Notes:

Notice that each of the nationalities are comprised of a country plus the word 人 rén, we see here an example of a noun (the country) functioning as a modifier of another noun (the common noun person).

For example, 日本 Rìběn Japan + 人 rén person = 日本人Rìběnrén Japanese person.

Note as well that although "Japanese person" counts as two separate words in English, we are treating it as one word in Chinese - it would be just as easy to translate 日本人Rìběnrén as Japanese, as in "He is Japanese."

Finally, do remember that rén could be singular or plural depending on the context - thus 日本人Rìběnrén perhaps could most explicitly be rendered in English as Japanese (person/people). Of course, that would be a crazy thing to write!

As with all languages, translation is an inexact science, especially with Chinese, which is a very context-dependent language. You should be careful when (for instance) asking your Chinese friends "How would I say X in Chinese?" because the sentence they give you, while perhaps rendering the meaning of the English in Chinese, might not be a normal-sounding Chinese sentence, in fact, in might not even be a functioning Chinese sentence at all.

Notes:

Notice that this question does not use the question particle 吗 ma at the end. This is because it is not a simple yes/no question, but uses the question word 哪 nǎ.

哪 nǎ literally means which, it is a common question word and component of 哪里 nǎlǐ where which we will look at in lesson 12. 哪 nǎ is the first question word we are going to learn in this program. Properly speaking, it is an interrogative pronoun.

The word order for questions in Chinese that use an interrogative pronoun is the same as the word order in a statement - the question word occupies the space in the sentence where you would expect to find the  information in the answer. This is unlike English, where the question word usually is at the beginning of a sentence.

Notes:

请问 qǐngwèn can be translated as "Can I ask you a question?" or "Excuse me".

Notes:

The verb 认识 rènshi, like 是 shì and 叫 jiào, does not change form according to the noun. In fact, this is the case for all Mandarin Chinese verbs, because Mandarin verbs are not inflected.

Since Chinese verbs do not change according to the subject of the sentence a lot of Chinese verbs can also double as nouns.