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How to assess Chinese? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3989 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes  Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 1 of 6 23 April 2014 at 11:24pm | IP Logged |
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Could you, guys, recommend me a book or article or even a thread here that would give me a realistic idea about the difficulty of Chinese (Mandarin). Normally, by skimming through a few course books and grammar manuals I can get an idea about how the language works and I am able to assess its difficulty. However, I am not sure if this would work with Mandarin.
Shall I just buy a Teach Yourself, Hugo or Assimil course anyway and flick through it? Please note, I am not seeking advice on how to learn Chinese. I would just spend, say, a month trying to figure out whether Mandarin would be a doable project for me or it is absolutely beyond my means in time and brain power. Edited by Hungringo on 23 April 2014 at 11:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4255 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 2 of 6 24 April 2014 at 2:36am | IP Logged |
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Here are some relevant articles that might provide some insight.
Why Chinese is So Damn Hard Why Chinese isn't as hard as you think Chinese is Easy Language Difficulty Ranking - made for native English speakers, but I don't think Hungarian will give you any significant advantages Personally I think the articles claiming Chinese is easy are a bit misleading. To me, there are two aspects that make Chinese difficult. Many encouraging articles try to make them seem like they're not really a big deal, but I think it's more honest to say, there are things that make them not maddeningly difficult, but they're still huge obstacles. 1. Tones - Say what you want about how much context makes tones less important. But the fact is, when you're just starting out and listening to audio, it's much harder to get a foothold in comprehension when you're constantly second guessing if the word you heard is a word you actually know or new vocabulary. 2. Characters - Yes there's often an internal logic to how they're constructed that helps you figure out characters. But being able to memorize thousands of different characters on sight, is going to take a huge time investment no matter what. If the characters were completely random, the task would be near impossible and no human being would ever do it. The actual situation, that there's sometimes logic behind the characters, but that you can't rely on it all the time, means that's it's a huge task, but on the level of what a dedicated human being can reasonably achieve in a lifetime. Just about everything else about Chinese is really easy and to your advantage it seems. To me there's nothing terrifying about Chinese, but it seems to be a very long term project no matter what, there's no shortcuts. Training your brain to hear it and read it takes years, no matter what. I tried cramming Cantonese for months and felt that I didn't get very far for all the effort I put in. More recently I've been taking a more slow and steady approach spending 15-30 minutes a day working on learning the characters along with vocab and sentence structures. There's nothing complicated or stressful about learning it, and I think I'm seeing reasonable results for the time I've put in so far. It's just about slowly training my brain to recognize all these characters. That's my perspective so far anyways. Edited by YnEoS on 24 April 2014 at 2:44am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3893 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English | Message 3 of 6 24 April 2014 at 8:07am | IP Logged |
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Why wouldn't this work for Mandarin?
If you're an Assimil fan, they have the language course itself + a book for learning to write the Chinese characters. Adding that other book to your skimming through list would probably answer most of your questions. Mandarin is doable and probably not that crazy difficult either. The worst thing about Mandarin is that it just takes much more time to get anywhere with it that with, say, Italian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Michel1020 Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5018 days ago 365 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Dutch | Message 4 of 6 24 April 2014 at 9:18am | IP Logged |
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You could try one or more free podcasts like -http://popupchinese.com/ and make your own opinion.
Listening to mandarin for a while helped me with all my other languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3989 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 5 of 6 24 April 2014 at 10:24am | IP Logged |
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Thank you.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| BaronBill Triglot Senior Member United States HowToLanguages.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4690 days ago 335 posts - 594 votes Speaks: English*, French, German Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Persian | Message 6 of 6 24 April 2014 at 4:20pm | IP Logged |
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For me, Mandarin has required a lot more upfront work than my other languages did. The vocabulary is completely foreign and therefore difficult to pick up right away. That said, I think once you get past that initial time investment, it actually gets much easier. The vocabulary starts to make sense and stick. For me, it was a couple months in that the veil lifted and I started noticing real progress.
All in all, spoken Mandarin is pretty easy once you get the hang of tones and pronunciation. Reading and writing on the other hand... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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