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Is Mandarin Really More Difficult? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| jae Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5665 days ago 206 posts - 239 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Latin Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, French | Message 1 of 47 28 February 2010 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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My question is whether Mandarin is really all that difficult when compared with other languages in Asia (for a native English speaker). Most of the other languages also use characters, and Vietnamese (which does not use characters), for example, has even more tones than Mandarin (which are difficult for those to learn, in whose native language tones are not used in the same way). Basically what I'm wondering is whether Mandarin really is much harder than these languages, or if people just seem to think it's unnaturally difficult because it's one of the few languages from Asia that they are familiar with. Thanks :)
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| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5736 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 47 28 February 2010 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Only the Chinese languages use only characters, Japanese still uses quite a few, and sometimes you can see some in Korean, but apparently you don't really need to know them.
All the Asian languages are hard for English learners, but if you rely on reading for vocabulary acquisition, then Chinese has an extra challenge for you. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5465 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 3 of 47 28 February 2010 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I guess each language has its own difficulties. I only have knowledge of Japanese and
the most rudimentary Thai, so I can't comment specifically on Mandarin, but with Japanese, you need to know around 1000 characters to be functional and around 2000 to read newspapers and novels comfortably. The problem with Japanese characters is that almost all of them have more than one pronunciation depending on the way in which they are used. For example, on its own 木 is read "ki" and means "tree". The compound 木曜日, which means "Thursday", however, is read "moku you bi". So 木 has two readings, "ki" and "moku" (and possibly more that I'm not aware of). Having said that, knowing the meaning is more important than knowing the pronunciation - there are almost no situations in everyday life when you are required to read aloud, pronouncing every kanji compound correctly. As far as I know, grammar is more complex in Japanese than Mandarin, but I'm sure Chinese speakers will be along soon to correct me of my misconception! All I can say about Thai is that it has five tones rather than Mandarin's four, and the alphabet is deceptively difficult. With most Asian languages, you also have to deal with vocabulary that is far removed from Indo-European languages, although Japanese gives you a helping hand with its numerous loanwords from English (although some become quite unrecognizable from their originals). 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6438 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 4 of 47 28 February 2010 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | ||
Agreeing with both of these statements. Although from what I have studied (very, very little, and it was like 10 years ago) I don't remember Thai grammar being terribly difficult, although that might change in the more advanced stages. There's no crazy noun cases or verb conjugations. I think Chinese is the same way. The alphabet is ridiculously difficult. Multiple ways to write the same letter. No spaces between words (although Japanese is the same way). I believe there are also weird rules about "hard vs. soft" and other things that never made sense to me. Edited by IronFist on 28 February 2010 at 9:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| bruceshaw Diglot Newbie China youtube.com/user/swfRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5465 days ago 9 posts - 10 votes Studies: Japanese, Mandarin*, English | Message 5 of 47 01 March 2010 at 2:20am | IP Logged | ||
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It is difficult I think.
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| AlexL Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7085 days ago 197 posts - 277 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 6 of 47 01 March 2010 at 5:06am | IP Logged | ||
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If you disregard writing, Mandarin is easier than almost all the Asian languages. What makes it hard
(pronunciation and alien vocabulary) is shared by pretty much all the Asian languages--even though Japanese and Korean don't have tones, they have very difficult grammar and a few sounds of their own that are hard to make (especially Korean). Modern Mandarin's grammar is relatively simple, though Classical Chinese is of course a different story. Where Mandarin gets hard is the writing system. In my experience, studying languages with official alphabets is LOADS easier than studying languages like Mandarin, even when the alphabets are not perfectly phonetic or are missing information, as in Hebrew. When you are reading a text in a foreign language, you are bound to come across words you don't know; in an alphabetically written language, you can at least pronounce the word in your head and keep going. In Chinese, you can't, and I think it makes it much harder to read or to learn by reading. Even if you can figure out a word from context, you wouldn't know how to pronounce it without checking a dictionary. Furthermore, Chinese writing does not separate words by spaces so you have no idea if the character/characters you can't recognize are stand-alone words or components of longer words. Finally, though Mandarin's simple grammar is a boon for the learner generally, it makes it harder to guess the meanings of words based on grammatical context. EDIT to change "Classical Mandarin" (which doesn't exist) to "Classical Chinese". Edited by AlexL on 03 March 2010 at 10:07pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| YoshiYoshi Senior Member China Joined 5532 days ago 143 posts - 205 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 7 of 47 01 March 2010 at 7:14am | IP Logged | ||
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IMHO It's worth mentioning that, not only does modern Chinese have a complex system of writing, it also has a relatively special grammar that is quite isolated from mainstream languages. It's a well-known fact that, classical Chinese might be widely regarded as a mission impossible for westerners, actually the grammar of modern Chinese wouldn't be such a piece of cake either, no doubt the rules of Chinese grammar doesn't involve cases, masculine\feminine\neuter, adhesive, or any other difficult phenomena, apart from writing characters, perhaps it's easy for western learners to practise speaking Chinese, and usually we can roughly (at least) understand what they're saying, though sometimes it sounds incorrect, strange, or confusing, that's to say, it's easy to practise oral Chinese, but maybe it's difficult to reach an intermediate or advanced level, if you never pay attention to some detailed usages and nuances.
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| ericspinelli Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5784 days ago 249 posts - 493 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Italian | Message 8 of 47 01 March 2010 at 12:47pm | IP Logged | ||
"boku" (木刀) and "ko" (木の葉). Yes, kanji readings are pretty ridiculous. がっ and かっ (合) are ones that always intrigued me. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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