Chinese Words and Phrases
Courtesy of Commissar People's Blade

Ni hao, brothers and sisters.

Mandarin Chinese is spoken by nearly 900 million people, and is generally written in Chinese characters, which are ideographic in nature. To be able to read and type Chinese in an English character setting, you must employ one of the accepted romanization systems. Many have been used over the years by Westerners, but it behooves you to use the official PRC romanization system, pinyin. You will also find it easier to pronounce.

Pinyin also uses accent marks to indicate the four tones of Mandarin, which have semantic significance. These we cannot type easily, so I, Brother Collective Fist and Brother Comrade X will have to politely suffer through your hapless mispronounciations of our melodious language. Please understand, though. The word "hao" with the third tone (down then up), means "good." We use it frequently. But with the second tone (down), the word means "number."




Common Phrases

English	Chinese
Hello	Ni hao Ni hao ma (ma is a question word, like adding a question mark)
I, me	Wo
You	Ni
Hen	Very, is very
Hao	Good
Hao a	Okay ("a" makes a word more casual)
Yes	Shi de ("is") Dui ("right")
No	Bu Shi ("is not") Bu Dui ("not right")
Thanks	Xie xie Xie xie ni
I'm OK	Wo hao.
I don't know	Bu zhi dao.
I understand	Wo ming bai. Wo bu ming bai (don't understand)

Slogans

English	Chinese
Serve the people	Wei renmin fuwu
A hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend	Bai hua qi fang, bai jia zheng ming
Dare to think, dare to act	Gan xiang gan gan
To rebel is justified	Zao fan you li
Smash the Gang of Four!	Fencui si ren bang
Seek truth from facts	Shishi qiu shi
Achieve the Four Modernisations	Shixian sige xiandaihua
Achieve the Four Modernisations	Shixian sige xiandaihua

Proverbs

English	Chinese
To negotiate with a tiger for its skin	Yu hu mou pi
If anyone spits in your face, let it drip dry	Tuo mian zi gan
Without entering the tiger's lair, how can one catch the tiger's cub?	Bu ru hu xue, yan de hu zi
Keeping the company of an emperor is like keeping the company of a tiger	Ban jun ru ban hu

Online Reading of Classics

Politics Mao's Little Red Book Quotations from Chairman Mao