Lesson1:我爱你

When I think about what to teach first, ‘你(nǐ)好(hǎo)’ just came up. Almost every textbook starts from this simple phrase ‘hello’. That makes sense. It’s simple and useful. But in the end, I decided to bring a sentence instead of the very useful phrase.

我(wǒ)爱(ài)你(nǐ)。
我(wǒ)     I, me
你(nǐ)     you
爱(ài)     love, to love

I selected this sentence not because I’m a fan of romantic movie. It’s because these three simple characters can show you the basic sentence structure of Chinese. According to this sentence, we can learn some principles of Chinese language:

1.    A single character is often a word. I know a lot of western learners hate characters. It’s too hard to recognize and to write. But the bright side is Chinese words are built with characters which means if you learn one character, you may already know ten words. For example, 爱(ài) means ‘love’, 爱(ài)人(rén) is ‘lover’, 恋(liàn)爱(ài) is ‘relationship’… At least you know it’s something about ‘love’. So don’t ask me if you should learn character or not. One character for dozens words, you can make your decision.

Tips: Don’t think teacher just say everything is important but give you no support. For learning characters, I think to learn how to write is not as important as learn how to read to type. So use your flashcard or Google pinyin to type characters by pinyin. It’s way much easier.

2.    The word order plays very important role in Chinese language. Luckily, the basic order is the same as English: Subject + verb + Object. Another bright side of character is there is no conjugation! How wonderful that is.
Now let’s back to the sentence: 我爱你。Maybe it’s too much to say this to a Chinese person you just know. But if you learn some other words, you can simply make a lot of sentences.
妈(mā)妈(mā)  mom
爸(bà)爸(ba)  dad
苹(píng)果(guǒ)  apple
猫(māo)    cat
狗(gǒu)    dog

It just occurred to me. The first time I said: 我(wǒ)爱(ài)你(nǐ)，妈(mā)妈(mā) was the evening I knew I passed my college entrance exam. It’s not because I loved my mom till that time. It’s because Chinese have different culture about ‘爱(ài)’ from western society. We can talk about that later in the culture session.

Now homework time. There are some words here. Use the structure you learnt today to make your own sentences. For those who don’t know how to type characters, please download Google pinyin.

Another very important thing: if you never learn Chinese pronunciation system-Pinyin, there are tons of online resources. For example, Allset learning. They provide amazing Pinyin products and free Pinyin APP.

喜欢(xǐhuan)  to like
咖啡(kāfēi)  coffee
牛奶(niúnǎi)  milk
草莓(cǎoméi)  strawberry
茶(chá)    tea

P.S. I tried to add audio to the blogger so that sentences can be listened to but I failed.