Instructors:
L0101, M 10-1, W 10-12, UC 85
Helen Xiaoyan Wu Îâ С Ñà, RL 14151, tel 946-5102 (O)
<xiaoyan@chass.utoronto.ca>
Alice Bo Dong ¶­ ²¨ , RL 14160.
<bo.dong@utoronto.ca>
L0201, M 12-3, W 12-2, UC 52
  Yan Yan êÌ Ñà, RL 14130.
<yan.yan@utoronto.ca>
L5101, M 6-9, W 6-8, RW 142
George Qingzhi Zhao ÕÔ Çå ÖÎ, RL 14222A
<zqingzhi@chass.utoronto.ca>
Consulting Time:
H.X. Wu: M 4-6 pm; other times by appointment only.
A.B. Dong: W 12-1 pm by appointment for this and other time.
Y. Yan: M 3-4 pm by appointment for this and other time.
G.Q. Zhao: W 5-6 pm by appointment for this and other time.
Textbooks:
Margaret Mian Yan ÑÏ ÃÞ / ÑÏ ÃÞ and Jennifer Li-chia Liu Áõ Á¦ ¼Î / Áõ Á¦ ¼Î.  Interactions I and II: A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese.  Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana UP, 1998.  A student workbook accompanies each text.
We expect to start Interactions II before or right after the Reading Week during the second term.
Tapes: It is essential that you immediately purchase the audio cassettes for the textbooks.  Without them you cannot do many of the exercises.  First 11-cassette set US$100.00 for both Interactions I and II; each additional set US$50.00.  Please call 1-800-842-6796 or visit <www.indiana.edu/~iupress> to place your order.
Recommended CD-ROM:
Pinyin Master 2.0 for Windows or Macintosh.   For more information, please visit
<www.csulb.edu/~sanpaoli/pym/pym.html> or e-mail to <sanpaoli@csulb.edu>.
 
 

    L5101, M 6-9, W 6-8, RW 142
Instructor: George Qingzhi Zhao ÕÔ Çå ÖÎ
<zqingzhi@chass.utoronto.ca>

                                          Requirements:

Attendance: Students are required to attend all classes throughout the semester, unless excused by advance arrangements made with one of the course heads. More than 3 unexcused class absences will affect the course grade.

Homework: Tardy assignments will be marked down two incremental grades (eg., from A to B+) for each day until submission. Assignments more than two days late will not be accepted.

Makeup: allowed only in cases of documented medical or personal leave, including university sponsored activities (eg., graduate student internship, sporting events, model U.N.). Please attempt to inform your instructors in advance of any absences. Under no circumstances will class be recapitulated or "re-presented" in the case of absence.
 

Marking Scheme:
Quizzes           20%
Test 1 (end of the 1st term)        15%
Test 2 (end of Interactions I)        15%
Assignments            5%
Examination (covers I and part of II; date set by the Faculty after 2nd term)  35%
Instructors' evaluation (attitude, attendance, class performance, ...)   10%
Attention:
This course is a comprehensive introduction to Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) as a second language for students with no background in any Chinese dialect.  Please read carefully the three Notes and the Condition under the course description of EAS100Y on p. 96 of The Faculty of Arts and Science 1999-2000 Calendar.
Copying Fee: A $5 photocopying fee is requested for materials issued in class in excess of our printing allotment.

Hot Links

Chinese Multimedia Tutorial  Chinese Pronunciation Guide  Learning Chinese Online Page (UC Davis)

 Harvard Chinese Language Program Chinese Character PronunciationsArt of China / Learn Chinese

CoursesScene Online - Beijing Scene - BS III/5 - Comrade Language: The Dating Game

Learning Chinese Online Chinese Romanization Guide Page (UC Davis) Pin-Yin Romanization

Chinese Language Tones Chinese Language Phrases Chinese Romanization Charts

A Guide to Gwoyeu Romatzyh Tonal Spelling of Chinese Zhuyin fuhao Mandarin TTS Conversational Chinese Speak Mandarin Campaign Website OnlineIndex of /chinese/reading/tools/

Chinese Language and Culture

Chinese language is one of the world's oldest languages. About 95 per cent of the people of China speak Chinese. Approximately 75 per cent of the people of Singapore speak Chinese, and almost all the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan speak it.

Chinese is written the same way throughout China. However, the language consists of seven major dialect groups with some variations within each group. These dialects differ so greatly that a person who lives in one area may not be able to converse with someone from another area. The pronunciation of many words depends on the dialect being spoken.

Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. This family includes Burmese, Thai, and Tibetan.

Written Chinese has no alphabet. Instead, it consists of about 50,000 characters. The Chinese writing system is logographic, meaning that each character stands for a word or part of a word. A person who knows about 4,000 of the most frequently used characters can read a Chinese newspaper or modern novel. Scholars who read ancient Chinese literature and documents must learn many more characters.

The earliest forms of Chinese script were pictographs. The characters, also called graphs, were drawings or pictures of the objects they represented. As Chinese script developed, characters became more simplified and less pictographic.

Some characters are not pictures but represent abstract words. Examples include the characters for up and down. Such characters, called simple graphs, are few in number. Compound graphs, however, are more numerous. Compound graphs are formed by two or more characters. For example, the character meaning to bark is a compound graph formed by the characters for mouth and dog.

The Chinese also developed a technique called character borrowing. It involves "borrowing" the character of one word to represent another word that has a similar pronunciation. For example, one character means burn, but it also is used to represent yes. The character is pronounced rahn for both meanings.

The meaning of a character that stands for more than one word may be difficult to determine. To make the meaning of such a character clear, the Chinese developed phonetic compounds. A phonetic compound is a character that has an additional character or an additional marking to help the reader determine the word it represents.

Spoken Chinese. The common dialect of Chinese is Northern Chinese or Mandarin. The Chinese call the dialect putonghua, which means common or standard language. Northern Chinese is the official language of China and is taught in all the nation's schools. About 600 million people speak it. They live throughout northern China and in several southwestern provinces. Other major Chinese dialects include Yue or Cantonese, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Min, and Wu. They are spoken in many areas of China and in the Chinese communities of various cities in other countries.

Chinese dialects differ in the use of tones. A tone is the pitch used in saying a particular word. Northern Chinese has four tones--high-level (high and unwavering), rising, low-dipping (falling and rising), and falling. Some other dialects have as many as nine tones. The use of tone is an important means of separating words of different meanings but similar pronunciation. For example, ma means mother in a high-level tone, horse in a low-dipping tone, scold in a falling tone, and hemp in a rising tone. Each of these words has a different character when written in Northern Chinese.

Chinese is spoken with no tenses. For example, the sentence Ta shi xuezhe could mean He is a scholar or He was a scholar, depending on how it is used.

Many language experts consider Chinese to be monosyllabic--that is, almost all the words have only one syllable. Even words of more than one syllable can be broken down into single-syllable words. For example, xuezhe (scholar) consists of two single-syllable words--xue (learn) and zhe (one who).

Development. The earliest known examples of Chinese are inscriptions carved in bones and shells during the Shang dynasty (c. 1766-c. 1122 B.C.). This early language had a simple structure. It was the basis of a later language called classical, or literary, Chinese.

Present-day Chinese dialects developed from classical Chinese. Northern Chinese began to be used during the A.D. 1300's. Northern Chinese became China's official language because it was spoken in Beijing, the capital. But it was not widely used in writing until the Literary Revolution, a cultural movement that began in 1917.

Through the years, the government has promoted the use of Northern Chinese through the nation's educational program. In 1919, Chinese schools began to use a system of phonetic signs to teach standard pronunciation. This method involved books that taught the pronunciation in Northern Chinese of Chinese characters. In 1949, Chinese educators began to simplify characters to make them easier to learn and write.

In the mid-1950's, the government introduced pinyin, a system of writing Chinese using the Roman alphabet. This alphabet consists of the 26 letters used to write English and many other languages except the letter v. In 1978, the government directed that Chinese names and words used in English and other foreign language publications be written in pinyin. Pinyin replaced the Wade-Giles system and other writing systems that use the Roman alphabet. Two British diplomats, Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles, developed this system during the late 1800's and early 1900's.

Contributor: David R. Knechtges, Ph.D., Prof. of Chinese, Univ. of Washington.

Additional resources

DeFrancis, John. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1984.

Norman, Jerry. Chinese. Cambridge, 1988. A general introduction to various aspects of the language.

LISTEN TO THE NEW WORDS

Pinyin -- The Best Chinese Phonetic System

What is Pinyin?

There are more than 400 basic syllables in the common speech of modern Chinese, and they can be very well notated with
Pinyin ,"the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet System (Hanyu Pinyin Fangan)", which was adopted by National People's Congress
of the People's Republic of China on February 21, 1958. It is the achievement of the long efforts and hard work of thousands
of linguistic experts in China.

Pinyin is a set of symbols used to transliterate Chinese characters and combine the speech sounds of the common speech
(Putong Hua, Guo Yu or Chinese Mandarin) into syllables. This system makes use of the Latin alphabet, modified to meet the
needs of the Chinese language. Over the last 39 years, it has been used throughout the country to faciliate the learning of
Chinese characters, to help unify pronunciation and popularize the common speech. Many Western learners of Chinese have
found this system very helpful in their Chinese language study, some of them even learn to speake and understand Chinese
Mandarin to some extend without learning a single Chinese characters. We believe Pinyin is extremely useful in learning or
using of Chinese language , but we also believe learning Chinese characters are very important to master the language. It is
proved to be the best phonetic system for overseas Chinese kids in the US and other countries in the World. With no doubt, it
is also to best system of English-speaking adults to learn Chinese.

21 Initials and 38 Finals

A Chinese syllable usually consists of two parts:
1) an initial, which is a consonant in the first part, and
2)a final, which can be a vowel or compound vowel with or with one or two ending
consonants. For example, 'm' is the initial and 'ang' is the final in the word 'mang2' (=
busy). 2 is the tone of the word. In 'ma3' (=horse), 'm' is the initial, 'a' is the final and 3 is
the tone.

A symple syllable can be just a final with an initial. An initial (i.e. only the beginning
consonant) alone cannot become a syllable. Usually a syllable represents a Chinese
character. For example, "e2" = "goose or geese", "er4" = "two"

Putonghua (Mandarin, Common Speech) is a tonal language

Usually there are 4 tones in Putonghua, with a fifth tone (neutral tone) being used for the second word in many two-word
phrases or idioms. The same pronunciation with different tones can mean very different things. For example,
ma1=mother, ma2=sesame, ma3=horse, ma4=curse or scold;
(to avoid confusion, we suggest omitting the 1 from 'ma1')
tang1=soup, tang2=sugar, tang3=lie(lay, laid), tang4=scorching/hot/burn.

Different tones in the same pronunciation can mean just the opposite:
mai3=buy, mai4=sell.

 Greeting & Parting
 Pinyin Guide: Classroom Expressions
 Pinyin Guide: Classroom Expressions 1

Lesson Four
Lesson Five

If you have comments or suggestions, email me at zqingzhi@chass.utoronto.ca