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Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| movica Diglot Newbie China Joined 5000 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, English Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 17 of 57 20 March 2011 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just saw this article recently. Someone translated it into Chinese and it's so much fun~
http://www.douban.com/note/139812171/ 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| koba Heptaglot Senior Member AustriaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5868 days ago 118 posts - 201 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, French | Message 19 of 57 22 March 2011 at 6:17am | IP Logged | ||
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Honestly, opinions about the difficulty of Mandarin vary a lot.
Some people say it's much easier than, say, German, Russian, and other languages with complex grammar structures. I have also studied Mandarin for a while so I can comment on the subject. Mandarin might be hard in the sense that, if you're a Western and if you do not really devote yourself to learn it, that is, if you don't do an 'immersion' and just flirt with it, you might not get the level you wish so easily as you would with other languages that share similarities with your native tongue. That is because ideas in Chinese are expressed much differently than in Indo-European languages, so I'd say the cultural aspect plays the biggest role here. As for the tones and the characters, at least from my experience, I'd say that they're manageable, and as you progress you get a better and better pronunciation and the characters also start being memorized easier. Edited by koba on 27 March 2011 at 2:31pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| djc463 Heptaglot Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5801 days ago 51 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, German, Italian Studies: Mandarin | Message 20 of 57 27 March 2011 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I was planning on trying to learn Mandarin next.... This is frightening, maybe Japanese would be better due to the
fact that the writing system makes much more sense. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Segata Triglot Groupie Germany Joined 5171 days ago 64 posts - 125 votes Speaks: German*, Japanese, English Studies: Korean, Esperanto | Message 21 of 57 27 March 2011 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | ||
Korean is what you wanted to write.. right? As much as I love the Japanese writing system.. it makes no sense at all. ;) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6357 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 22 of 57 28 March 2011 at 2:05am | IP Logged | ||
Don't forget that the pronunciations of the Japanese characters are almost completely random. You can know the pronunciations of 美, 味, 美味 and 美味い and still become shocked when you realize that 美味しい is pronounced completely different. :) But really.. Forget what I just said, there's no need to fear at all. Learning Japanese is wonderful: Every single word you learn is pure joy, every syllable you hear makes your heart pound of excitement and every character you write makes your eyes sparkle! I'm glad it takes time. :D Edited by M. Medialis on 28 March 2011 at 2:08am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Nature Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5237 days ago 63 posts - 80 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 23 of 57 28 March 2011 at 7:24am | IP Logged | ||
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Oh come on Mandarin isn't that hard at all!
中文不难！ Maybe I just have a good teacher and the class goes slower because it's Mandarin but I have a better mark in that class than I do in Spanish :P 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kenshin Triglot Newbie Taiwan Joined 5030 days ago 17 posts - 34 votes Speaks: Taiwanese, Mandarin*, English Studies: Japanese, German, French | Message 24 of 57 29 March 2011 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Obviously, I might be biased because I'm a native speaker. To me, the most pleasing
feature of Chinese language is that it has no declensions and conjugations. As an isolating language, Chinese is much simpler in grammar in comparison to most European languages. Sure, there are thousands of Chinese characters you have to learn. But once you learn a character by heart, that's it: it doesn't change its form and pronunciation. And I think lack of grammatical conjugation might explain why Chinese people tend to make English sentences like "where are you come from? ". Well, verbs have different forms doesn't make any sense to Chinese speakers... So, it's not surprising that there are also many Chinese students complaining about why English is so difficult to learn. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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