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Is Mandarin Really More Difficult? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6950 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 17 of 47 12 March 2010 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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(About me: fluent in Japanese, studied Mandarin Chinese for a few years and gave up, flirted with Vietnamese, B.A. in Linguistics and East Asian Languages. I have no experience in Thai so I won't be commenting on it here.)
I wouldn't say that Mandarin is particularly difficult or easier compared to other East Asian languages. * I don't think 'number of tones' is a good measure of difficulty (e.g. 'Vietnamese/Cantonese has more tones so it's more difficult to study than Mandarin'). If you're learning a tonal language, you'll probably learn how to differentiate between the different tones pretty quickly. Absence vs. presence of tones is definitely a big issue, but if you have to chose among tonal languages, it's my experience that 4 tones vs. 6 tones will likely not make a difference in terms of difficulty level. * Mandarin and Vietnamese do have tones, and quite difficult pronunciation. Also, most morphemes are monosyllabic, so to me it seemed like the words went by too quickly for me to recognize them (as opposed to longer Japanese and Korean words, which give you more time to recognize). . * However, I guess you can say these languages 'make up for' difficulties in pronouncing/listening with simpler syntax than Japanese and Korean. * As for the writing system, Mandarin is probably not more difficult than Japanese. This is because while in Japanese you have the benefit of being able to read/write phonetically sometimes, kanji have multiple readings whereas Chinese characters used in Mandarin generally have only one (in other words: more extensive use of characters, but a little simpler). Also, I think many in this thread have underestimated the necessity of kanji comprehension in Japanese and Korean; most of the words written phonetically in Japanese are just particles, verb endings, or foreign words. As for Korean, Chinese characters are apparently not used very much in everyday writing; according to Ardischir, however, your Korean vocabulary acquisition will be limited to an extent until you study Chinese characters, and will start to 'snowball' after that. Of course this is not to say that you'll be studying hanzi to the same degree that a student of Mandarin would be, but in any case, the case isn't so black-and-white as 'Korean is easier because you don't have to learn all the hanzi'. Anyway, it probably goes without saying that you're best off not going with any East Asian language if easiness is your main concern. ;) But for those pursuing Mandarin or another Chinese language, you can rest assured that your counterparts studying other languages in East Asia are not getting off a whole lot easier than you are. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5736 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 18 of 47 12 March 2010 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
When you write 'morpheme', do you mean 'word'? Or why else would that make a difference how 'how quickly things go by'? If you mean words: Mandarin is mostly bisyllabic.
And I still say 6000 characters, of which maybe 1000 have several pronunciations, are harder than 3000 with two to three. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 7182 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 19 of 47 13 March 2010 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Yes, there are actually quite a few characters that have different pronunciations in
Chinese. Certainly, it's much easier to remember a new pronunciation and meaning (2 things to remember) than having to remember a new pronunciation, meaning and character (3 things to remember). Obviously it's the character that takes the longest to remember especially when learning to write. The different meanings and pronunciations are of course sussed out by the context, though of course there can be some slips of the tongue. Now does the fact that Chinese having more characters makes text easier to read? In some ways yes! That's one of the advantages of the Chinese language, because there's so many characters skimming for a word is much quicker (assuming you've spent the long hours memorizing the characters) if you've ever had the situation where you need to find a Chinese name in a list or a bus-stop on a bus route, then you'll know that you can find a place/name faster than you could in say English. In English we use the same letters with many different forms of pronunciation and the same spelling for different things e.g. 'saw' which is the past of 'to see' and 'saw' a tool for cutting (hence the argument for spelling reform). However, nobody would seriously suggest that this makes English more difficult then say Chinese. Of course English is a wholly different kettle of fish altogether than say Japanese, and it's probably not such a great analogy, but I make it anyway... I think probably one of the other things that makes the Chinese script particularly difficult is that the characters are not separated into 'words' so th at ev er y sy la bl e is se pe ra te d an d ea ch sy ll ab le is ro ug h ly th sa me si ze. Every syllable/character caries a meaning with in itself and might or might not be a word depending on the context within the text. With more reading it soon becomes easy to recognise words but there are still times where highly educated people will find that it's hard to decipher where a word starts and finish. There is actually some talk of further changing the script so that people group characters into words and use spaces between the words. All talk at the moment and I think only in academia. I personally think it was quite a nice thing to read text up and down from right to left as they used to do in Chinese. Is Japanese the same as Chinese? Do they make the words clearly recognizable in their script? Also do the phonetic scripts help and complement the kanji? That is to say, it seems that a word in Japanese can consist of a kanji and then some phonetic script. Does this mean that at least some of the word is phonetic, and so does this mean the meaning of the kanji can be guessed from the context of the phonetic script? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5810 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 20 of 47 13 March 2010 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Kana (the “phonetic scripts”) are used for the grammatical part (unlike Chinese languages, Japanese is highly inflected) and for some words (words whose kanjis are outside of the jōyō list, or foreign loans). Example: 猫は魚を食べる。Neko wa sakana o taberu. This is what you can understand of the sentence without kana: Cats•fish•food•• This is what you can understand of the sentence without kanji: •[topic marker]•[object marker]•[verb] 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 7182 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 21 of 47 14 March 2010 at 5:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks MäcØSŸ, That's interesting. Knowing Chinese means that I can also understand
'cat - fish - food' in the sentence. So the sentence means the cat eats the fish? I think having the grammatical markers is quite nice as it makes the relations in the sentence clear. Just out of interest 魚は猫を食べる。 - Would this mean something like the fish eats the cat? Also having these markers in the sentence does this mean you can move the word order about more freely? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6769 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 22 of 47 14 March 2010 at 7:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Delectric: yes and yes.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sayumi Groupie Japan Joined 5419 days ago 51 posts - 75 votes Speaks: Japanese | Message 23 of 47 14 March 2010 at 8:55am | IP Logged | ||||||||
生一本（kiippon） 生業（nariwai） 生意気（namaiki） 生きる（ikiru） 生活(seikatsu) 生じる（shoujiru） 生える(haeru) ... Anyway, why 6,000 characters? The Japanese have the jinmei kanji so I'd agree that 3,000 is a more or less accurate figure, but is it really true that Chinese students have to memorize 6000 hanzi? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5736 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 24 of 47 14 March 2010 at 9:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Is it like that for all Japanese characters, or is that one of the extreme cases? What's the average?
If you want to be at an educated native speakers' level, then yes. I'm at 2500-3000 characters, and from what I see popping up in my reading, I'd guess that one will do quite well with 4000-5000 characters. But if you want to get really good, you'll definitely need more than 5000. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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