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Romance Languages Are Difficult! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| GoodSirJava Diglot Newbie United States down-with-big-brothe Joined 6710 days ago 21 posts - 25 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, Czech | Message 17 of 31 14 July 2006 at 10:36am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Slavic languages easier than Romance languages because of a lack of articles? In Czech, you need to memorize and be able to instantly recall something like 196 different nominal declensions, just to make a BAD, WRONG sentence that will surely get you laughed at. And how are vowels harder than ř, or retroflex consonants?
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| Mga Groupie United States beastie.redirectme.n Joined 7124 days ago 67 posts - 66 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Arabic (Written) | Message 18 of 31 19 July 2006 at 6:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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GoodSirJava, are you saying that Czech has retroflex consonants? Though I won't pretend to be an expert in the language, I did study it for a little bit. I don't recall any retroflex consonants.
I also checked the relevant chapter in my copy of The World's Major Languages and Wikipedia. Neither of them mention retroflex consonants. If I am wrong, please correct me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 7182 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 19 of 31 19 July 2006 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Chinese easy ha! Obviously it's subjective but here's my two cents.
I've just started learning French after a long break from my school years and I've got to say it seems very logical. By that I mean it just seems to fit my English logic system much easier than Chinese does. Many words are similar, the pronunciation is relatively easy and at least if my pronunciation isn't perfect I don't have a problem making my self understood. Chinese grammar is not easy. Just because its verbs remain constant does not make it easy. Sometimes I feel the logic of Chinese has little connection with the English language. It seems that often though you know one Chinese verb you just can't count on using your English language logic to use that verb for another job. For example 'kai che' - to drive a car, but kai more commonly means open or 'xia ban' to finish work and yet xia is more commonly used to mean next or under. The logic seems so different at times that when you literally translate Chinese it feels like you're talk in some weird language. Lady Skywalker has already mentioned the script and I second this. I must know about 1500+ characters by now but though I can read and sound a lot of text, I still don't often understand what i'm reading. Also which no one has really mentioned is the tones. I've seen/heard many a foreigner (including me) stumble trying to say something with no one understanding you, all because your pitch is wrong. I feel that it was really only after about one and a half years of living in China that I really started to clearly hear the difference between the tones. And, they're not all constant, the tones of a word will change depending on the previous tone so really there are many more tones than the 4 basic ones. As an English teacher it's always the case that Chinese, and Japanese, students usually despite the many hours of study they do from a young age will have much, much worse English than say an equivilent Russian, French, Spanish student etc. Edited by delectric on 25 July 2006 at 4:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6703 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 20 of 31 25 July 2006 at 2:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I respectfully disagree with you, delectric. Chinese is not that difficult. If it weren't for the characters, I don't think anyone would be making a big deal about it.
Of course the grammar is different than English -- it's a completely different language, from a different cultural background. French is much more similar to English because it's from the same cultural world. It seems to be that you're frustrated by their different word choices. Then again, Chinese get frustrated when they have to learn "read a book," "watch TV," "see a house," all of which are one word in Chinese, "kan4." It just comes down to the fact that it makes sense to the people who use it. And tones. Tones are not that much different from word stress in other languages, and they're a lot more consistent. When you know a character, you know the type of stress it will receive, with some exceptions. I feel that, if you can remember the two stress patterns for "contract," then you can handle Chinese tones. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 7182 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 21 of 31 25 July 2006 at 6:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Is learning to speak Chinese hard? Actually I'm asked this all the time by the Chinese themselves. Every time I tell them it's easy because I love learning the language. Whether a language is hard or difficult is a subjective matter.
However, would you say that learning to speak Chinese is easier than; French, Spanish, Italian? In relation to many other languages Chinese is hard. Actually, most of the time i'm not so frustrated by the different word choices. I've learnt most of my spoken Chinese through immersion so the word choices usually seem natural or at least i've not questioned them. However, at times when i've had to guess at which verb I should use for a job that I don't know i've not been able to use the choice that would seem most logical (to me) whereas with a language that is more closely related you wouldn't have this problem, so much. And of course I know only too well, that Chinese students can find the word choices for English just as random or strange. This is because speaking the two languages relative to each other is not easy in comparison to say an English speaker learning French or a Mandarin speaker learning Cantonese. With Chinese tones of course they can be learned but the pitches between the tones are so small that when listening to a Chinese native for the first time it's extremely difficult to distinguish them. The third tone (dropping and rising) for exampleis often mistaken by the novice for a falling tone when it changes into the third half tone or sometimes the novice will think that the third tone is a level or clear pitch when it changes into just a base sound with little rising or falling to the pitch. English speakers are just not used to hearing such fine differences between each word. I do not agree with you that the tones are just the same as word stress in other languages. The tonal nature in English usually functions to differentiate mood more than anything. While in Mandarin a wrong tone on a word will change the entire meaning of the word. This is not the case for say English except in a few instances one common one I can think of is 'to record' and 'a record'. You could quite easily say an English word in a flat tone without word stress and natives could tell you what word it is (indeed this was the case with the old 1980's children's 'Speak and Spell' computer game). Try doing this in Chinese and it would just not work as the pitch of the word is essential. My last point that Chinese is more difficult to speak than many other languages is it's vocabulary. You can't rely on anything that sounds similar to English in the same way you could with an indo-European language. You can't use your knowledge of English to delve and investigate into Chinese (though saying this I do have a list of a few words that sound a little similar e.g. mai and to buy gei and give). An English speaker who knows ZERO French could still make an educated guess at the meaning of many French words though for 99.99% of Chinese words this does not hold true even with brand names. Raincrowlee I take some of your good and interesting points into account but I feel you don't qualify what Chinese is easy in comparison to? As already stated I think speaking Chinese is difficult in comparison to French and i'll go as far as saying all Romance languages, despite only having knowledge of Spanish and French. If you put the same person immersed in Mandarin for a year and also did the same for French. I'm quite sure the spoken French will be better than the spoken Chinese. However, if someone argued that speaking Chinese is easy compared to Japanese, Russian, Arabic etc, on a personal, experiential level I couldn't argue as i've not tried out these languages. Let me know what you think. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6769 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 22 of 31 25 July 2006 at 9:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Initially, I'd say Mandarin is quite a bit easier than Japanese. A first-year
Mandarin student can already have decent conversations in Chinese, but it'll take a Japanese student two or three years. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6703 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 23 of 31 25 July 2006 at 10:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
My first foreign language was French, which I took for five years in jr/high school. Since then, I've also studied a bunch of foreign languages, including Spanish, Russian, Indonesian and Japanese. I've also spent the past four years living in Taiwan learning Chinese. I feel that the Romance languages are more familiar than Chinese, but not any easier on a word-by-word basis. Yes, as a whole, it's easier to find cognates in the Romance languages, which makes them easier to learn. However, an unfamiliar word in French doesn't strike me as any harder to learn than an unfamiliar word in Chinese. It's just that there are so many more unfamiliar words in Chinese. One of the advantages in learning new words in Chinese is that you never run into new sounds. Because all of the syllables are fixed, and only those syllables are used for all words, you will never run into a new pronunciation for as long as you study the language. You can learn all the sounds of the language in the first week of study, and after that be able to pronounce anything in the language. Compare that with English, with all the words that maintain French spellings and pronunciation.
Pitch tone is not quite as essential as you think, unless you are trying to say single words. For the most part, people can follow what you're saying by listening to the context of the words, and adjusting to understand. I've known people whose tones are completely messed up who could hold conversations with Taiwanese, and the message was understood because of context. And by word stress, I don't mean the tone of the voice. Even people speaking in monotones put stress on certain syllables. If you put the stress on the wrong syllable of longer words, it does make it hard to understand. Same thing in Chinese -- the wrong tones make it hard for people to understand you, but not impossible. Tones shouldn't be made into something worse than they are. This is not to say that tones and word stress are the *same* thing. However, they are similar enough that you can use stress to discuss tones when your talking to people whose background does not include a language with tones.
Unless that person is Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese, becuase their languages have been strongly influenced by Chinese. The problem with saying that Chinese is hard to learn because it's unfamiliar is unfair because it assumes all language learners have the same background as you. Definitively untrue. For Americans and Europeans, the fact that Chiense is unfamiliar is one of the biggest hurdles they have to get over. But that's why it's called a foreign language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6891 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 24 of 31 26 July 2006 at 1:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Actually, I personally feel that the fixed pronunciation is what has impeded my progress with Mandarin (and this is even after 4 years of formal language study). With new pronunciations, I find it easier to associate a new word with its meaning. Perhaps it's just me but I find it very hard to build up my vocabulary with Mandarin, which is essentially built from monosyllabic units, and have found I've made a lot more progress with Japanese (a language I've only been learning for 3 months) which is polysyllabic.
Not necessarily true. Korean and Japanese have very different grammars to Chinese. Even if there's a good number of shared vocabulary, it does not necessarily mean that a Korean or Japanese person will find Chinese a breeze. I haven't really had the chance to ask many people but a good number of the Japanese I've talked with during my short time in Kyoto do not even know the basics of Chinese. Only one seemed to recognise the phrase 'xie xie' (thank you), which my partner kept accidently using (he's been too long in Taiwan, I think!). I'm not even sure if Chinese is offered as a language option in the schools here or whether the Japanese are reluctant to speak the language but I'm of the feeling that spoken Chinese would be just as foreign to them as it is to us Western folk. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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