早上好，中国

2026-09-13

Quick note before anything: for those of us who speak languages based on the Latin alphabet, getting used to languages built on characters can be very hard. But I believe in you!

If you look at the title of this post, you'll see the word for China: 中国 (Zhōngguó). The first character, 中 (zhōng), means "middle" or "center". The second, 国 (guó), means "country" or "state". Put them together, and you get the "Middle Kingdom".

In the last semester, I had the opportunity to get to know many people from this Middle Kingdom and help a little with translation from English to Portuguese in their classes. From this experience, I would like to introduce the very basics of Chinese.

What is Chinese, and where does it come from

China is one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations, but its full history would need a whole blog post. For now, all we need to know is that "Chinese" isn't a single language.

The most crucial distinction to avoid confusion (and getting beaten by either side!) is between the spoken varieties and the writing systems. On the spoken side, people may speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or other regional varieties. The Han ethnic group is the largest, but far from the only one. On the written side, characters come in Simplified (standardized in mainland China) and Traditional (used in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan) forms.

Hanyu - 汉语

The most widely spoken variety, and the one taught as the standard, is Mandarin, known natively as 汉语 (Hànyǔ).

Just like Zhōngguó, this word is also really cool to understand: 汉 (Hàn) refers to the Han ethnic group, and 语 (yǔ) means language. So, Hànyǔ literally means "the language of the Han people". That's the one we will talk about today.

pinyin - 汉语拼音

If you were paying attention, you realized the first two characters next to the pinyin are hanyu! And the other one? It means ahem! pin yin!

Pinyin is how we write the sounds of spoken Chinese in the Latin alphabet, and that will be the focus of this section.

Look at us! We barely started and we already have a small vocabulary! (Bear with the pinyin in the table for now, I explain it right away. I also didn't explain the hanzi above: those are the characters!)

Yun mu - 韵母

In Portuguese and English we have our vowels, right? A E I O U. In Chinese, every syllable is built from an initial (the "consonant" it starts with) and a final, the yun mu, the part that carries the vowel sound.

That's "Good Morning" for you! 早上好，中国!

We also have an order for the finals - 韵母 (it's different from our A E I O U) which is:

Please note that in Chinese we have the ü sound, the same one we have in French! :)

Sheng mu - 声母

Before the final comes the initial (sheng mu), which acts like our consonants. If we look at the words from our title, 早上好 (zǎo shàng hǎo), the initials are exactly z, sh, and h.

Most of them sound somewhat similar to what we are used to in English or Portuguese, but there are two "imposters" in the initial family: y and w. They are basically vowels (i and u) wearing a fake mustache to act as consonants when a syllable needs a starting letter. You can see this in the word we just learned: 语 (yǔ).

The pronunciation of the sheng mu (声母) can be quite different from what we are used to in English or Portuguese. Since learning sounds through text is nearly impossible, I highly recommend checking out YouTube for pronunciation guides.

For now, I will just leave the complete list here for future reference.¹ A fun fact: the groupings in this table are not random! They are organized by where the sound is produced in your mouth, like your lips, teeth, or the roof of your mouth.

Sheng diao - 声调

Now comes the part that usually scares most of new students the most: the tones (sheng diao). Because Chinese has a relatively small number of possible syllables, they use the musical pitch of your voice to multiply the available words. Changing the pitch changes the meaning entirely!

And here is the golden rule you should never forget: The tone mark always lands on the final ;)

There are four main tones, plus a fifth "neutral" one. The classic example every single student learns uses the syllable ma. Notice how the visual marks above the vowels ( ¯, ´, ˇ, ` ) literally draw the shape your voice should make!

• 1st Tone (Flat): mā (妈) - Mother. Your voice stays high and steady, like singing a single note.
• 2nd Tone (Rising): má (麻) - Hemp / Numb. Your voice goes up, like you are asking a question in surprise: "What?"
• 3rd Tone (Falling-Rising): mǎ (马) - Horse. Your voice drops low and comes back up.
• 4th Tone (Falling): mà (骂) - To scold. Your voice drops sharply and forcefully, like a quick command: "Stop!"
• Neutral Tone: ma (吗) - Question particle. It has no mark. It is pronounced short and light, placed at the end of a sentence to turn it into a yes/no question.

So yes, if you use the wrong tone, you might accidentally call your mother a horse. (Don't worry, context usually saves us, but it's a rite of passage for every beginner! Me included)

summary

If we could compress everything we learned today into a single formula, it would look exactly like this:

拼音 = 声母 + 韵母 + 声调 (Pinyin) = Sheng mu (Initials) + Yun mu (Finals) + Sheng diao (Tones)

In future posts, we will go more in-depth into the phonetics of the language, talk about the stroke order of the hanzi, and work through some more vocabulary.

Until then, 谢谢 (xièxie, thank you) for reading!

All the vocabulary we have learnt today (for reference):

Vocabulary Cheat Sheet

Here is a quick recap of every word and character we learned today: