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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| WingSuet Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5351 days ago 169 posts - 211 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Cantonese | Message 17 of 22 02 October 2011 at 10:03am | IP Logged | |||||
I can understand what Jimbo is saying. Even if we do know radicals (maybe not perfectly) it can still be difficult knowing which of the radicals a character may consist of we should look up. Also, you must know how many strokes a character consists of, which isn't always easy for someone who hasn't been learning Chinese for very long. It took me a long time to get the speed up when looking up characters, and I still need a while to find it sometimes. When I first started learning Cantonese I thought pronunciation could be difficult at times. I struggled with the ng-sound as in 我 and the ch-sound as in 茶 (this word in particular was very difficult to say). Now that I've started learning characters (only know about 400) I think the most difficult thing is the many different meanings one character might have and how it can mean something completely different when followed by another character. You might know all characters that a sentence is made up of, but still don't understand the sentence because you can't figure out how the characters relate to each other. 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 18 of 22 05 October 2011 at 8:14am | IP Logged | |||||
I forgot about the ng- initial being difficult. It really did take a lot of practice to get the hang of that one. Even in my second-semester class I remember there were still a few students who still didn't have the hang of it and had to pronounce 我 as two syllables, putting an audible pause between the "ng" (which they pronounced as "ing" or "ung") and "aw" syllables. The class was one day a week for 3 hours, so it's understandable if they weren't practicing much outside of class... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6550 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 19 of 22 05 October 2011 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hands down it's the sheer number and complexity of Chinese characters. Other problems mentioned so far are
much more temporary in nature, or just not as overwhelming. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lindseylbb Bilingual Triglot Groupie ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4932 days ago 92 posts - 126 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Cantonese*, English Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 20 of 22 10 October 2011 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I know I am a native but I wanna say 多音字 and 形近字。that's so painful for a student living in main land, being a cantonese. For god sake why, why they voted mandarin, why did sunzhongshan do that!!! I guess this problem is not that serious in traditional characters since some of then are indeed differenct characters. And "有旁读旁有边读边" causes great trouble. In spite of this crazy simplified and standard stuff, we are even required to have the knowledge of northern dialects!!! God I ask for human rights for this only one time...This is politics, no culture. However I am not that good in cantonese, either. Maybe due to lack of cantonese education, I cannot well distinguish some of the tone. cant write in cantonese, have trouble reading it, cant pronounce the 成语 well, and even make some words sound like mandarin!!! Gosh…
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5209 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 22 10 October 2011 at 5:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
For me, reading and writing. Without an alphabet, there's no way of telling how to pronounce an unfamiliar word. (Sure, the radicals might act as reminder for some words, but this is hardly a surefire clue.) Because reading and writing are so difficult, new learners will do much better if they start off with conversation-only methods. Use texts with pinyin for those first one to two years. The texts could also include the characters (in parallel text with the pinyin) for use during later study, but students starting off by trying to learn to speak, read and write simultaneously will have a tremendously difficult time. I appreciate that some people planning to travel to a Chinese-speaking country might need to be able to recognize a few basic words (such as "toilet", "men", "women", "exit", etc.), but -apart from that - I believe it'd be far better in the long run if any significant reading (and especially writing) work is left till much, much later during any course of study. And this isn't related to the language as such, but it was a major obstacle for me: the rote-learning methods used when I was forced to study it in Singapore. Massive amounts of irrelevant material, all parroted en masse. (Did I ever learn how to buy something from a store? No. Was I forced to memorize stories about ancient scholars taking the Imperial Exam? Yes.) The result: despite eight(!) years of suffering through Chinese classes, I don't speak it at all. I can hear the tones, and occasionally remember one or two words or phrases, but that's it. Edited by songlines on 10 October 2011 at 6:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| xiongshi7 Newbie United States Joined 4941 days ago 21 posts - 25 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 22 of 22 12 October 2011 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Without question tones (just imagine the reaction you'd receive saying "Ni3 hao4 ma1,"
instead of "Ni3 hao3 ma5")followed by grammar rules. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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