As you probably have discovered, reading out loud a sentence such as「你好嗎」gets a little troublesome, regardless of the meaning. Compare this to a sentence such as “Ik ga morgen een nieuwe auto kopen”., and at least you can try to get somewhere by using what you know about English.
For if you are interested: “Ik ga morgen een nieuwe auto kopen.” is Dutch, and means: “Tomorrow I am going to buy a new car.”
With「你好嗎」on the other hand, apart from having to completely guess the meaning, you also have problems pronouncing it. In order to fix that problem there is something called Hànyǔ Pīnyīn or 「漢語拼音」, which is a transcription system devised in the PRC and essentially used all over the world, with one exception: Taiwan. There they use something called Zhùyīn fúhào or 「注音符號」. I’ll refrain from going into a history lesson concerning the two different transcription systems, nor will I be going on big arguments stating which one is supposed to be better than the other.
Instead we will be doing what everyone essentially does and learn Hànyǔ Pīnyīn before everything else. In a later stage when we are supposed to have completely mastered Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, the other transcription system will be introduced.
Finally 「你好嗎」can be transcribed as ‘nǐ hǎo ma‘ and means ‘How are you?’
Finally we will add a bit of vocabulary from now on in every little unit. Feel free to memorize it. To be honest, I’m rather curious myself how this is going to work out. We will see.
Vocabulary
- 你好嗎 nǐ hǎo ma How are you?
- 你好 nǐ hǎo Hello!
- 嗎 ma Particle for Questions. Add 嗎 add the end of any question to turn the sentence into a question.
- 漢語拼音 Hànyǔ Pīnyīn Hanyu Pinyin (Pinyin for short)
- 漢語 Hànyǔ Chinese (language)
- 拼音 Pīnyīn Transcription System
- 注音符號 Zhùyīn Fúhào Zhuyin Fuhao (Zhuyin for short)
- 注音 Zhùyīn phonetic notation
- 符號 Fúhào Symbol, mark, sign
(I still have to do some work on the formatting, so this post will see some slight changes in the future. However, I’ll post it for now. Enjoy~)