Virtual Mandarin: 你好吗？ Nǐ hǎo ma?

This is really the first day of my independent learning course in Mandarin. I've had a look around the web and decided to start off with something where I'd have the chance to hear the pronunciation of the words along with learning the written language, both in Chinese and Roman characters. I opted for ChinesePod and I've been listening to Lesson 1.

I'd already picked up somewhere that nǐ hǎo meant "hello". It seems to be a fairly normal greeting, and you can use it in lots of situations. I've found the tones quite tricky, but there'll be more about that in future posts.

Perhaps an extension of nǐ hǎo is the phrase nǐ hǎo ma? This means "how are you". Both the nǐ and hǎo have the 3rd tone which means your intonation goes down then up. I'll post a podcast at some point of my trying out the tones - I look forward to your comments!

A possible answer to nǐ hǎo ma? is the phrase hěn hǎo. Here both words again use tone 3. Hěn hǎo apparently means "very well". If I've understood the podcast correctly you can use it in a variety of situations. Nǐ seems to mean "you", so you can say nǐ hěn hǎo, and it would mean "you're very well". I'm not 100% sure yet if you could say this with different intonation to make it into a question. Or maybe you'd say nǐ hěn hǎo ma, to mean "are you very well", because I think that ma is a question particle.

Finally, to make the answer to nǐ hǎo ma? more polite, you can add the word for thank you: xiè xie. The "x" sound is quite difficult to produce, but I'm sure with practice it will become easier.

So, my first Mandarin conversation:

A: 你好吗？
B: 很好。你好吗？
A: 很好谢谢

A: nǐ hǎo ma?
B: hěn hǎo. Nǐ hǎo ma?
A: hěn hǎo, xiè xie.

It's late so I'm going to finish there. If you want you can download iPod-ready slides of the characters and phrases I've made to help me in this lesson: Download 060426_Archive.zip (216k)

I'll need to try to find out how you say "see you soon"!