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A difference between English and Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| chirish Newbie China Joined 4910 days ago 9 posts - 14 votes Speaks: Mandarin* Studies: English | Message 1 of 21 23 June 2011 at 12:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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People in China who studies English often complains that there are so many words to remember, and it seems no or less relation between each other.
Students in a university may have a knowledge of 3000 words on average, but that's not enough for reading news, communicating with native people, or doing some research When you read/listen more, you have more opportunity to find so many many new words. These new words may represent new things you never met, but very often, the meaning of these words may be similar with some of words that you have already know (but maybe slightly different), but, with totally different spellings Learning the first 3000 words is relatively easy, but to achive a very fluent level, to learn 10000 or more words, it seems not so easy. The method is still to remember alphabet sequence or pronunciation of each word, one by one However, in Mandarin, although learning the first 1000 or 3000 characters is relatively hard, or much hader, it appears to be simple to remember the words, which are meaningfull, if you know the basic meanings of 1000/3000 characters A research shows the most frequenly used 500 characters cover 80% of daily coversation conversation, newspaper, TV, etc. Even if you are doing some special research, 3000 is enough. We may even hardly remember how to write the chars, if they are not in the range of 3000, although no problem on recognition Why can Chinese words can be remembered easily? In Chinese, to represent a new object, or to distinguish two similar objects, do not create new words, instead, find some characters with related meanings, and combine them to a word In a group of words: 心情 心态 虚心 烦心 心脏 心理 they have common character:心, which means heart, or center While 物理 理性 理论 生理 地理 理想 have a common 理, which means reason, physics, or theory 龙虾(lobster) is a kind of or similar with 虾(shrimp) 公鸡(cock), 母鸡(hen)，鸡肉(chicken) A farmer may not understand psychology at all. When he first sees the word 心理学, he will probably know it is some scientific or technical research about human mind or thinking. However, if he saw psychology, how to guess its meaning? So I think it is very interesting, to investigate on words of Mandarin. It is so different with alphabet systems. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 21 23 June 2011 at 12:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That seems silly to me. Better to learn how words are constructed through morphemes and word roots.
Similar numbers as for English words.
"Psycho" = mind, just like in psychiatry, psychosocial, psychokinesis, psychopath, psychopathic, to psych and psychosomatic. "-ology" = "study of", just like in biology, paleontology, theology, pathology and scientology.
It's much more similar than you think. The Chinese writing system is morphosyllabic, which means it has one character per morpheme. Alphabet languages have several characters per morpheme, but they work exactly the same, except that Mandarin has, probably through the influence of the writing system, extremely few polysyllabic (poly = many, syllab = syllable, ic = adjective marker) morphemes. But morphemes are morphemes and Mandarin works just like all other languages. It's just written differently. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5057 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 3 of 21 23 June 2011 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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"That seems silly to me. Better to learn how words are constructed through morphemes and
word roots." Word formation is not developed much in English. Ari, what writing system is better: Chinese or alphabetical? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5600 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 4 of 21 23 June 2011 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I do not think, that the fault lies in the alphabetic writing system, but that English borrows heavily from other languages, namle Greek and Latin, to form its advanced vocabulary. So these expression are not connected to everyday words.
If you would call it soul-lore, it would be as understandable as ψυχολογία is for a Greek person or 心理学 for a Chinese man. Edited by Cabaire on 23 June 2011 at 1:37pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| hjordis Senior Member United States snapshotsoftheworld. Joined 5187 days ago 209 posts - 264 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 5 of 21 23 June 2011 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Edited by hjordis on 23 June 2011 at 7:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 6 of 21 23 June 2011 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't quite know what that means, but I'm having difficulty interpreting it as something that's even remotely true.
That is of course impossible to answer objectively. From a purely practical standpoint, I can see no major advantages of using a morphosyllabic writing system, and quite a few disadvantages. The Chinese characters have, however, a significant cultural and aesthetic value that is impossible to take into account in an objective judgement.
But 'psychology' is an everyday word! Or at least everyweek. The fact is that even though these roots are not taken from Germanic and thus the very core of the language, they are still consistently Latin, Greek or French to a very high percentage. This means that most of them are quite common and thus understandable for most users. I could say words like "psycholingual", "urbanophile" or "anthrovore" and most educated speakers, even if they had not encountered them before, will have no problem understanding their meaning to a degree of precision much like that of unknown Mandarin words written in Chinese characters. With an added advantage: the English words are understandable in speech as well as writing, whereas with the Mandarin words you will most likely have to ask how it's spelled before you understand it. Otherwise you might think I said "新理学" or "心里穴", which would be pronounced the same way (unless you're from Taiwan), but the meaning would differ immensely, the first being something like "the study of what's new" or maybe "news studies" and the second "acupressure points in the heart". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5057 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 7 of 21 23 June 2011 at 9:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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It seemed to me that we could form less words from one root than in Russian, especially
by affixation. Edited by Марк on 23 June 2011 at 9:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 8 of 21 23 June 2011 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Dunno about Russian; it's possible English has less ways to form words from one root. But there are still quite a number of ways. Take the root "cannibal". I'll use this one to show that one doesn't have to take a very common morpheme that is included in lots of everyday words. We could get, for example:
Cannibalism, cannibalise, cannibalee, cannibalisation, cannibalised, cannibalising, cannibaliseable, cannibalness, cannibality, cannibaltastic*, cannibalicious, cannibalogy, cannibalogist, cannibalist, cannibaloscopy, cannibalometry, cannibalomancy, cannibalese, cannibalous and so on. And this is without building on the beginning of the word. I could go on forever with stuff like "psychocannibalistic", "overcannibalised" or "intercannibal"**. Many of these words are not commonly used, of course (except by students of cannibalomorhpic linguistics), but they're perfectly legitimate and bear witness to the English word building toolkit. Use a more common root and you'll get more common words. And then there's of course the great English tradition of portmanteaus (I will not pluralise it in French, thankyouverymuch). We could make lots of fun words, like "Cannibangelina", "cannibanana"*** or "canniburger". * No, really. "Cannibaltastic" gets quite a lot of hits on Google. ** Intercannibal relationships are known to be volatile and may quickly turn into intracannibal relationships. *** Cannibalese slang for the male genetalia. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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