Welcome to Lesson 2
Press "play" to begin.
Listen carefully
to the Chinese audio.
Repeat all of the
Chinese words that
you see on the screen.
Listen to this conversation:
In the next few minutes, you will learn how to introduce your friends and talk about your job. But first, do you still remember how to say "hello" in Mandarin?
In the dialog Annie is introducing her friend Linda to her other friend, Li Ming. Here is how to say "friend" in Mandarin.
The Chinese speaker is going to repeat this word part by part starting from the end. Please repeat each part after them, and Try to make your pronunciation sound exactly like theirs. Be sure to repeat aloud.
Like many two-syllable words in Mandarin, the two characters that make up this word do no necessarily mean anything when used on their own. Now, how do you say, “friend” in Mandarin?
Mandarin Chinese lacks many of the possessive pronouns found in English. This means that words like “my”, “your”, and “his” have no direct equivalent in Chinese. Instead we can construct these terms with a very useful Chinese word:
This word is something like the English word “of”. Listen and repeat.
How do you say “of” in Mandarin?
And, do you still remember how to say “I” in Mandarin?
In English, we can put an adjective or a possessive pronoun in front of a noun directly. However, we have to put one word “的” between the adjective and noun or between the possessive pronoun and noun in Chinese, which is the same meaning as “of” in English. Here is how to say “of” in Mandarin. Listen and repeat.
Now, if you put
and
…together, you can make the term for “my” in English. This is something like saying “of me” or “of mine”. Listen and repeat.
How do you say “my” in Mandarin?
Now, how do you think you would say “my friend” in Mandarin?
Say “my friend”.
Let’s move on to something else for a moment. Here is how to say “this” in Mandarin. You can use this term to refer to a thing or things that are nearby. Listen and repeat.
How do you say “this” in Mandarin?
Do you still remember the Chinese word for “is”, “are”, and “am”?
How do you think you can say “this is” in Mandarin Chinese?
Once again, how do you say “this is” in Mandarin?
Here is how to say “this is my friend”. Listen and repeat.
How do you say “this is my friend”?
What part of that means “friend”?
And what part of that means “my”?
Which part means “this is”?
Say again, “this is my friend.”
Now Li Ming is going to greet Annie’s friend Jack, so he says “Nice to meet you.” Here is how to say this in Mandarin.
This phrase has a few new words we should take a look at. Here is the Mandarin word for “happy”.
Say “happy” in Mandarin Chinese.
We also come across the word here that means something like “very” or “very much.” Please repeat.
So, how do you think you say “very happy”?
The other important term in this phrase is......
….This word means something like “know” or “recognise” or “be acquainted with”. In this context, you can use it to talk about people you have met, or are meeting now. Listen carefully and repeat.
Now let’s put it all together. The Chinese speaker is going to read everything slowly, part by part. Please listen and repeat.
How do you say, “Nice to meet you” in Mandarin?
Excellent, now let’s take a moment to talk about jobs. Here is how to say “student” in Mandarin.
Listen and repeat.
Do you remember how to say “teacher”?
And how do you say “student”?
Do you remember the Mandarin word for “is” and “are”?
How about the word for “you”?
Now, with all that in mind, how do you think you might say “You are a student,”?
You might be wondering why we’re going over “you are” instead of something like “I am”. That’s because in Mandarin Chinese, you can create a yes/no question by adding a question particle to the end of a sentence.
For example, here is how to ask “Are you a student?” Listen and repeat.
Now, which part of that can you use to make yes/no questions?
Very good, now say “Are you a student?”
Do you remember how to say “I” or “me” in Mandarin?
Here is how to say "teacher" in Mandarin.
Now, how do you say “I am a teacher” ?
How do you say “Nice to meet you” ?
Now ask “Are you a student?”
Say “I am a teacher.”
In the last lesson, you learned how to ask people their names. Do you remember how to say “What is your name?”
Which part of that means, “what” ?
And which part means “name” ?
Say again: “What is your name?”
Great, let’s move on. Much like the words for “my” and “your” there is no single Mandarin word for “yes”. Instead you should simply respond with the verb from the yes/no question you have just been asked.
For example, if someone asks you a question that starts with “Are you...?”, you can say “yes” in the following way. Please listen and repeat.
Instead of “yes”, this is literally more like “it is” or “I am”. Once again, how do you say “yes” to this kind of question?
You may have guessed by now that if we can say “yes” by saying something like “it is” , then we can say “no” by saying something closer to “isn’t”. In Mandarin, you can create the negative form of any verb by putting the word for “not” right in front of it. Here is how to say “isn’t” in Chinese. Listen and repeat.
Great, we’ll come back to this in a second. Next, in the dialog, one of the characters says the word.......
This is just like saying the word “oh” in English. You can say this word when you understand what other people are talking about. Listen and repeat.
Do you still remember how to say "what" in Mandarin?
Here is the Mandarin word for “teach” . Listen and repeat.
You may notice that this sounds very much like the word for “called” or “named”, but the difference is that “teach” is spoken with a high, level tone, and “called” is pronounced with a sharp, falling tone. Listen closely.
Don’t worry if you can’t tell the difference just yet, understanding the the tones in Mandarin Chinese can take quite some time.
Do you still remember the word....
...from lesson one? Listen and repeat.
This word can be used very much like....
….to form a question.
For example, here is how you can ask a teacher which subject they teach.
Not to make things too complicated, but it’s worth noting here that the word....
...is being used with another question word, in this instance “what”. This is somewhat different than the way we use....
…Which is more often found in yes/no questions.
Another thing we might want to think about is politeness. In English, we often say “excuse me” before asking a question In Mandarin, we use the following phrase in the same way.
How do you say “excuse me” ?
Now we can use this to make the last question a bit more polite. Here is how to say “Excuse me, what do you teach?”
How do you say “Excuse me, what do you teach?”
Here is how to say the name for the “Chinese language” in Mandarin. Listen and repeat.
Do you remember how to say “I” ?
Now try to say “I teach Chinese”.
What part of that means the “Chinese language” ?
Now let’s review the conversation from today’s lesson.
First, Li Ming meets Annie on the street, so he says “hello”.
She greets him in return.
She says “This is my friend, Linda.”
He says “Nice to meet you.”
And Linda responds.
She asks him, “Are you a student?”
And he responds, “No, I am a teacher.”
Next, Li Ming says, “Oh, may I ask what you teach?”
To which she responds, “I teach Chinese.”
Alright. This is the end of lesson two. If you feel comfortable with what you’ve learned today, feel free to go on to lesson three next. Don’t worry if you can’t remember everything. We’ll be reviewing everything in the coming lessons.
