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Mandarin: Difficulty of Not Forgetting | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| languagefreak Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5246 days ago 51 posts - 52 votes  Speaks: Russian, English* Studies: German | Message 1 of 5 11 May 2011 at 3:29am | IP Logged |
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Let me start of my explaining my thinking. I am a native russian speaker; I was born in Russia and moved to
America when I was 2. However, my parents couldn't speak English, so at home we always spoke, and still speak, only Russian. By going to school and watching (a lot!) of TV, I learned English, and of course now at age 20 my English is much better than my Russian. My English is of course flawless and I sound like anyone else. In Russian, however, I sound a bit worse. I don't have an accent really, however, I do make occasional mistakes with cases just because my feel for the language isn't as good as someone who speaks it hours a day. Also, my vocabulary is quite limited, because again, I don't speak it enough to develop my vocabulary. I can understand pretty much everything except difficult words when I listen though (and to be fair, of course I don't, like anyone else, know every English word). Now comes my question. After this summer, I will be reasonably fluent in German, because I will be working in Germany for about 3 months at a store, so I will have to speak German for many hours a day. At that point, starting a 4th language isn't as dangerous as it would be right now. So, I thought, why not try Mandarin? However, I am not someone to do something unless I am going to perfect it, so I don't want to do Mandarin unless I think I can become fairly fluent at it. Also, in case I have to pause my education in it for some time, I don't want it to all disappear from my head. So, I guess my question is, will SPOKEN (not written!) Mandarin, after I learn it, be more difficult to forget than Russian, because the grammar is so simple? I don't think I wrote my question well enough, but I think this is enough for now. I will most likely have to clarify though later, lol. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evilgoat Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4991 days ago 8 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 2 of 5 11 May 2011 at 6:26am | IP Logged |
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I think it all depends on what kind of level of Mandarin you're aspiring to obtain.
To answer your question: During the periods when I've stopped studying Chinese, I definitely regressed. I'd guess my passive understanding and active usage abilities diminished at a similar rate. I estimate that they got worse faster than another Western language would have (such as French and Spanish, which I have studied), simply because directly translating in my head from English to French seems to work a lot better than English to Chinese. To digress a bit: Assuming for a moment that tones and pronunciation give you no problems, the biggest obstacles for learning Chinese are cultural and conceptual analogies. While some things translate directly ("ball," "cat," etc.), learning such a different language from English means you spend a lot of time assembling a new linguistic structure in your head. To put it simply, I think the danger in stopping studying Chinese for a while is not in forgetting the grammar, but rather in forgetting the vocabulary. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5831 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 3 of 5 11 May 2011 at 6:59pm | IP Logged |
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I find that I very quickly forget Chinese vocabulary, and others who i have discussed this with agree. Many words. especially at the beginning, can be easily confused due to the limited number of phonemes in Mandarin, and there are just no cognates to use as a crutch. if you have only ever studied European languages. So I would definitely agree with Evilgoat about the problem of forgetting vocab.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| FamusBluRaincot Triglot Groupie Canada Joined 5560 days ago 50 posts - 114 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin, Italian | Message 4 of 5 12 May 2011 at 9:04am | IP Logged |
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I too have found that Mandarin vocabulary is difficult to learn and retain. When I started, it felt like swimming
through molasses. Now, after a number of years of study, it has become much easier, but I’m not sure that it will ever be truly easy. It’s not just the lack of cognates that makes it difficult. You might learn an English translation for a word, but you will only fully grasp the meaning of the word by hearing it in many different contexts. Chinese words and expressions just don’t match up well with English. Even concrete nouns are far from straightforward-you have to learn their measure words, and a given noun might have more than one measure word depending upon the situation. Compare this with learning the genders of nouns in the Romance languages. Adding to the difficulty is the large number of homonyms in the language. Another thing new learners should realize, is that Chinese is an old and rich language. It is rich in idioms, many of them using words that no longer exist in modern Chinese, or whose meanings have changed. Chinese children learn these in school, through stories, and such. Many of the podcast lessons try to teach the idioms without teaching the stories behind them. My personal opinion is that you won’t get the full flavor and meaning of these idioms without studying the stories, and this too takes a lot of time. I learned belatedly that learning some characters can help with sorting things out. Like many beginners, I thought that the characters would be the most difficult part of the language. At one point, I had already worked my way through more than a hundred IMandarinpod lessons while knowing less than ten characters. But once I started to do a bit of work on them, I found they came fairly quickly. But I already had a good idea of the meanings of many of the syllables-a complete beginner wouldn’t find it so easy. I now think its a mistake to totally ignore the characters as I did. But I can’t help but notice that there seems to be a large number of Chinese learners who can read the language just fine, but who are very poor at understanding the spoken language. And I had better not get started on how badly they pronounce the language. (If you mispronounce Spanish, you will be thought of as a gringo with an accent. If you mispronounce Mandarin, they will give you a baffled look and wonder what language you are speaking) I’m hesitant to give advice to people who are interested in learning the language. Not everyone wants the same thing, and your ambitions can change as your progress in the language. There is nothing wrong with wanting to taste the language a bit, satisfy your curiosity, and dazzle your Chinese friends with a few well memorized and well pronounced sentences. (That was me when I started) But if you truly want to learn the language well, and are not prepared to spend 14 hours a day at it, you should expect to be at it for a number of years, and you must be dogged and patient. I agree with those who say that, for an English speaker, Mandarin takes 3 to 4 times as much study as a language like Spanish. Edited by FamusBluRaincot on 12 May 2011 at 9:13am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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