How do you introduce yourself in Chinese? This might be the most basic sentence pattern you need to know when you first start to learn Chinese. The good thing is only a few sentence patterns serve the purpose of this need:

 

wǒ shì David

我是David.

I am David.

Or …

wǒ jiào David

我叫David.

My name is David.

Or, simply …

David.

Let’s go through all new characters for this lesson in the following table first:

shì	jiào	zhè
是 (is)	叫 (call)	这 (this)
hǎo	hāi	lǎo shī
好 (good)	嗨 (hi)	老师 (teacher)
zǎo shang	xiàwǔ	wǎn shang
早上 (morning)	下午 (afternoon)	晚上 (evening)

Please be careful that you don’t use the direct translation of “This is David” in Chinese to introduce yourself. You use that sentence pattern to introduce people beside you, while gesturing to the person you’re introducing.

You say:

zhè shì Joe

“这是Joe.”

“This is Joe.”

This is a common way to introduce your friends to others.

Introduction normally come after greetings. The exact way you greet to people depends on the relationship between you and the other. But of course, the following greetings can be used to anybody:

nǐ hǎo

你好!

Hello!

 

zǎo shang hǎo

早上好!

Good morning!

 

xià wǔ hǎo

下午好!

Good afternoon!

 

wǎn shàng hǎo

晚上好!

Good evening!

 

If the people you meet is really close to you, you can greet each other with any “free style” lines following “Hi xxxx” (“嗨, xxxx!”) to kick start your conversation. Such as:

hāi , David

嗨, David!

Hi David!

OK, now, let’s see how to give out more details in the introduction:

nǐ hǎo! wǒ jiào David. wǒ shì Zhōng wén lǎo shī

你好! 我叫David. 我是中文老师.

Hello! My name is David. I’m a teacher of Chinese.

Please pay attention to the sentence pattern we’re using here in the introduction above:

who + is + what.

This statement sentence pattern is very easy to understand and duplicate. Because in Chinese, there’s no conjugate. “是” (is) will always be “是” no matter which person it is used for.

Today’s lesson is to learn how to greet to people and introduce yourself in Chinese. It is the very first step to open up a conversation with Chinese. Practice introduction of yourself using the simple sentences you learned from today’s lesson.

You’re encouraged to paste an introduction of yourself in Chinese as your comment.

Welcome to have my face to face lesson on http://www.verbling.com/teachers/dawei  !  🙂

Have yourself a wonderful weekend! See you next time!