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Text chatting in Chinese is difficult | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Takato Tetraglot Senior Member HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5050 days ago 249 posts - 276 votes  Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese | Message 1 of 5 23 September 2012 at 4:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Whenever I use text chat with Chinese people in Chinese, there are two options:
1) I chat with them in English 98 % of the time and in Chinese 2 % of the time, 2) I try to chat solely in Chinese, they tell me after my second or third sentence that I'm impossible to understand. (First sentence is 你好, second may be 你好吗.) For example, last time I wrote 你知道一个很难语. The native asked me "What are you talking about? Sorry I don't understazd." then corrected my sentence to 你会一种复杂的语言. So, what do you think? Do I write incomprehensible, seemingly random characters, or do I write stuff that is obviously unnatural, unheard of, outlandish, stupid and insane, but understandable if one tries to think a bit, like "I is more bestest on the Chinese idiom in my school group?" When I tried my A2 English, my Spanish that I had been learning for 6 months or even my rusty German, people sometimes told me that I write quite odd, but they can understand what I write. Now I try my Chine and I only get discouragement. Is it that the people of some East Asian countries can comprehend incorrectly written stuff with way less success or is it that I write pure rubbish when I use Chinese? Heh, maybe I should only dare to write Chinese when my Chinese written comprehension gets to a C1 level. Or leave Chinese and learn Bulgarian instead. Bulgaria seems to be in Europe... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5310 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 2 of 5 23 September 2012 at 6:14am | IP Logged | ||
知道 and 会 are 2 words in Chinese that mean different things, and 1 word in English. 很难 without 的 can be a phrase meaning "difficult to". 語 can have many meanings. Placed after "difficult to", 很難語 can mean "difficult to say". Alone, I'd expect it to mean "linguistic" or "lingual" or similar, rather than the noun "language". I read your phraee as "You are aware that 1 piece very hard to say", then adjusted to "You are aware that a very difficult linguistic", and then I thought I got it, guessing "You are aware of a very hard phrase". > but understandable if one tries to think a bit, like "I is more bestest on the Chinese idiom in my school group?" That was hard but guessable. In Chinese, it can be hard to tell what part of speech a word is, so if you get it wrong, you could be saying "I is organise medium Chinese say wellest", which is hard to guess. Helps if the reader knows English. On a better day I might have gotten 知道=know instead of 知道=aware of. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4680 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 3 of 5 23 September 2012 at 9:14am | IP Logged | ||
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While I understood what you meant by 你知道一个很难语 (though not that it was a question), it's probably because I'm not a native and I can imagine the errors that you've made, and also because we're on this website, so I can imagine that 语 means 语言.
But that's not enough, personally I wouldn't try to have a conversation with someone in my native language (nor another one that I speak fairly well) if the second sentence I received was such a signal that you haven't mastered the basics of the language. I don't mean that in a discouraging way, but considering your last paragraph, do you believe your Chinese is A2? It's a bit difficult to say from here, but I don't think an A2 level would produce this sentence. So perhaps it's not necessarily Chinese people not being able to understand you, but rather the sign that you could use some more time studying, and certainly when you actually reach A2 they'll understand you. If your favourite way of improving is chatting (and being corrected), then go ahead and don't give up! If you chose to do so, however, I'd suggest you do this with language partners rather than friends. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4446 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 4 of 5 04 October 2012 at 9:10am | IP Logged | ||
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The major problem with learning any language is applying it in a local context. Anybody
who watches a foreign film and familiar with the language spoken on screen with English subtitles will notice more than half the content may be translated by overall meaning and not word-for-word. There are phrases that are native to that language but not directly translatable. Languages that are not related translation errors are more apparent. Knowing a few words and getting the rest off a dictionary is not enough and often lead to misunderstanding. Some practical examples: In the movie "A Wedding Banquet" from Taiwan the young man's (lead character) parents came to town. He introduced his parents to his partner from Arizona. They didn't know where it is so he told them: 德州 (the Chinese for Texas). Obviously the State of Texas isn't Arizona but this was the closest he could come up with. Once I was taking a taxi. The driver was obviously from the Punjab in India from the turban he was wearing. He lived in Hong Kong before and said something in Cantonese: 香 港好食吾好住 referring to HK as a place with fine-dining but not a good place to live (because of the congestion). People from HK would know many good restaurants there. Another instance I described a Chinese who has not traveled abroad as: 乡下人 or someone from their home village. The person may live in a large city like Shanghai or Beijing but for someone who knows little about the outside world this is an appropriate label. If you were to say something similar in English you may use the expression "frog in a well" or something more native to the English language. In a face-to-face conversation it is much easier to use gestures to fill in the rest when there is a misunderstanding. On the Internet you may every try to write in English sentences and fill-in a few Chinese words in between to be understood. I tend to get right into the topic of discussion when replying to online blogs and skip the formality like: こんにちは konichi-wa (Japanese) or 您好 (Chinese). Unless you are talking to someone very dear people can sense these are the only words that you can express correctly. Edited by shk00design on 06 October 2012 at 3:41am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5168 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 5 of 5 04 October 2012 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know, I haven't tried to actually practice Chinese after so many years of study, but I do believe the Chinese attitude towards people trying to learn their language is not the most warm-welcoming. Considering that it's a language that can produce so many ambiguities, starting from the abundance of homonyms (even those that are homonym parts of speech for which the IE languages have differently sounding words), I don't think Chinese try any hard to understand nor try to be in the foreigner's place to wonder which difficulties they would have. I see this in Georgian for example but not in Chinese. My 2C.
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