Lesson 5: Family Members & Addressing People (A & C)

This is intended for both adults and children. There are many ways to address a family member in English (Dad, Father, etc) and Bahasa Indonesia (Papa, Ayah) , so does Chinese.

Knowing what to address someone properly is important. From here, you will know how the relation between one person to another. This is the unique thing about Chinese, which also makes it a bit complicated. However, personally I would like to keep this tradition in my own family.

Here I will only show you the most common one :)
Father                             爸爸            bà ba
Mother                            妈妈            mā ma
Older Sister                    姐姐            jiě jie 
Younger Sister               妹妹            mèi mei 
Older Brother                 哥哥            gē ge
Younger Brother            弟弟            dì di 
Paternal Grandpa           爷爷             yé ye 
Paternal Granma            奶奶             nǎi nai
Maternal Grandpa          公公             gong gong 
Maternal Grandma         婆婆             pó po 
Uncle (from Dad's side, older than your dad)                 伯伯             bó bo 
Uncle (from Dad's side, younger than your dad)            叔叔            Shū shu
Uncle (from Mom's side)                                                舅舅             jiù jiu
Aunt (from Dad's side）                                                 姑姑             gū gu
Aunt (from Mom's side, older than your mom)              姨妈              yí mā
Aunt (from Mom's side, younger thatn your mom)        阿姨              ā yí
Niece                                侄女                    zhí nǔ 
Nephew                            侄儿 / 外甥        zhí ér / wài shēng

There are still more actually, like your uncle's wife is not just "aunt", but there is a proper way to address her, depending on whose wife she is. However, enough for now. It will be to overwhelming if I were to introduce all at once.

The purpose of knowing the above is that so that you can teach your children a proper way of addressing people. Together with this, introduce to her the greeting that you have already learnt before. So the next time they see their grandpa, they can say: “公公，早上好”  

gōng gong, zǎo shàng hǎo or “爷爷， 早上好” yé ye, zǎo shàng hǎo (Good Morning, Grandpa)。

Or teach them how to say thank you. When your husband's older brother buys a present for your childen, teach them to say “伯伯，谢谢” bó bo, xiè xie (Thanks, Uncle)

Another tips to address friends. If it is a female friend, we like to address them as “阿姨”   ā yí,  we assume she is a sister to us (wife). However, if it a male friend, we teach our kids to address him as “叔叔” shū shu , we assume he is a brother to our husband, if your male friend is older we use “伯伯”, bó bo.

Teaching kids how to address people properly is still something conventional yet part of teaching them good manner, at least for the Eastern. In our family, it is something that is important. When our parents are talking to their friend, even if we do not know them, we will have to address that uncle/aunt. We do not just stand there quietly or walk away without greeting them. Raised in that kind of family, I expect a lot from the kids nowadays too.

What if we meet someone about our age or not in a "Personal" context, working environment, for example. It might not be too appropriate to call your boss (who you assume from their appearance is older than you) as 伯伯. For this purpose, we have the following:

Mr.     先生     xiān sheng     

                   e.g. Mr. Lee       李先生        lí xiān sheng

Mrs./ Madam  (Married woman)        女士       nǚ shì     

                  e.g. Madam Kwan     关女士         guān nǚ shì 

(Note: If we know exactly that woman is married to Mr. Li and she takes after his surname, we can then use 夫人 (fū ren).

Addressing them as: 李先生 & 李夫人       lí xiān sheng & lí fū ren        Mr & Mrs. Li)

Ms.     小姐      xiǎo jiě 

                   e.g. Ms. Chen          陈小姐     chén xiǎo jiě

Try to apply this as much as possible and you will get use to it before you know it. :)

Your kids can call me,

Linda 阿姨   (Aunt Linda)

Tips!

I normally do not memorize the meaning, I will use it in one situation where I know for sure it is correct and always refer back to the use of each word in that situation to get the meaning.

For example: I have many uncles whom I address as 舅舅 jiù jiu. Therefore, when I need the meaning of the word "舅舅", I will always refer back to that person. And start thinking, "who does the person relate to?" Then, I know that he is my mother's brother. Thus I got my answer 舅舅  jiù jiu refers to uncle from mother's side, can be older or younger.

Hanyu Pinyin - Part 4 - More Phonics

 Here are the phonics that you have been introduced before:
Single vowels: a, o, e, i, u, ü and
Consonants: b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r, z, c, s, y, w

Other than the above, there a few more that you have to know and understand. As you can already see in the pinyin chart on Yabla's site, there are many of the remaining that I haven't covered. In fact, I am not going to cover all. I will show you the other basic pinyin that is formed by combining the 2 vowels, that is known as 双韵母 (shuāngyǜnmǔ) and sounds that come out from your nostril, known as 鼻韵母 (bíyǜnmǔ )

Let's first look at 双韵母 (Shuāngyǜnmǔ). It literally means double vowels. Here they are:

ai    ei    ui   

ao   ou

iu    ie    üe    er

Tips on pronouncing the above:

1. Pronounce the first alphabet (remember it is more to Bahasa Indonesia ABC than English ABC) and without stopping (no gap), followed by the pronunciation of the second alphabet.

2. Repeat the sound in a faster pace.

3. Again, it sounds almost the same like Bahasa Indonesia pronunciation. You do not have to memorize them all. Just try to pronounce it with the trick above (no. 1 & 2) and you should be able to get the correct pronunciation. Again, NO memorizing)

Let's see the video below (I am sorry, that you can only view this on your desktop).

Here is the implementation in spelling a word:

Remember! The spelling of the 2 vowels must be pronounce continuously without stopping. Treat "ao", "ei" as One phonic, not 2 separate phonics. Here is the difference if you spell it one by one with a gap in between, and this is not the right way to do it!

Here is how you use it in spelling a word!

More Example:

Try spelling the following on your own:

1. k - āo
2. x - i - ǎo (try spelling word with 3 syllables)
3. t - uō
4. l - uò
5. j - üé
6. m - ài
7. q - iē
8. l - óu

The last one from phonics is to know that there are certain phonics which sounds are produced from our nostril, known as 鼻韵母 (bíyǜnmǔ ). Here they are:

an  en  in  un   ün 

ang, eng, ing, ong

Let's see how to use it to spell a word:

With this, the basic things that you should know about Chinese Phonics are all covered. Here are a few important rules that you should know:

1. I mentioned that vowel is the one that should carry the symbol of intonation on top of them. It will be easy if there is only one vowel in a word. If there are more than one, such as in the word "shuoI", then you have to know where to appropriately place the small symbol for intonation.

In the first part of Hanyu Pinyin post, I asked you to memorize the vowel in the given order: a, o, e i, u, ü. It is for a reason. That order helps to decide who is going to wear the "crown".

Here is the rule:

a. If you see an "a" in the word, then "a" should definitely wear the crown (E.g. hǎo)

b. If you don't see an "a" then either "o" or "e" should wear it. "o" and "e" has never come together in a word (E.g. xiè, shōu)

c. However, if "u" and "i" come together, whichever that place a the back, then it should wear the crown. (E.g. shuǐ, xiū)

2. When 2 words with 3rd tone comes one after another, the first word should be pronounced as 2nd tone (while the writing have to be kept as 3rd tone "v")

Listen to the following:

3. When you see a word that comes without an intonation symbol, it is known as 轻声 (qīngshēng), literally means soft tone. It has to be pronounced softly and keep it short! See the following:

There are more rules that we should (not MUST) know, but I am not going to explain all of them here. It will be ongoing process. I will explain them when we see them during our learning. 

Now, you can practice reading the following sentences yourself:

1. wǒ shì Linda                         I am Linda

2. wǒ xué hàn yǔ                       I am learning Chinese

3. tā shì shuí?                            Who is he/she?

4. nǐ hǎo                                     Hello

5. wǒ de mā ma                          My mother

6. nà shì shén me?                     What is that?

7. Ní hǎo ma?                             How are you? / Are you good?

8. Wǒ xǐhuān chī pángxiè          I like to eat Crab

For the past 2 months you have been introduced to the tools and the very basic of Mandarin that will allow you to explore more yourselves. I want you to revisit every post about Pleco and Bihua.com to refresh your memory and also starting practicing the hanyu pinyin (Chinese phonics) from the single phonics to the one that we learnt above. 

To perfect your Chinese phonics, you can do the following:

Pick the things (noun) / activities (verbs) that you would like to know and translate them in Pleco. DO NOT play the speaker for now, look at the pinyin and start spelling and pronouncing them. Then for comparison, you can check the recorded audio to see if you have pronounced it right. Do not look at the sample phrases or sentences for now. If you get 80% of this right, then you might want to pick up a Mandarin book that comes with hanyu pinyin. And start reading short article. Best is to use the primary school kids' books (P1 or P2 books). Not only reading, you can start translating the short article to English and see if the story makes sense to you. :)

Happy Trying,

Linda Tan 

P.S. Here is the answer to the previous post exercise:

xī         mǎ       tā         chē      hé

Hanyu Pinyin - Part 3 - The 4 Tones

Moving forward, once you know how to spell the combination of phonics, then you have to get to know and master the 4 tones known in Mandarin.

Tone is known as 声调 ( shēngdiào ) in Chinese. There are 4 tones in Chinese and they are symbolized by the 4 small lines on top of one of the vowels.

To avoid confusion between the second and fourth sound (slash and backslash look alike), you can try to link the four lines to form letter "M" with the tail in front. If you can't form an M with the 4 lines, you have definitely written the second and fourth lines wrongly.

Each line represents how a word sounds.

The first line is flat, thus the sound produced by word with the first tone is flat, just like when a dentist ask you to open your mouth and say "ahhhh".

The second line has to be written from the left bottom to the right top (going up), because the sounds that are produced by words with second tone is going up.

The third line looks like letter 'v'. I always relate this to the sound of burping (short one!).

The fourth line has to be written from the left top to the right bottom (going down), because the sound it produces would be like the "aw!" sound that you make when a friend hit you, high pitch to low pitch.

Please listen to the following:

Listen to the second sound, I purposely drag it longer so that it is clear how the sounds go from lower to higher pitch. However, when we speak we normally do not drag the sound.

Let see how we use it in the spelling:

More sample spelling...

You should first work on perfecting the 4 tones for the 6 individual vowels.

āáǎà

ōóǒò

ēéěè

īíǐì

ūúǔù

ǖǘǚǜ

Then, you can start spelling a word that consists of 1 consonant + 1 vowel. You can try the following combination of phonics that form a word:

nā   ná   nǎ  nà

bō   bó   bǒ  bò

dē   dé   dě  dè

qī   qí   qǐ  qi

kū   kú   kǔ  kù

xǖ   xǘ   xǚ  xǜ

Match your answer with the spelling on this page

Tips and Trick!

Pronouncing the 3rd tone can be a bit tricky. Personally I think changing it a little works just fine. You can try to imitate the sound that you make when you burp (short one!) Listen to the (burping) sound in the video below and how we use it to pronounce actual words.

We are going to finish up pinyin, in my next post. As mentioned, pinyin will help you to read the translated English word in Pleco or any other dictionaries and maybe read books that come with pinyin (most beginner books do have pinyin). Also, once you know how to read/pronounce certain words or when you hear someone say something and able to spell the pinyin out, it will enable you to look up the meaning of the words in Pleco much faster. All in all, pinyin is the basic tool that will allow you to explore more about the language yourself.

Try the following, write down the pinyin and the tone of the word that you hear. Answer will be revealed in the next post.

Feel free to comment or ask questions!

Happy Spelling,

Linda Tan

P.S. I have not found a way to make the video work on hand gadget (on my iPhone), so the videos above can only be viewed on a desktop or laptop.
For first timer, please go back to the very first post to start learning Mandarin. Here it is. It is to get to know what you need along the way.