Paint Your World: Colours in Mandarin

Look around the room you are in right now. How many different colours can you spot in just ten seconds? Now here is the big question: did you know that over one billion people on Earth use a completely different set of words for those colours? Mandarin Chinese is the most-spoken language in the world by number of native speakers. Today you are going to learn how to say colours the way a child in Beijing or Shanghai would say them.

Mandarin Chinese is written in characters, but we can also write the sounds using letters. This letter-based system is called pinyin. The little marks above some vowels in pinyin show the tone — the musical pitch of your voice. Mandarin has four tones, and getting the tone right helps people understand you. Here are eight key colours to learn. The word for colour in Mandarin is 'sè' (sounds like 'suh'). You will often hear it added after a colour word, for example 'hóng sè' means 'the colour red'. • Red — hóng (say: hoong, rising-falling tone) • Blue — lán (say: lahn, rising tone) • Yellow — huáng (say: hwahng, rising tone) • Green — lǜ (say: lyoo, falling-then-rising tone — your voice dips then comes back up) • Black — hēi (say: hay, flat high tone) • White — bái (say: bye, rising tone) • Orange — chéng (say: chung, rising tone) • Purple — zǐ (say: dzuh, dipping tone) A helpful trick: group colours by the number of letters in their pinyin. Short words like 'lán' and 'hēi' are great ones to learn first. Say each word three times out loud — repetition trains your brain fast! Remember: in Mandarin you do not say 'the' before a colour. You simply say the colour word on its own or add 'sè' after it.