Main Features
Pinyin
Chinese language study always begins with the pinyin phonetic system. The NC200 provides a fun way to learn pinyin that will have you reading and speaking “hanyu” in no time. Don’t be afraid to learn Chinese. Let the NC200 be your teacher!
Characters
Master the only living pictographic language in the world! Through learning stroke order, radicals, and pronunciation of characters in a simple and intuitive program, you will find that reading Chinese is easier than you think..
Multimedia Courseware
Chinese is fast becoming the most popular language to study for students, business people, and travelers from the world. With lessons in pinyin, character writing, grammar and vocabulary, and with online updates and support, the NC200 makes learning Chinese convenient and fun.
Search
If you like surfing the web, then you’ll like using the NC200 search capabilities. You can instantly find example sentences, pronunciation, translation, related articles, grammar points, and more. The touch screen interface allows you to pick words right off the screen. Look up words or save them to your word bank. It’s easy!
Practical Sentences
The NC200 provides a quick reference guide of useful sentences for every situation. You can choose from dining, transportation, idioms, shopping, and more. Use it while you travel or as a study tool. Just navigate the easy to read menu and find the sentence you want. If you just need a quick translator, just play the audio and the NC200 will speak for you。
Dictionary read anyone who has studied Chinese before knows: It’s nearly impossible to find a single dictionary that has everything you need for a language course. flipping through the pages of a dictionary to find the English or Chinese translation for either pinyin or example sentences is tedious and inefficient. Now you can find the word you’re looking for instantly with the NC200. With audio pronunciation, color images, and dictionary editing capabilities, you will never need to carry a heavy dictionary and text book to class again!more
Travel Guide
Visiting China for the first time? Or are you an “Old China hand”? Get useful guides to popular destinations, local cuisine, transportation and ticket info, entertainment hotspots, and much more. The NC200 will help you get the most out of your China travel experience and be
Chinese Learning
The Chinese language is one of the most fascinating surviving languages you can learn today. With its pictographic roots, learning Chinese often feels less like language class and more like art class. Besides the aesthetic appeal of its characters, the Chinese language also has a long history spanning some 5000 years. With over a billion people speaking some variant of Mandarin Chinese, one out of every six people on Earth, Mandarin Chinese is fast becoming a global language in travel and business. Indeed, some experts estimate that as many as 100 million people will be undertaking Chinese study by 2010.
Chinese is, with good reason, often cited as the single most imposing obstacle of traveling or doing business in China. The language sounds impenetrable and the written language impossibly alien. But by investing some time in learning to speak and read Chinese, you will find your investment paying off handsomely over time. Though challenging, Chinese study can be fun, and you will find your status rise in the eyes of the Chinese you meet. They believe that anyone who makes an effort to learn Chinese is showing admiration and respect for China.
For those who are interested in learning Chinese, it’s important to understand the idiosyncrasies and differences Chinese has with English. For example, the basic unit of the Chinese language is not the letter, as Chinese has no alphabet. Neither is it the word, as most Chinese words are paired. Rather, the basic unit of the Chinese language is the “character”. Many novice Chinese learners will be confused by the differentiation between “word” and “character”, as this is a relatively foreign concept in English. Many “words” in Chinese are actually pairings of two or more “characters” to form a new meaning, with each character representing one syllable. A classic example (both in describing this concept and in illustrating how easily westerners can be confused by Chinese) is the common misconception that the Chinese have the same word for “crisis” as they do for “opportunity”. The Chinese word for “crisis” is 危機. The misinformed will then say that the Chinese, in their optimistic wisdom, crafted the word “crisis” by combining the word for “danger” and “opportunity”. While危 does indeed mean “danger”, 機 most certainly does not mean “opportunity”. By itself, 機 has a multitude of meanings, most commonly “machine”. Only when機 is paired with 會, or “occasion”, does 機會 mean “opportunity”. When learning Chinese, it is important that the student approach Chinese not just character by character, as one might in English, but also maintaining awareness that most words in Chinese are actually composed of a pair of characters.
Another major difference is in grammar. Chinese grammar as you know it in English is practically non-existent. There are no tenses for plurals, prepositions, or verb conjugations. There are no masculine or feminine tenses, nor are there “the" or "a". There are no past or future tenses, and often most surprising to Chinese learners, there are no explicit words for “yes” or “no”. The only rules are those of word order, though it can be complicated. For example, the time is always placed in the beginning of the sentence, unlike in English where the time is placed at the end of the sentence, e.g. I had a snack yesterday.
The history of Chinese began well before 1000 B.C. The earliest form of writing was characters carved into turtle shells and hollowed out bamboo. In the beginning, Chinese characters were indeed pictographic. The character for “sun” looked like the sun. The character for “horse” had eyes, a mane, and four legs.
Over millenia, however, the pictographic characters became more and more stylized to create the characters in the second column. The evolution of the character for “horse” is shown.
In addition, these pictographic characters comprise of only 4% of modern-day Chinese. Their ties to an ancient history and culture, however, are valued far more than just for their number.come an indispensable travel Companion.
