|
 |
English>Chinese vs. Chinese>English | ||
Tags: Difficulty | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| I'm With Stupid Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4171 days ago 165 posts - 349 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Vietnamese | Message 1 of 4 26 September 2013 at 9:17pm | IP Logged | ||
|
When talking about difficulty of languages, people will often refer to how different it is from your native language as one of the key factors. So based on that, would it be right to assume that two people learning each other's language would have an exactly equal level of difficulty? All other things being equal, of course (access to resources, opportunities to practice, etc). Is English just as difficult for a Chinese native speaker as Chinese is for an English native speaker? Or are there still factors in particular languages that make them objectively more difficult for everyone? You might assume, for example, than any spelling system with an alphabet would be easier to learn than a series of hyroglifics. What do you think?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5379 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 4 26 September 2013 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | ||
|
The equation should normally apply, with the exception of outstanding or unusual features, and the Chinese writing system is definitely one such feature. I'm certainly not arguing that English spelling is easy, but Chinese writing is an outstanding hurdle that makes Chinese harder to learn for an English speaker than the other way around.
If you were asking the question in an entirely oral context where writing were not an issue, if both people had never been exposed to any other language, I'd say the difficult is equal. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4442 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 3 of 4 27 September 2013 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Definitely agree Chinese is difficult to learn because of the characters. I know people who are fluent in spoken &
written Chinese have to look up characters not used frequent in a dictionary since you cannot spell characters phonetically. There are many characters that sound similar except for the intonation it would be easy to get mixed up. To this day Chinese input software does not come with a spell-check. When typing on the computer you have to rely on proofreading to edit your page. The difficulty with English is pronunciation. Like French has a lot of silent sounds. Some Chinese learn English words by using characters that sound closest help them remember and tend to make the silent sounds more audible. Such as the word "England" can sound like the Chinese way "yīnggélán" with the "g" sound in the middle more pronounced. Like the French "Mademoiselle" to an Italian-speaker would sound like "Mad-a-moiselle" with the silent "e" more pronounced. The last time travelling in Shanghai the announcement in Chinese was clear and easy to understand but the equivalent in English was a bit awkward. Some people can speak 2 or more languages reasonably well. There are certain sounds native to 1 language that is not found in another. If you native language isn't English, there is a good chance you would speak it with some of your native accent mixed in. Depending on how strong the accent the conversation can get misunderstood. A few days ago I was listening to a news broadcast. The story was from Kenya. Someone was interviewed in a local hospital. It was clear his first language is not English but his pronunciation was sufficiently clear and can be easily understood. Words like "hospital" sounded like "hospit-el" and "remember" sounded like "rememb-a". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6548 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 4 of 4 29 September 2013 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | ||
Exposure is one thing that often keeps all other things from being equal when comparing to English. I would bet that the average chinese person gets much more exposure to English than an English speaker gets to chinese, for example. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
