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Study languages you are bound to fail in | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| aabram Pentaglot Senior Member Estonia Joined 5533 days ago 138 posts - 263 votes  Speaks: Estonian*, English, Spanish, Russian, Finnish Studies: Mandarin, French | Message 65 of 96 14 March 2014 at 11:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Sure, but as it happens it was just yesterday that I had to explain to one of my friends how Mandarin works. What really boggled her mind was when we got to the part of how one would look up unfamiliar hanzi in dictionary when one does not know the pronunciation. Count strokes? And then look the radical in the index? And only then you can retrieve the word? What century is this? Okay, we all have smartphones now with hw recognition but if you don't happen to have one, then you, as a learner, are by modern standards, pardon the expression, f*cked.
If we only consider oral part then learning and mastering the language then Mandarin is no biggie indeed. For some obscure reason most people tend to dismiss the writing system when it comes discussing Mandarin. It really is the elephant in the room. Just yesterday our teacher, while writing example sentences on the whiteboard, stopped in mid sentence because she'd suddenly forgotten how to write the 戚 part of the 亲戚. And she's a native speaker. Edited by aabram on 14 March 2014 at 11:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 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 66 of 96 14 March 2014 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | ||
I won't deny that writing is a hurdle. But vocabulary construction, grammatical rules and so on more than make up for that in other respects. Eventually, this stuff evens out for me. There are just as many reasons why Mandarin is easy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4032 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 67 of 96 14 March 2014 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Mandarin is quite possibly the most simplified of the Sino Tibetan family, it is like Spanish is to Romance.
There is even a middle Chinese creole hypothesis going around that invasions by Mongols and Manchus significantly caused a creolization, while southern languages such as Cantonese and Hakka remained free of watering down. Mandarin has only 4 tones with barely any agreement rules, 6 vowels, no consonant clusters etc. Something that is pretty difficult in both grammar and pronunciation is like Min, it has inclusive vs exclusive pronouns, hundreds of irregular tone changes, an example would be one of the words for "mister" changing the tone of the following name in Cantonese. Tonal sandhi where the tone of the previous word affects the next word like consonant gradation in Estonian for example, and tons of measure words, tons, while Mandarin is losing its own. (Dungan only has "ge" left) We need to see Mandarin as it is, the Spanish/English of the east, something like Min is what Lithuanian is to us. Edited by Stolan on 14 March 2014 at 6:15pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4772 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 68 of 96 14 March 2014 at 7:42pm | IP Logged | ||
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 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 69 of 96 14 March 2014 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Exactly. And this forms one of the biggest problems for me when speaking Russian (apart
from soft/hard), because I tend to stress like a Dutch person, not a Russian when speaking. I've learned to adapt it, and also to keep a tab on moving stress, but this is the one part where you can hear me screw up Russian the most obviously. Edited by tarvos on 14 March 2014 at 7:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4668 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 70 of 96 15 March 2014 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | ||
it has only a pitch accent and not a 5 tone tonal system (4 regular tones + 1 neutral tone), Shanghainese, like Japanese and Swedish has pitch (you could say: 1 tone + 1 neutral tone) Edited by Medulin on 15 March 2014 at 5:16pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4032 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 71 of 96 15 March 2014 at 6:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Grammatically I want to also mention for Mandarin, is Shanghainese as watered down grammatically?,
BTW, I hear many folks mentioning the Russian mobile stress is but I read that SerboCroatian may not change to accentuation syllable in some dialects now, but rising and falling alternate in a mobile kind of way across the paradigm, and Bulgarian also has mobile stress. Why does nobody fear those as much? Russian does have one leniency I can name, only 5-6 monophthongs! Edited by Stolan on 15 March 2014 at 11:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 72 of 96 16 March 2014 at 10:28am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't deliberately choose languages in which I'm bound to fail, but I might have to fiddle with the criteria to make something seem like a success.
For instance I have studied old phases of several languages (like Old French, Old Occitan, Old Norse and to some extent Old English), and I define it as a success if I can read them fluently - and it would be an extra bonus if I some day learned to write and maybe even think in them too, but I would not expect that to happen unless I find some suitable dictionaries FROM something into those languages. New Norwegian (which is a written standard, not a spoken language or dialect) is a border line case because I have some primitive wordlists, including an old one by Rasmus Rask from the 1800s, and I can find modern texts on the internet (or as subtitles on NRK1!) - but it will only be a real success the day I can write pure New Norwegian instead of my current confused mix of New Norwegian and Bookish Norwegian. On the other hand my problem with Irish is that I hardly can't expect to learn to speak it fluently (the native Irish speaking population may die out before I get to that stage) - so here the success criterium must be to be able to read, write and maybe even think simple sentences in some halfway decent travesty of true Irish. I know that there are training camps in the language, but I wouldn't participate in something like that unless I already had decent skills in the written language - and that's what I'm working on right now. In a few cases I have put languages on hold for a while. This is for instance the case with Filipino, but again the lack of a sufficiently good dictionary was responsible, and I hadn't foreseen this problem so I didn't just speed up to full throttle with the clear expection of hitting a wall. I just got tired of a language where half the words of even simple texts weren't in my tiny dictionaries (even Google translate was more efficient!) - and to boot a language where educated speakers mix it with English words to the extent that pure Filipino/Tagalog may be impossible to find. Edited by Iversen on 16 March 2014 at 10:34am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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