Daily Conversation

Today, we are going to learn how to make a self introduction. Before that, we learn a short greeting. Usually before we introduce our self, we say “hello”.

Hello! or Hi!

In Chinese, 你好！ (nǐ hǎo)

Next, we learn how to make a self introduction.

PinYin

What’s Pinyin?

Pinyin is “spelling sound” or “phonetics” of Chinese.

It expresses the sounds in the Chinese language using the alphabet. Pinyin is also the most common way to input Chinese characters into a computer. Although Pinyin and English both use the alphabet, many letters are not expressed with the same sounds that English uses.

Today, we learn “a” as in “father”.

Tones

Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language. It has four pitched tones and a “toneless” tone. Different tone expresses different meaning.

Four tones of “a” are pronounced like this.

Vocabulary

Today, we are going to learn three words.

Name, 名字 (míng zi)

I, 我 (wǒ)

You, 你 (nǐ)

Review

Let’s review what we learned today. We learned Self Introduction.

Dialog Practice

Pretend we meet each other at first time. I am going to introduce myself to you, and then you are going to introduce yourself to me. First, we are going to use English, then use Chinese.

In Chinese,