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What are your hairy goals? | ||
Tags: Goals | Advanced Level | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4354 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 73 of 111 18 August 2014 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Iversen, I'd like to point out two things. First one, some Chinese languages can be written also with Latin alphabet (e.g.,
Taiwanese Hokkien). Secondly; my experience with reading Chinese characters might be fairly limited, but so far my impression is, that you don't really need to see every single stroke of each character. When I read, I just see the shapes of characters (it's sort of like "jizz"), and that's enough for recognition. I generally don't have to disassemble each character into it's radicals and their strokes. The most extreme case I've experienced, was watching a not-so-high-resolution video, where the strokes of the characters in the subtitles pretty much just melted together, nevertheless only a minority of them was unreadable (to me, and probably just because they were unknown to me, which meant I couldn't have yet gotten used to their shapes). However, keep in mind I'm not yet proficient in any language using them, so perhaps some more proficient member here could state their opinion. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5350 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 74 of 111 18 August 2014 at 10:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To read the following in the original, with a grasp of detail and nuance superior to what an ideal translation could provide:
- Преступление и наказание - Mysterier - დათა თუთაშხია - こゝろ - Kritik der reinen Vernunft - उपनिषदः - مقدمة ابن خلدون - Cel mai iubit dintre pământeni - Φαίδων 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4037 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 75 of 111 18 August 2014 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
You don't need to read it, I know a few British guys and an American who live in Hong Kong who can't read anything but can speak Cantonese, they can recognize a few characters but they usually just say "I'll have what he's having" when they walk into a restaurant. Tones are an overrated difficulty, Mandarin has 4 tones but no consonant clusters, a tiny vowel range, only nasals can end codas, if it weren't for those 4 puny tones, it would be twice as simple as Spanish. Would you rather say "xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ" than treat tonality just like nasalization, palatization, creaky voice, aspiration, vowel length, etc. It is a phonological feature out of numerous that it not exceptional. Edited by Stolan on 18 August 2014 at 11:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4849 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 76 of 111 18 August 2014 at 11:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
Why not? I love Nuxalk! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4712 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 77 of 111 18 August 2014 at 11:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
I guess you speak perfect Mandarin then? Considering it's so easy? :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 78 of 111 19 August 2014 at 1:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not particularly scared of the tones - they remind me of the diphtongs which are common in many languages. For instance I have noticed that Dutch diphtongs sound like the go down, whereas Afrikaans has diphtongs that sound like they go upwards. I would just consider the tones as characteristics of single phonemes - my guess is that it would be more difficult to learn them if you confused them with short-range sentence tones.
If the Chinese used Pinyin systematically I might consider learning Mandarin, but in spite of Ezy_Ryder's calming words I still don't like those pesky small bundles of lines. It may be true that you eventually learn to recognize the general shape, but it takes a lot of study time to get there. If I had to learn Mandarin or another CHinese language I would use Pinyin as a bridge and learn the speech and the writing in parallel. It would be hopeless first to learn the writing and then the language, as I could do with Russian and Greek. Edited by Iversen on 19 August 2014 at 2:03am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5350 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 79 of 111 19 August 2014 at 1:39am | IP Logged | |||||
You have a conception of what it would be like to use the Chinese writing system, however the actual experience of doing so may be entirely different. You might be missing out on something special simply for lack of trying. My humble suggestion would be to purchase one or two beginning Chinese or Japanese textbooks, and just start working through them. At worst, you will gain a comparative and typological knowledge of these languages; the only risk you run is liking and learning them. I myself had many notions of what it would be like to study Japanese, Chinese and Arabic, yet in practice they turned out to be much more hospitable than I could ever have imagined. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4673 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 80 of 111 19 August 2014 at 5:01am | IP Logged | |||||
When Chinese DO use Pinyin, it's Pinyin without tone markers :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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