Chinese(Mandarin)中文

it is nice Group!

hehe artie, written Chinese is more than simply counting the strokes, you've got to write them, and as long as you do, you'll find it's more difficult than you could imagine. They look nice, but I hated writing them when I was a kid lol.

You know, it seems to me that written Chinese is actually simpler than English. Look at Ni Hao:




That means Hello. How are you? Now let's count the number of strokes to write that in English:
H = 3
e = 2
l = 1
l = 1
o = 1 ... and so on...

The total number of strokes to write Hello. How are you? is 27. (30, if you count the punctuation).

Look at the diagram for writing Ni Hao.

你 = 7 strokes
好 = 6 strokes
Total = 13

That's a better than 50% reduction!

Check this out, it may help get started. The audio speaking may be a bit fast for beginners, if that proves to be a problem, this one is much slower.

PS. I made these pics myself, just typed them in microsoft office word, and grabbed screenshots. And for where to talk to chinese, I've no idea if there's any, but you can always add chinese to your msn or skype or something. But be warned, they'll probably talking to you in english if you don't make it clear that you want to learn chinese from them hehe.

你好 testing 1 2 3 It works!

Yeah, but what about the tones? Ni Hao (and every other chinese word) carries a tone or series of tones. I can't hear those tones when we write. Anyway, I guess I can learn to recognize chinese writing symbols. Where did you get those pictographs of "peace" "daddy" "mummy" "home" and "virtue"? And do we have a web platform sufficient for communicating chinese characters?

Ni Hao artie,
Yes Chinese is a very beautiful language, and to begin with, you may want to learn some daily expressions so that you can use them everyday. For example, Xie Xie(thanks), Zai Jian(goodbye). You know Ni Hao and that's great!

Ni Hao! I want to learn a bit of Chinese! It is such a beautiful language to hear and to see. How do I begin?

ni hao nacera. You may want to have a look at here, the link is rather professional and standard, better than what I could give you I'm afraid. plus, I'm not their advocate though. And sorry for the late reply.