The first thing that hits you is the mass of squiggles and strokes that make up written Chinese. When starting with a European language you at least see familiar characters and quite often a number of words immediately seem and are familiar because they have common origins. It's a whole new ball game when it comes to Chinese, there are virtually no common words or language constructs, you can't just start by looking for similarities as there aren't any obvious ones. Before giving up in horror, there are a number of things that are actually simpler in Chinese : spelling is phonetic; there are no complex verb declensions (as in German, Latin); there are no complex plurals (as in English) and no gender to nouns (as in French).
The basic sounds of Chinese are different to English so in most cases using English consonants and vowels are at best a crude approximation to the Chinese sounds. Some sounds are new, others are modified. For example the letter 'x' is used to indicate a difficult 'hs' type of sound and 'r' loses its 'roll' and is more neutral. So next time you hear a Chinese struggling with English sounds, imagine how odd our attempts at Chinese must sound to him.
The written Chinese script is not phonetic, it is basically symbolic, and so to make it easier for non-Chinese speakers and for anyone learning Chinese it is convenient to have a system of spelling the characters as they are pronounced using the standard Western alphabet. Over the years different ways have been devised to achieve this, of these only the Chinese 'pinyin' system is now widely used. The 'pinyin' system uses the phonetic spelling for 'mandarin' or 'putonghua' or Northern Chinese.
Mandarin Chinese has four pitched tones and a "toneless" tone. The reason for having these tones is probably that the Chinese language has very few possible syllables -- approximately 400 -- while English has about 12,000. For this reason, there may be more homophonic words , words with the same sound expressing different meanings, in Chinese than in most other languages. Apparently tones help the relatively small number of syllables to multiply and thereby alleviate but not completely solve the problem.
Tone Description
1st High and level.
2nd Starts medium in tone, then rises to the top.
3rd Starts low, dips to the bottom, then rises toward the top.
4th Starts at the top, then falls sharp and strong to the bottom.
