we devide all words into 12 kinds. They are:

1. Nouns. Just as English and many languages in the world, they are used to represent entity and concept. We don't care about male or female and single or plural in Chinese. That's pretty cool, isn't it?
2. Verbs. Different from the language of European countries, we don't care about the time and grammatical person.
3. Pronouns. The pronouns of Chinese is always accurate and easy.
4. Adjectives. The adjectives of Chinese are also free to use. And there is no dilemma of choosing -er or more, -est or most.
5. Quantity words. It's kind of difficult, because such a concept don't appear in English.
6. Numerals. Very very easy. No special situation.
7. Adverbs. If you want to make a adjective to be a adverb, it's also very easy to transform an adjective into its adverb form in Chinese.
8. Prepositions.
9. Conjunctios. Little bit of different from English. Usually we use a pair of conjunctions in Chinese at the same time.
10. Auxiliary words. Just like "don't" in English.
11. Onomatopoeias.
12. Interjections.

In Chinese students' textbook, all the words are classified like this. But for foreigners it makes a lot of difficult instead. So I try to make it easier and clearer by simplying the classifications and use the way that used when I learnt English and Japanese.

Personal pronouns(人称代词)

Before all，we talk about Chinese pronouns. In Chinese there is no such thing called objective case, so it can be used as subject and object, that's OK.

person	quantity	word	in English
first	single	我	I/me
first	plural	我们	we/us
second	single	你	you
second	single	您	you (polite and formal)
second	plural	你们	you
third	single	他	he/him
third	single	她	she/her
third	single	它	it
third	plural	他们	they/them(universal)
third	plural	她们	they/them(all women)
third	plural	它们	they/them(all animals or things without life)

You may find that all the plural forms of pronouns is the single form + 们, you bet! In fact, 们 can be used after many nouns and makes them plural.

Different form Japanese, Chinese people won't treat using pronouns as a rude behaviour. However, when you talk to a person that you respect, use "您" instead of "你". Chinese also has lots of polite expressions and modest expressions like Japanese, but we don't use it so often like Japanese.

Verbs(动词)

Now briefly introduce verbs. Chinese verbs are much simpler than English and Japanese. Use the transitive verb "找(to look for, infinitive form)" as example:

tense	simple	progressive	perfect
present	找	（正）在找	找过（了）
past	找（了）	（正）在找	找过（了）
future	（会）找	（正）在找	找过（了）

To some extend, this table is of no use. The verb of Chinese hardly care about when. When you want to negate a verb, we use "没" or "不" even "别"(used to negate an order), and when you want passive voice, you only need to place a "被" before a verb without any exceptions.

Sentence order

The sentence order of Chinese is basically the same as English's, S-V-O. When prepostions come, it may be a little different.

我(I)步行(on foot)去上学(go to school)。

But in simple sentences, it's perfectly the same.

我(I)喜欢(like)吃(to eat)汉堡(hamburger)。

Now you have a basic understanding of Chinese. Are you ready? Let's learn!