Hello, and welcome to Chinese Learn, Chinese lessons. Today, I would like to teach you a very, very simple Chinese sentence, however, also very general and useful. And this sentence I want to teach you today is, “How are you?”
So in Chinese, ni hao ma? I’ll say that again so just follow me. It’s got only these three characters. It’s extremely easy to follow. Ni hao ma? Now, you’ve got an idea how to pronounce this sentence.
So let’s have a look at each individual character. Okay, let’s have a look at the sentence, ni hao ma? It’s very, very simple. So the first character “ni” means you, and the second character “hao” means good and the third character “ma” is a character that represents a question. So if you are asking a question you’ll say, “ni hao ma?” But if you are not asking a question you can say, “ni hao” and that means hello or it means you good in Chinese. So “are you good?” in Chinese means how are you? “Ni hao ma”.
Let’s have a look at each individual character. So, ni as I’ve taught in many other lessons means you. So it’s a left and right structure. Again, there will be a good revision for you if you already know this, but otherwise you can master this character “ni”. So the right beat can be separated for the top component and the bottom component. Each component are constructed by fewer lines. So all you need to do is to put the lines together, perform the component and then you put the components together to form the character and the order of writing each individual line, it’s not counted. So you can write in whatever order you want as long as you get a character that can be recognized, you have mastered this character, “ni”.
As you can hear, it is the third tone because it goes from up to there and then up a beat again.
So let’s have a look at the second character “hao”. So “hao” is a very interesting character because the two components represent different individual characters. The left component represents woman and the right component represents a guy or man in Chinese. So if you put woman and man together it is good. So that’s very fantastic character writing in Chinese. Again, this structure is a left and right structure. Each component has got different lines, so all you need to do is to put the different lines together to form the man and woman and then put the woman and the man together to form this character “hao”.
And there is a specific rule in Chinese that you have to change the tones when you have the two third tone characters put together. So if you have ni and hao put together, which both of them is in third tone then you have to change ni into the second tone which is ni. So it goes from down to up. It is like asking a question in English.
And let’s have a look at the last character “ma”. So “ma” is again a left and right structure and I’ve taught this character in many other lessons before. So the way of you writing this character is from left to right. So the left one is basically a square or what we call a mouse character. A mouse component in Chinese and the right is a horse components or we can write it individually as a horse character. So you put the mouse and horse together and it becomes a ma left to right. And again, you can figure out your own order of writing each individual lines as long as your character is recognized. So “ma” left to right structure.
In this case, we have a special tone here which is a tone of no tone. That means this character can be whispered and you don’t need to put a strong pronunciation on it and that is, “ma”. It’s like the first tone, but you say it with even lighter voice.
So altogether, three character “ni hao ma” and I believe you can master this Chinese sentence in no time.
I believe now, you have mastered every single details of this sentence. The pronunciation the pinging, the tones and the writing and the reading of the sentence “ni hao ma”. So this has been a request on Twitter and I recommend everybody to send me a request n Twitter or comment in YouTube for the words you want to say in Chinese and I can transform them into such kind of lessons for you. It’s short but it’s also quiet powerful and exciting for you to learn a Chinese sentence and probably you’ll find it easy as well.
So I hope you enjoyed my lesson and until next time please feel free to subscribe to my channel and rate this video. And I’m working hard and I’m hoping to give first to my course in three months time to teach you some basic Chinese skills. So this course will be focused on how do we learn Chinese easy and exciting for ourselves. So my task here is to bring down the difficulty for learning Chinese especially for reading and writing of the Chinese sentence and also how to pronounce a 100% correct form, so you will sound like an urban or local Chinese. So this is fantastic and until next time!
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