Sinitic Language Family
(Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese)
*There are many
dialects of Chinese. Most of these dialects are mutually unintelligible
to Chinese from different ethnolinguistic groups. The government
of China has endorsed and teaches citizens Mandarin Chinese
as a standard language that can be used across the country.
Students coming from Taiwan, Hong Kong or Canton (Guangzhou)
in the south of China speak Cantonese which may be understood
by Vietnamese speakers but not by Mandarin speakers.
Pronunciation - Most words in Asian languages
consist of a single syllable and almost never end with a consonant sound.
Give students extra time and practice to decode longer, multi-syllabic words
and stress final consonants.
Consonants - R = L, X = /ST/, V=/W/, Z = /S/, Y
= /J/,
There are no letter equivalents in Chinese for N, Q, R, S, T, V, W, X,
Y, Z
Vowels - Mandarin Chinese has four vowel tones.
Cantonese Chinese has six vowel tones.
Blends - Most
Asian languages do not have blends. Consonants are almost
always separated by a vowel. You may notice students trying
to insert vowels between difficult blends, thus space sounds
like suh - pace.
NG = /N/, TH = /T/ or /F/, SH = /S/, CH = /S/
Grammar - Chinese
is an isolating language, a feature of which being that grammatical
concepts are expressed by independent words, called particles.
Thus the possessive relation is expressed by the particle de as
in:
wo (I, me, my) de (possessive particle) fangzi (house)
= my house
Sentence Structure - SVO
Adjectives - precede nouns
Plurals - plurals
are marked with numbers.
For example: one boy, two boy, many man
Tense - Tense
is marked by using a time classifying word such as
yesterday, today or tomorrow.
For example: Yesterday I eat lunch. Tomorrow I eat lunch.
Articles - use
of articles is rare and optional
Verbs - no use
of the verb "to be"
Culture
Orthography - Chinese does not use an alphabet
system but rather a set of symbols (kanji) each of which represent an entire
word. This presents major difficulties to teachers who are trying to teach
phonetic decoding of words. Chinese students typically try to memorize
the sound and match it to the shape of the word. Old Chinese is read and
written from top to bottom. Modern Chinese is read and written from left
to right.
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