Answer Key
Appendix 1: Mandarin Chinese Pinyin
Appendix 2: Three Chinese Folk Songs
Cháng chéng shì yóu kè de bì yóu zhī dì.
The Great Wall is a must-see for visitors to China.
Gāo tiě shì yóu lǎn zhōng guó de yī zhǒng fēi cháng fāng biàn de fāng shì.
High speed trains are a very convenient way to get around China.
Zì xíng chē gòng xiǎng zài zhōng guó yuè lái yuè pǔ biàn.
Bike sharing is now increasingly common in China.
Zhōng guó rén jiāng zhì néng shǒu jī yòng yú yī qiè, bāo kuò gòu wù hé fù kuǎn.
The Chinese use their smartphones for everything, including shopping and making payments.
Preface and Acknowledgments
In recent years, China has seen a lot of changes—economically, socially and technologically. Many new and innovative tech and social media platforms are now available and have become popular and even essential in Chinese daily life—for example: WeChat, Alipay and Taobao, not to mention high speed trains, ride sharing services, etc. These new technological developments have improved Chinese living standards. At the same time, the Chinese language and culture has undergone many changes to reflect the contemporary world and lifestyle of the Chinese people.
As a result of all these changes, we decided to thoroughly revise this book to reflect contemporary Chinese language and culture. Many new words and expressions have been added to this edition, along with new dialogues and cultural information.
In the process of revising the book, I read through it again many times. Each time, it reminded me of all my former students who encouraged me when writing the book. I would like to thank them and also all of my Chinese colleagues and friends who helped me with this book in different ways.
I also wish to thank Tuttle’s former editor, Sandra Korinchak, for her professional vision and valuable suggestions on how to make this book more appealing and more beneficial to learners. For her help with this revised edition, I would like to thank Professor Mingming Chen at Shanghai University, who shared her knowledge and information about recent developments in China with me. Professor Chen also helped check the glossary.
Special thanks also go to Jeremy Gordon and Peng Xu who did the audio recordings for the new edition during their free time and weekends. Thank you very much!
In addition, I would like to thank my editor Nancy Goh for her professional advice and for editing the book. Thank you so much!
Last but not least, my deep thanks go to my friend and coauthor Xiayuan Liang, for her careful and thorough polishing of the English in this book. Working together, we finally completed this revision!
Yi Ren
How to access the online Audio Recordings and Answer Key for this book:
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2. Type the URL below into to your web browser.
https://www.tuttlepublishing.com/Mandarin-Chinese-for-Beginners
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Pinyin 拼音 Pīn yīn
An ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao Zi, said: “A journey of a thousand miles starts with one single step.”
So, now that you have this book open, what next? What is that first single step in learning Chinese? It’s learning pinyin!
Pinyin is a Romanized spelling system. When we learn English, we start with A, B, and C; and in learning Chinese, we start with pinyin. Did you know that Chinese children begin learning pinyin before they start to learn Chinese characters? It’s used like the phonetic symbol system used in English: it shows us how to pronounce sounds, and then characters. And most of the pronunciations are similar to those of the English letters.
When you become familiar with pinyin, you will feel like you have a strong pair of wings and are able to fly freely among Chinese characters, just the way native Chinese speakers do in speaking, reading, and writing this language.
Okay, let’s start to learn pinyin. First of all, you need to know that pinyin is composed of three