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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6294 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 9 of 22 30 September 2011 at 8:55am | IP Logged | ||||||||
With an electronic dictionary, I can just write the character out with the stylus or my finger. With a paper dictionary, I need to know the radical or how to pronounce the character before I look it up. This is a big barrier when you are first starting out. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lyric_Ho Bilingual Triglot Newbie China facebook.com Joined 4807 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Cantonese*, EnglishC1 | Message 10 of 22 30 September 2011 at 9:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
if you encounter this difficulty, i think your chinese learning has come to an advanced level. i think homonyms could be understood through the context. eg.他有后台。He has backstage.(it is strange to translate to English:)) one of the meanings is "He owns the backstage." the other one is "He has somebody who is powerful to support him."(how do you express this in English?) if you have a context for this sentence, i am sure you can understand it without difficulty,but if not, then actually also easy, because, we all know that in both languages,people seldom say someone owns a backstage. and i must point out that,if this sentence is used to express 'he owns a backstage',in Chinese, you add a quantifier "个"before "后台". or, in another occation, "他的后台很漂亮。" and “他的后台很硬。” to identify these two mingings, you need to understand the adjectives, "漂亮beautiful" describes the senery of a place, while "硬hard"describes the quality of somthing, in the sentence it descibes the power of his backer. i think all may confuse you is the meaning in Chinese, and this is the most amazing points of the language. Please, if you have any questions just feel free to ask, I am glad to help. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5696 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 11 of 22 30 September 2011 at 11:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||
But characters aren't words, at least not in the same sense of English words. We don't have to agree on what the proper definition of a Chinese word is, but at least you must count in a consistent manner when comparing two languages. Here's what I mean: Consider the following: doorbell, door, bell; 門鈴、們、鈴. You would consider that three English words. Yet using the character-as-a-word criterion you would only count two Chinese words. But fundamentally the same thing is going on in both languages! You must either consider those three separate Chinese words, or you must not count television, telephone, et al as separate words from tele-, vision, and phone; you can't have it both ways. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lyric_Ho Bilingual Triglot Newbie China facebook.com Joined 4807 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Cantonese*, EnglishC1 | Message 12 of 22 30 September 2011 at 1:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
i see, so you mean you did not learn the radical and pinyin at the begining of your learning? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lyric_Ho Bilingual Triglot Newbie China facebook.com Joined 4807 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Cantonese*, EnglishC1 | Message 13 of 22 30 September 2011 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
thank you so much, egill, now i got what you mean. first, "word" in English is an entity in the dic., and most of the time we can not refer to one character which represents the same meaning with the English "word". secondly, tele- in English is not a word but part of the word, or we call prefix, and in Chinese,we have radicals.(can i say radicals in Chinese is similar to the prefix in English?) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| indiana83 Groupie United States ipracticecanto.wordp Joined 5490 days ago 92 posts - 121 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Cantonese, Italian | Message 14 of 22 30 September 2011 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think that would be misleading. Prefixes are more similar to characters which cannot stand-alone. For example you have 可愛、可惜、可怕、可以、可能. But 可 does not really stand by itself - you would never think of it is a "word", it is more similar to the English suffix "-able". For my own part, I would say topicalization is still a difficult concept. That is putting the topic at the head of the sentence, a simple example is: English: I went to Nathan Road Cantonese: 彌敦道、我去過 Englishified Cantonese: Nathan Road, I went I understand the concept, but when I listen to people, I sometimes have trouble understanding what they are saying when they topicalize very long sentences. I think it's just a matter of exposure/practice though. There are some sounds that were hard to make when I was beginning, especially "yu" sounds in Cantonese like in 書 or 雪, 住, etc. I still whistle a little bit when I say 書. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lyric_Ho Bilingual Triglot Newbie China facebook.com Joined 4807 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Cantonese*, EnglishC1 | Message 15 of 22 01 October 2011 at 5:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
thank you for correcting:) but I would like to mention here,"可"can be used alone:我想提交这份申请，不知可否？in thie context,"可"alone stands for "可以". of course this is usually used in formal speaking or written.
Totally agree, if you immerse in the language environment,you will soon be fine with this.
do you meaning the most difficult factor of learning cantonese and Chinese is the pronounciation? or just some sounds like s, sh, x? thank you:) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6294 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 16 of 22 01 October 2011 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
When you first start out, sometimes it is hard to be sure what the radical is and if you know the pinyin, you probably know what the word means and don't need to look it up in a dictionary. Again, problem solved if you can write out the character with your finger in an electronic dictionary or if you are using something like Pleco with optical character recognition for when you get stuck. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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