Lesson 1: Basic Numbers (A)

For me, teaching Chinese for adults and kids are different. The way of teaching is definitely different, the order of things that I teach is different too. I have the background for both, but coming from a city where Mandarin is something common and nothing exclusive, I used to have high expectation to the learners. Moving to Bali, I have to lower my expectation towards the learners (both kids and adults) and slow down my pace of teaching.

For every coming post in the future I am going to label them “Chinese for Adults” and “Chinese for Children”. Also, I will put (A) for adults and (C) for children within the title. So, you can refer to the relevant posts easily.

Today, I am going to start the lesson for adult. Like language in general, we start from numbers!

Zero - Ten in Chinese

Here is the basic numbers 1 – 10, in Chinese

一   yī             One (1)

二   èr            Two (2)

三   sān         Three (3)

四   sì             Four (4)

五   wǔ          Five (5)

六   liù           Six (6)

七   qī            Seven (7)

八   bā           Eight (8)

九   jiǔ           Nine (9)

十   shí          Ten (10)

Apply your knowledge on the Chinese phonics here (from now on, you will get to practice that often!). If you need help to confirm the pronunciation, key in the pinyin above and look for the correct character on Pleco and listen to the pronunciation.

Get a hold of 1 - 10 above,  Master them first, before continuing. Moving on I would like to introduce 10 - 100 to you, that comes in exercise. Try your very best not to peek the above. You must be able to recall "nine" as "jiǔ", "six" as "liù", and so on without referring to your note...

Let's start:

十一     shíyī           Eleven (11)

十二     shíèr           Twelve (12)

十三     shísān         Thirteen (13)

十四     shísì            Fourteen (14)

：           :                    :

二十     èrshí            Twenty (20)

Can you see the pattern above?

Exercise 1: I want you to fill the missing numbers between 14 - 20

Answer can be jotted down in the following 3 ways:

1 . You say it and record it down with your phone, so that you can check your answer later on and also this allows you to compare your pronunciation to the correct pronunciation, OR

2. You can write down the pinyin, to practice on your hanyu pinyin (the phonics), OR

3. You can write down the Chinese characters, if you wish to learn to write and read the Chinese characters, remember there is order of strokes that you have to follow, check this on bihua site. If you have forgotten how to use the site please refer to the previous post, OR

4. You can do 1, 2, and 3 all together

Finish the above before continuing... You can stop if you think you have enough for this one session and continue the following later.

Moving on. The last number that we learnt was 二十 (èr shí) Twenty (20)

二十一        èr shí yī        Twenty one  (21)

二十二        èr shí èr        Twenty two (22)

二十三        èr shí sān      Twenty three (23)

     ：                   :                  :

三十            sān shí yī        Thirty (30)

三十一        sān shí èr        Thirty one (31)

：                      :                    :

四十            sì shí               Forty (40)

五十            wǔ shí             Fifty (50)

六十            liù shí              Sixty (60)

 ：                      :                    :

 ：                      :                    :

九十             jiǔ shí              Ninety (90)

 ：                      :                    :

一百             yī bǎi               One hundred (100)

As you can see there are many missing numbers from 23 - 100.

Exercise 2: Please fill in the missing numbers by looking at the pattern from the numbers that are shown. Numbers in Chinese is quite easy no changes in writing or whatsoever like in English (forty not fourty, twelve not twoteen, thirty not threety, and so on).

Answers to be revealed in a separate post!

Please Note: 

In Chinese, the number "2" that is usually written as "二" and read as "èr" will change to 两 (liǎng) whenever it it is used to measure things, like 2kg (weight), 2 o'clock (time), 2 dollars (money), etc.

We say:

2 kg            两公斤       liǎng gōng jīn

2 o'clock     两点           liǎng diǎn

2 dollars     两块            liǎng kuài

Happy Numbering!

Linda Tan

P.S. For your knowledge

Pinyin should be written without space if they are one phrase.
For example: gōng jīn means kilogram. It is ONE word in English and it represented with 2 Chinese characters, they are gōng and jīn, thus, gōngjīn is supposed to be written WITHOUT space. However, for easy reading for beginner, I would like to separate all the pinyin from one another.