Easy grammar, awkward counting, and a script you cannot sound out

Once the tones are in your ear, Mandarin grammar is a relief. Verbs never change: 我去 (waw CHÜ) is I go, I went and I will go, and a time word such as 昨天 (zuótiān, dzwoh-TYEN, "yesterday") or 明天 (míngtiān, ming-TYEN, "tomorrow") does the work an English tense would. There are no plural endings, no genders and no agreement, and the basic order — subject, verb, object — is the one you already use.

Everything you count needs a measure word. You cannot say one beer; you say one bottle of beer, 一瓶啤酒 (ee-ping PEE-jyoh), or one cup of tea, 一杯茶 (ee-bay CHAH). A bowl of noodles is 一碗面 (ee-wahn MYEN), a ticket takes 张 (JAHNG) for flat things, and people at a restaurant take the polite 位 (WAY), which is why the kit's table for two is 两位 (lyahng-WAY). When you do not know the right one, 个 (gè, GUH) is the universal fallback and is always understood.

Tones shift when certain words meet. 不 (bù, BOO, "not") turns rising before a falling tone, so 不要 (boo-YOW) is said búyào (boo-YOW) and 不客气 (boo-kuh-CHEE) is búkèqi (boo-kuh-CHEE). 一 (yī, EE, "one") moves too, to yí (EE) before a falling tone and yì (EE) before the others, which is why 一个 (ee-GUH) comes out as yí gè (ee-GUH). When reading out a phone, room or bus number, one becomes yāo (YOW), so that it cannot be misheard as seven, qī (CHEE).

Prices are printed in one word and spoken in another. The sign says 元 (yuán, YWEN), but people say 块 (kuài, KWHY), and a tenth of a yuan is 毛 (máo, MOW), so 三块五 (sahn-kwhy-WOO) is 3.50 yuan, the five standing on its own. Numbers also have a one-handed sign language: six is thumb and little finger spread, eight is thumb and forefinger in an L. A vendor flashing an L at you is saying eight, not loser.

Characters cannot be sounded out, but a few dozen pay back fast. The mainland uses simplified characters, and the ones worth learning by shape are on doors and in stations: 入口 (roo-KOH) entrance, 出口 (choo-KOH) exit, 男 (NAHN) men, 女 (NYOO) women, 推 (TWAY) push, 拉 (LAH) pull. Add the four directions 东西南北 (dohng-shee-nahn-BAY) and big-city street signs start to make sense — Shanghai's 南京东路 (nahn-jing dohng-LOO) is simply Nanjing Road, East.

Pitch belongs to the word, not to the mood

English uses pitch to carry feeling. Your voice rises when you ask a question, falls when you are sure, and climbs when you are surprised, and you do all of it without thinking. Mandarin has already spent pitch on the words themselves, one fixed contour per syllable, so every instinct you have for sounding friendly or puzzled pulls the tones out of shape. The commonest casualty is the question. You do not need to lift your voice at the end, because Mandarin marks a question with a word instead: the small, toneless 吗 (ma, MAH) on the end of 你会说英语吗？ (nee hway shwoh YING-yoo mah) does the asking for you. Let the sentence stay level and the particle carries it.

The good news is that the syllables themselves are tidy. Almost all of them are a consonant and a vowel, and the only consonants that can end one are -n and -ng, so there are none of the clusters that make English hard to learn. Practise tones in pairs, never one at a time, because nobody speaks a syllable alone: 你好 (nee-HOW), 谢谢 (SHYEH-sheh), 买单 (MY-dahn), 再见 (dzai-JYEN) each teach you how two contours meet. Exaggerate them at first; native speakers flatten their tones in fast talk, but a learner who flattens them too is simply not understood. And notice that the third tone, the dip, mostly stays low in real speech and only curls back up at the end of a phrase.

Six things that catch visitors out

Your passport is your ticket. Train travel runs on real names: tickets bought on the official 12306 app or at a station are tied to your passport number, and you show the passport itself at the gate. Big sights work the same way. The Palace Museum in Beijing, the Forbidden City, sells timed entry online in advance against a passport number, caps daily visitors and, like many museums, closes on Mondays. Every metro station in Beijing and Shanghai also puts your bag through an X-ray, so leave a few extra minutes.

Travel avoids the national holidays. The week from 1 October, 国庆 (Guóqìng, gwoh-CHING), and the Spring Festival around the lunar new year are when the whole country travels at once. Trains sell out, the Great Wall at Badaling is wall-to-wall people and hotel prices jump. If your dates are flexible, move them; if not, book everything early and go to the big sights at opening time.

Water arrives hot. Restaurants pour hot water or weak tea, not iced water, and stations and high-speed trains have hot-water dispensers that travellers use for tea and instant noodles; on a long train ride, the whole carriage smells of cup noodles at mealtimes, and joining in is the local way to travel. Tap water is not for drinking unboiled; buy bottled. If you want something cold, ask for 冰的 (bīng de, BING-duh), the iced one.

Carry tissues. Many public toilets, including some in stations and parks, supply no paper, and a good share are squat toilets. In older buildings with narrow plumbing the paper goes in the bin beside you, not down the pan. A small pack of tissues from any convenience store solves most of it, and a bottle of hand sanitiser covers the times there is no soap.

Check the unit before you order. Fish, seafood and some meats are priced per 斤 (jīn, JEEN), half a kilo, and the fish you point at in the tank is weighed whole, so a cheap-looking figure can multiply. Northern dumpling shops sell by the 两 (liǎng, LYAHNG), fifty grams. Leftovers are not an embarrassment: ask to 打包 (dǎbāo, dah-BOW), wrap it up, and the staff will bring a box.

Questions get personal quickly. A stranger on a long train ride may ask your age, whether you are married, how much you earn and what your flat cost, all within the first hour. It is curiosity, not intrusion, and a vague, cheerful answer is fine. Outside the big cities, people may also ask to take a photo with you; a smile and a yes or a no both go down well.

The language everyone has in common

What this kit teaches is 普通话 (Pǔtōnghuà, poo-tohng-HWAH), common speech: the national standard, built on the pronunciation of Beijing, taught in every school and used on television, on trains and in every government office. For a great many Chinese people it is not the language of home. Families in Shanghai speak Shanghainese, in Fujian Minnan, in Guangdong Cantonese, and in Chengdu a Sichuanese that is Mandarin with its own tones and vocabulary. They switch to Putonghua for strangers, for work and for each other across provinces, so when you speak it you are using exactly the language a Chinese traveller from another province would use.

English goes less far than the glass towers suggest. Front desks at international hotels in Beijing and Shanghai manage well, metro and high-speed rail signs are bilingual, and many young people in the big cities read English better than they speak it. A taxi driver, a noodle shop, a ticket window in a provincial station or a guesthouse in Yunnan will be Mandarin or nothing, and people routinely bridge the gap by speaking into a translation app and holding the screen up to you.

Plan for the phone, because its tools are different here. Google's services, Maps and Translate among them, are blocked on the mainland, so download an offline translation pack before you fly and expect locals to navigate with Amap, 高德地图 (gow-duh dee-TOO), or Baidu Maps. Then open in Mandarin anyway. Two words of it will earn 你的中文很好 (nee-duh johng-WEN hun-HOW), your Chinese is very good, which is generous and a little premature, and the exchange that follows is warmer for it.

What to call people, and how to thank them

Everyday Mandarin is direct, and that is not rudeness. At a counter people say 我要这个 (waw yow JUH-guh), I want this, or 来一碗 (lye ee-WAHN), bring a bowl, with no please at all, and nobody hears it as curt. Among friends and family, a stream of 谢谢 (SHYEH-sheh) can even sound distant, as if you were keeping score. Save your politeness for strangers and for anyone doing you a favour, and do not be wounded by a brisk answer in a busy shop.

Titles do the work that please does in English. Call a waiter with 服务员 (fúwùyuán, foo-woo-YWEN), or among younger staff simply 你好 (nee-HOW). A taxi driver, a cook or anyone who works with their hands is 师傅 (shīfu, SHIR-foo, "master"), a respectful word that costs nothing. A middle-aged woman is 阿姨 (āyí, ah-YEE, "auntie"), a man of the same age 叔叔 (shūshu, SHOO-shoo, "uncle"). Avoid 小姐 (xiǎojiě, shyow-JYEH, "miss") for waitresses: on much of the mainland it has picked up an unfortunate second meaning.

Compliments are batted away, and offers are refused before they are accepted. Praise your host's cooking and you will hear 哪里哪里 (nǎli nǎli, NAH-lee NAH-lee, "literally where, where?") or, from younger people, 没有没有 (MAY-yo MAY-yo). Offer a gift and it may be declined once or twice before it is taken; offer to pay and you will be overruled. If you are the guest, protest once, then let your host win. When the no is real, it rarely sounds like one: 不太方便 (bú tài fāngbiàn, boo-tie fahng-BYEN, "not very convenient"), 再说吧 (zài shuō ba, dzai SHWOH-bah, "let's talk later") and 我们研究研究 (waw-mun YEN-jyoh yen-jyoh, "we'll look into it") all usually close the subject.

The best thank-yous are not 谢谢 (SHYEH-sheh). To someone who has worked for you — the driver who found the hotel, the guide, the cook — say 辛苦了 (xīnkǔ le, sheen-KOO-luh), you've worked hard; it acknowledges the effort, not just the result. Before asking a favour, 麻烦你 (máfan nǐ, MAH-fahn nee), sorry to trouble you, softens the ask. And when someone thanks you, 不用谢 (búyòng xiè, boo-yohng SHYEH), no need for thanks, is as natural as the kit's 不客气 (boo-kuh-CHEE).

From the Beijing burr to the Sichuan drawl

Beijing speaks the standard with a curl. Its speakers add an r to the ends of words — 一点儿 (yìdiǎnr, ee-DYAR, "a little"), 这儿 (zhèr, JUR, "here"), 哪儿 (nǎr, NAR, "where") — so that the 哪里 (NAH-lee) you learned arrives as a single swallowed syllable. Southerners find it showy; Beijingers find southern Mandarin soft. Either way, across the north, from the hutongs to Harbin, what you hear stays close to what you learned, and the plates are northern too: wheat rather than rice, dumplings and noodles, the duck and 炸酱面 (jah-jyahng-MYEN) the kit's food cards list.

Shanghai and the Yangtze delta talk among themselves in Shanghainese, a Wu language that a northern Mandarin speaker cannot follow, and use Putonghua with you. Their Mandarin, like that of much of the south, tends to drop the curled tongue, so shì (SHIR) comes out as sì (SUH) and zhè (JUH) as zè (DZUH). If a word you know sounds slightly off in Shanghai or Hangzhou, uncurl it in your head and it usually resolves.

In Sichuan and Chongqing the everyday speech is itself a kind of Mandarin, southwestern in its tones but close enough that you will follow fragments. Two words to listen for in a Chengdu teahouse: 要得 (yào de, YOW-duh), fine, it works, and 巴适 (bāshì, bah-SHIR), comfortable, just right, the word for a slow afternoon over a lidded bowl of tea. In Xi'an, the old capital at the end of the Silk Road, the Muslim Quarter around the Great Mosque sells 肉夹馍 (ròujiāmó, roh-jyah-MWOH), meat in a flatbread, and 羊肉泡馍 (yahng-roh pow-MWOH), mutton soup over bread you tear into the bowl yourself.

Further south and west, Mandarin becomes the shared second language. Yunnan has more officially recognised ethnic groups than any other province, many with languages of their own, and in Guangzhou you will hear Cantonese all around you even though Mandarin works everywhere. Hong Kong and Macau are separate Special Administrative Regions, with their own currencies, their own immigration checks even from the mainland, and Cantonese and English as their everyday languages.

China, in sixty small pieces

Everything the card at the top of Start draws from — one a day, and here is the whole file. Read it on the plane.

• Tofu was invented in China more than two thousand years ago, made by curdling fresh soy milk and pressing the curds into blocks.
• The Yangtze is the longest river in Asia, rising on the Tibetan Plateau and running more than six thousand kilometers before reaching the East China Sea near Shanghai.
• Poyang Lake, China's largest freshwater lake, swells to several times its dry-season size each summer and shrinks by winter, when it draws most of the world's population of Siberian cranes.
• The Tibetan Plateau, often called the roof of the world, sits so high on average that it holds more glacial ice than anywhere outside the Arctic and Antarctic.
• Chinese has no alphabet; most characters instead combine a piece that hints at meaning with a piece that hints at pronunciation, a system built up over thousands of years.
• Around Guilin, centuries of rain have dissolved limestone into thousands of steep, forested karst peaks that rise straight out of the flat land along the Li River.
• Dim sum began as a Cantonese teahouse tradition for travelers to rest and snack along old trade routes; the term, diǎnxīn (點心, DYEN-sheen), literally means to touch the heart.
• In Gansu province, the sandstone hills of Zhangye Danxia rise in banded stripes of red, orange, and yellow, mineral-rich layers laid down over millions of years and laid bare by erosion.
• Thousands of life-sized terracotta soldiers, each with distinct facial features, were buried near Xi'an to guard the tomb of China's first emperor.
• Hot pot turns dinner into a shared simmering pot at the table, with diners cooking their own thinly sliced meat and vegetables in broth that ranges from mild to fiery málà (麻辣, mah-LAH), a numbing chili-and-Sichuan-pepper blend.
• Sichuan peppercorn, huājiāo (花椒, hwah-JYOW), is not a true pepper but the dried husk of a prickly ash berry, and it leaves a buzzing, tingling numbness on the tongue rather than heat.
• Ketchup's name is thought to descend from a fermented fish sauce called kê-tsiap in the Hokkien dialect of southern China, carried west by traders and reshaped along the way.
• Jiuzhaigou valley holds a chain of lakes so mineral-rich that each one settles into its own shade of turquoise, jade, or sapphire.
• Kite flying has been a pastime in China for over two thousand years, and the city of Weifang still hosts one of the world's best-known kite festivals every spring.
• Paper money first appeared in Song-dynasty China, where merchants in Sichuan issued jiāozi (交子, JYOW-dzuh) notes to replace strings of coins that had grown too heavy and cumbersome to carry.
• Century eggs, or pídàn (皮蛋, pee-DAHN), are duck eggs cured for weeks in a clay, ash, and salt mixture until the white turns translucent amber and the yolk deep green.
• Mooncakes, yuèbǐng (月饼, yweh-BING), are dense pastries filled with lotus-seed paste or a salted egg yolk, exchanged among family and friends during the Mid-Autumn Festival.
• The magnetic compass began as a spoon-shaped piece of lodestone balanced on a bronze plate in Han-dynasty China, used first for divination before sailors adapted it for navigation.
• Confucius, a teacher and philosopher, left behind sayings collected in the Analects that shaped Chinese ideas about family, education, and government for over two thousand years.
• Chinese calligraphy, shūfǎ (书法, shoo-FAH), is practiced as a fine art in its own right, with brush, ink, paper, and inkstone known together as the four treasures of the study.
• The character for good, hǎo (好, HOW), combines the symbols for woman and child, one of a small set of characters built by pairing two meaning symbols rather than a sound and a meaning symbol.
• Saying hello in Mandarin, nǐ hǎo (你好, nee-HOW), literally translates to you good, a greeting built from just two syllables.
• The English word silk likely traces back to an ancient name for China, passed into Greek as sērikos and Latin as sericum before settling into English.
• The Great Wall is not one structure but a patchwork of walls built, rebuilt, and connected by different dynasties over roughly two thousand years to guard China's northern frontier.
• Beijing (北京, bay-JING) means northern capital and Nanjing (南京, nahn-JING) means southern capital, a naming pattern that runs through many Chinese cities built as seats of imperial power.
• Movable type printing was pioneered in 11th-century China by an artisan named Bi Sheng, who carved individual characters into clay blocks centuries before Gutenberg's press.
• On summer evenings, groups of mostly older women gather in public squares across Chinese cities for guǎngchǎng wǔ (广场舞, gwahng-chahng WOO), upbeat group dancing done for exercise and company.
• Congee, a rice porridge called zhōu (粥, JOH), is simmered slowly until the grains break down, then topped with anything from pickled vegetables to salted duck egg for breakfast.
• Mandarin is a tonal language: the syllable ma can mean mother (妈, MAH), hemp (麻, MAH), horse (马, MAH), or a scolding (骂, MAH), depending only on pitch, so tone carries as much meaning as the sounds themselves.
• There is no single English word for guānxì (关系, gwan-SHEE); it describes a web of mutual obligation and trust built up through favors exchanged over time.
• The word for tea split into two families depending on the trade route: cha traveled overland from Mandarin-speaking regions, where it is chá (茶, CHAH), while te spread by sea from the Min Nan dialect of the southern coast.
• Mahjong, a tile-based game usually played by four people, is a fixture of family gatherings, its clacking tiles a familiar sound in teahouses and living rooms alike.
• The number eight is considered lucky in Chinese because it sounds like the word for prosperity, while four is often avoided because it echoes the word for death.
• Gunpowder emerged from the work of Tang-dynasty alchemists searching for an elixir of immortality, who instead found a mixture that burned unexpectedly fast.
• Peking duck is roasted until the skin crackles, then carved tableside and wrapped in thin pancakes with scallion, cucumber, and a dab of sweet bean sauce.
• Chinese surnames come first, so a person named Wáng Fāng (王芳, wahng FAHNG) is Ms. Wang to everyone but family, since Wáng is the family name and Fāng the given one.
• China's imperial examination system, which selected officials by written test rather than birth, ran for over a thousand years and is often cited as an early model for meritocratic government.
• Huangshan's granite peaks are famous for wind-sculpted pines that grow straight out of bare rock, a scene painted and photographed for centuries.
• Shaoxing wine, an amber rice wine aged for years in sealed clay jars in the city of Shaoxing, is drunk warm on its own or used as the fragrant base for countless stir-fries and braises.
• The English word kowtow comes from the Chinese kòutóu (叩头, koh-TOH), meaning to knock one's head on the ground, an old gesture of deep respect or submission.
• The Lantern Festival closes out the New Year celebrations with streets strung in glowing paper lanterns and riddles written on them for passersby to solve.
• The Yellow River carries so much fine yellow silt from the loess plateau it crosses that it colors the water and has shaped some of the most fertile farmland in the country for millennia.
• Giant pandas live wild only in a handful of mountain ranges in central China, where cool, misty bamboo forests supply nearly all of their diet.
• Many Chinese homes and shops are arranged according to fēngshuǐ (风水, fung-SHWAY), an old practice of positioning doors, furniture, and mirrors to balance the flow of energy through a space.
• Paper was invented in China around the 2nd century, traditionally credited to a court official named Cai Lun who refined a process using tree bark, hemp, and rags.
• Hand-pulled noodles, lāmiàn (拉面, lah-MYEN), are stretched and folded by hand rather than cut, a technique cooks perform right in front of customers in northern Chinese noodle shops.
• The Silk Road was not a single route but a shifting network of trade paths that carried silk, spices, and ideas between China and the rest of Eurasia for well over a millennium.
• Every spring, hundreds of millions of people travel home for the New Year holiday in what is regularly the largest annual movement of people anywhere in the world.
• The Forbidden City in Beijing served as the home of Chinese emperors for nearly five centuries, its halls and gates arranged in strict accordance with imperial ritual.
• In parks across China, groups gather at dawn to practice tai chi, a slow, flowing martial art performed as much for balance and calm as for self-defense.
• Xiàngqí (象棋, shyahng-CHEE), Chinese chess, is played on a board split by a river down the middle, with each side's general confined to a small palace at its own end.
• The English word china, for fine porcelain, comes from the country itself, whose kilns at Jingdezhen supplied translucent white ceramics to the world for centuries.
• The Turpan Depression in far western China dips more than 150 meters below sea level, making it one of the lowest points on any continent.
• Baijiu, báijiǔ (白酒, BYE-jyoh), a clear spirit distilled from fermented sorghum, is poured for toasts at nearly every Chinese banquet and can run well above 50 percent alcohol.
• During the Dragon Boat Festival, teams race long, narrow boats to the beat of a drum while families eat zòngzi (粽子, DZOHNG-dzuh), sticky rice wrapped and steamed in bamboo leaves.
• Han-dynasty scholar Zhang Heng built a bronze seismoscope that used dragon-mouthed levers to drop a ball and signal the direction of a distant earthquake, centuries before instruments could do the same.
• Mount Everest sits on the border between China and Nepal, and climbers approaching from the Tibetan side start their ascent from a Chinese base camp.
• Hainan, China's southernmost province, is a tropical island with its own stretch of white-sand coastline and coconut palms.
• The Gobi stretches across a vast stony plateau in northern China, cold enough to see snow in winter despite being classed as a desert.
• During Chinese New Year, elders hand out money in red envelopes called hóngbāo (红包, hohng-BOW), red being the color associated with luck and warding off misfortune.