Zodiac Notes

| Intro | Systems | Characters | Phonetic Guides | Grammar | Common Idioms |

You're not here to learn Chinese. In fact, I'm not here to teach Chinese. What we're here to do is to get a sense of how Chinese works. You can be knowledgeable about Chinese without speaking a word of it!
If you've been in contact with Japanese kanji before, you've got the basic concept down. Just replace the hirgana, katakana, and furigana with kanji and you get a Chinese Yoda. The phonetic system isn't nearly as complicated (one character usually has one sound, thank you)
However, if you do feel inclined to learn Chinese, there are lots of good Chinese learning sites out there. You may have heard the horror stories about having to learn 50,000 characters before you can read the newspaper. Actually, that's not true. You only need about 1,000 to read common books, and 2,000 to read pretty much anything you can get your hands on. Once you hit the 500 mark, though, the rest comes pretty easily, because the characters do their best to help you diagnose the meaning. So it's really not that bad. Really. It has its own charms.
Let me also state that all the pronounciation I'm talking about here is in Mandarin. The characters I show will be in Traditional form, because Tochi uses traditional form. However, the Phonetics will be in PinYin, because I'm targetting English speakers who will be more familiar with PinYin.
Don't get what I just said? Well, let's start talking!
Systems ... So, would you like Traditional or Simplified? Zhu Yin or Pin Yin? Depends on who you want shooting at you: Nationalists or Communists? ^_~
Portrait of a Character ... The survival of a language based entirely on characters.
Phonetic Guides ... Sound and Fury and dancing letters!
Grammar ... Who needs plurals? Conjugation? bah!
Common Idioms ... ah, the beauty of four-letter words.