1-Minute Chinese, Book 2

By Rowan Kohll

Inside this book, you will find…

• Cartoons that make mysterious Chinese characters easy.
• Brilliant mnemonics that will help you to remember how to read, speak and understand Chinese.
• Fact files full of useful tips on the characters and words learned.
• A phrasebook that gives you the Chinese you'll need to talk about anything, along with appendices on colours and numbers, full of information on how to remember and use them, as well as fascinating facts and useful tips.
• An introduction to Anglicisms, including a comprehensive list of words that you can already say in Chinese, even if you don't yet know it!
• A collection of Chinese characters that you can read just by looking at them.

And much more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rowan Kohll
• Release date: Aug 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310406300

Rowan Kohll

Living and working in China since 2003, Rowan Kohll has always been fascinated by the Chinese language and way of life. Now, with his new system of mnemonics, he is working to make Chinese as easy and fun to learn as possible. Rowan Kohll is a teacher working at an international school in Suzhou.

Book preview

Welcome to the second volume of 1-Minute Chinese!

These books have been a long time in the making. It was over a decade ago that I came to China. I found living here to be a deeply rewarding and fulfilling experience and have come to love the Chinese language. But it was over nine years before I came across the secret which would lead to me writing a book called 1-Minute Chinese, in which I outlined methods for learning, quickly and easily, a selection of the most useful Chinese characters.

Book 1 was made deliberately short so that it could serve as an introduction to Chinese. You can read it at a sitting, and get up having learned more Chinese than some people learn in years of trying! If you haven’t yet read it, I highly recommend it. And now, in Book 2, the journey continues!

Before I came across the methods explained in this book, learning Chinese was very difficult for me. I had help from family and friends in China, I used videos and tapes, and I found many useful books and online resources. But although I made progress in speaking Chinese there was one thing that, for years, I never even tried to do: learn Chinese characters. They were, I felt, just too difficult. It didn’t seem worth the bother, when you had to learn them line by painful line and with hour after boring hour of memorising work.

And I should add that my experience of learning Chinese is quite typical. From the dozens of people I’ve talked to over the years – usually professionals working in China, educators, highly motivated to learn Chinese – I have found that they would love to learn the language but have found it painfully difficult. Usually they have found it so difficult that even the most conscientious person simply gives up after learning a little. The rare exceptions are people like myself, who have the advantage of a partner who speaks Chinese.

And so things went on like this for a number of years. My Chinese ability hit a peak, and then plateaued. Characters remained a mystery, and looked like they would for the rest of my life. And then, everything changed when I learned about a wonderful new secret, the secret that this book was written to tell you about.

I learned about mnemonics.

What are mnemonics?

Mnemonics are memory devices. There are lots of different types, and you probably know some already. When your music teacher taught you that Every Good Boy Deserves Football. When we say In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. When children learn how to spell difficulty by chanting Mrs. D, Mrs. I, Mrs. FFI, Mrs. C, Mrs. U, Mrs. LTY, – all of these are mnemonics, designed to make difficult facts easy to remember. Which, of course, is just what people like us – people who say I want to learn Chinese – need!

This book will show you how using mnemonics can make learning Chinese easy. The traditional method – read, write, memorise and repeat, for hour upon boring hour – is painfully slow. Even modern methods, with flashcards, online resources, apps, videos and recordings take a long time to produce results. But with mnemonics, the whole process can take place in a flash, learning as fast as you can read. That’s why this series of books is called 1-Minute Chinese.

Since mnemonics work best when they are linked with strong emotions – often humour – it sometimes happens that the associations created depend on the cultural background. I have tried my best to make mnemonics which most people will find easy. However, if you think of a better way to remember any of the words or characters in this book – a personal joke, or a special idea of your own which is easier for you to remember – then by all means use that instead.

Either as a continuation of Book 1, or as a fresh start in its own right, this book will introduce you to the most useful Chinese words. The question is: if you could only learn a select vocabulary, which words would you choose? The thirty-five characters taught in this book have been chosen as an answer to this question. As you learn them you will find yourself making massive steps forward. They will open doors to you, help you along your way as fast as possible and enable you to say: Yes, I can speak Chinese.

So, turn the page and let’s get started!

Chapter 1:

The First Set of Characters

The 1st Character

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shuō

This sounds like shwau

English meaning: say/speak

The word shuō rhymes with four and saw, but also sounds quite like show, and the character looks like someone watching TV. So to remember it, imagine that he’s watching an educational programme that SHOWs how to SPEAK a language.

Tone: first, high and level. Because we are thinking of an educational program, imagine the TV speaking in a high, level voice.

Fact File for shuō

This word means both say and speak. You can use it as What did you say? (Nǐshuōshénme?) and I speak Chinese (Wǒshuō Zhōng wén).

As you get better and better at speaking Chinese it may well be that you will hear this word in the compliment nǐ de Zhōng wénshuōde hěnhǎo (you speak Chinese well). If this happens, the polite response is to say that youdon’tspeak it well: Nali, nali, Wǒde Zhōng wén bùshuōhǎo– Not at all, not at all, I don’t speak Chinese well – or, literally, my Chinese doesn’t speak well."

Other words and phrases:

shuō huà – to talk

shuō xiǎo – to chat (little talk)

xiǎo shuō – a novel, or little story

shuō míng – to explain (literally, to say the name

xuéshuō – theory (learn-say).

The 2nd Character

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nǐ

This sounds like nee

English meaning: you

As the word sounds like the English word knee and as the radical