Poo!...Not Poo!

If you have ever attempted to learn Mandarin, you will know it is not easy. Especially for us Brits! I have been picking up Mandarin since around September 2009, but I had never understood how children learned all of the common Mandarin characters.

I thought, to learn the first 5000 or so, they would use drill exercises to remember them all. But I knew that somehow the characters could be broken down into sub-characters. I did not understand how the sub-characters represented the main characters when they were put together, as together, they did not resemble the final character at all. That is when I had a chat (in a fashion) with my wife's father and now it is all crystal clear.

Basically there are 37 symbols that represent the phonetics system of the Mandarin language and they do not work like English phonetics, as in, when they are put together, they will not create a character/word visually, only through pronunciation. The list on the left shows the Bopomofo.

It probably wont make a lot of sense to some, as it stands. But the character (the red and green symbol - normally all black) is sort of like the Mandarin alphabet. The black letter on the right of it, is the way it is pronounced (but is slightly different to how it would be read in English).


E.g. the first symbol is pronounced 'ber', the one below it, 'per'. They are some of the simple ones. But some sounds are so similar that it is very difficult for foreigners to distinguish between them. Hence the name of my blog title today. While trying to say a word last night with my wife, I was pronouncing the word 'poo' wrong. My wife lost her patience with me and raised her voice saying 'it's POO! not POO! I couldn't contain my laughter at this point.

The symbols are placed on the right of a Mandarin character on top of each other. They tell children how to pronounce the character they are reading. Remember though, they are only a tool for pronunciation, they do not look like the character they represent the punctuation of.

Here is an example of two Mandarin words, with the Bopomofo, to tell us how to pronounce them. Bear in mind, Bopomofo is usually only given for children to use, which is why I never saw it until I looked inside my nephew's magazine.

Taking the first character on the left, we can see on big character and three small characters on the right of it (down the side). The three small characters (not including the dash to the right of them) are the Bopomofo. From top to bottom, they are pronounced 'der', 'ee' and 'an'. If we say all those in succession, we have the character 'dian'.

The character on the top right, using the Bopomofo, is pronounced 'shi'. When we say the two characters in succession, we have dian shi, which means television.

You might be wondering at this point, well how do the children know what the words mean? Usually, the children are already fairly proficient in speaking and listening, which enables them to recognise and understand the semantics of what they are reading. If they do not know a word, they can either ask someone who does, or use a Mandarin dictionary. Which is not as scientifically laid out as the English dictionary (to say the least).

Now if you were wondering what the dash is for, on the right of the Bopomofo, it allows the reader to know which tone to use to pronounce the character. There is an image of the tone symbols below. The tone smbol used in the image above is the 4th tone, meaning you must say the word from high to low tone. The first tone is constant, the second from low to high and the third (the hardest) is from high to low and back up again.


For a demonstration of the tones, you can watch this short video, which I found on YouTube.

That concludes today's edition, hope it was insightful and interesting. Maybe you even learned something!