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Difficulty of Mandarin, Purely Spoken | ||
Tags: Difficulty | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3893 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes  Speaks: English | Message 17 of 19 25 April 2014 at 7:29am | IP Logged | ||
There is such software, unfortunately, it's not error free. The one that makes least mistakes is translate.google.com, the one that offers most extras is http://mandarinspot.com/annotate, the one that marks characters that might be pronounced differently is http://annotator.jiang-long.com/ . There are many others, if anyone can suggest good options, let me know! Mistakes that this kind of software makes are rather predictable - 了，的，觉，要 and other characters that can have different pronunciation based on context they're in often get written down wrong (the preference being for the less common usage). ___________ Tested these three sites with this: 我睡不好觉 jiang-long is a winner, Google got this one wrong! For Mandarinspot, this mistake was expected. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 18 of 19 25 April 2014 at 8:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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http://annotator.jiang-long.com/ seems very nice.
I like its correct parsing of Pinyin (it groups syllables in words different from other tools which write Pinyin as if it were Vietnamese: one syllable - one word. Correct syllable grouping /80% of putonghua words are disyllables/ is very important for correct word stress, and pronunciation (unstressed b,d,g are partially voiced in neutral pronunciation, and unstressed p, t, k are frequently de-aspirated in colloquial pronunciation). Edited by Medulin on 25 April 2014 at 8:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4445 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 19 of 19 13 May 2014 at 3:02am | IP Logged | ||
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The bottom line to learning any language is to think of it outside the classroom context. Everyday you'd go
shopping, dining, work & socialize with friends, watch TV, listen to the radio. Children are naturally drawn to cartoons on TV in any language. In the Chinese community most people tend to divide themselves into Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking groups. A lot of people who speak 1 dialect such as Mandarin doesn't know enough words & phrases of the other to communicate directly to a Cantonese-speaking person. The other day a friend invited my family to dinner. He is Cantonese-speaking and took some Mandarin lessons. Although he sees a lot of Mandarin-speaking customers each week, he had to switch to English when they would come to his office. As a Chinese person with a background reading & writing characters, why does he have trouble picking up the spoken language? He told us that certain times of day the Cantonese programs would come on the radio but he would avoid listening to the Mandarin ones. The people who succeeded learning any language are the ones who spend the time to maintain some daily exposure. In my case I gave up most of my English TV programs for ones in Mandarin in 6 months. 1 typical case happened in Toronto, Canada a few years back. A number of people were waiting to board a light-rail train in Scarborough (the east-end of the city). 1 Chinese lady who is Mandarin-speaking asked another how to get to Scarborough Centre station. The other lady looked puzzled. Then came Mark Rowswell (a Canadian who became an actor Dashan in China) who explained to the lady exactly how to get there (in Mandarin of course). Believe it or not, it may be more common for a foreigner to be fluent in Mandarin but a Chinese who is Cantonese- speaking as his/her mother-tongue to be completely unable to communicate. In the Chinese community, people are used to memorizing facts and figures. It would take them much longer to learn Mandarin than a person who learns words & phrases phonetically. Koreans & Japanese can be learned phonetically as well. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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