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What qualifies as "difficult vocabulary" | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6586 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 17 of 22 23 May 2011 at 12:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
Idioms are impossible in my opinion, too. I find them very, very difficult. I love them to death. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| AlexBlackman Newbie Australia Joined 5513 days ago 11 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 18 of 22 23 May 2011 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thirded！ Many of them cannot be understood unless you know the meaning in the first place. I feel Chinese idioms are the world's biggest inside joke. Take these commonly used ones for example, who can guess what they mean? 画蛇添足 九牛一毛 塞翁失马 司空见惯 脱颖而出 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6663 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 19 of 22 23 May 2011 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
http://www.3kid.net/docs/0033/1197235807.htm seems like the Chinese themselves have to be taught these as kids, hehe. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6586 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 20 of 22 23 May 2011 at 7:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The chengyu are surely annoying, but I wouldn't call them difficult vocabulary, to be honest. If you know the
characters, they're often not too hard to remember. The problem is that there are so many of them, of course, but a single chengyu isn't too difficult. No, there are two types of difficult vocab items, I find. One is the character with many meanings. The character 幾 in Mandarin has the twin meanings of "Some" and "How many", often relying on nothing but context to distinguish them. That's not too bad. It gets a little hairier with Cantonese, which adds the two additional meanings of "Rather" and "How much" to it. All in all this category tends to cause problems in the beginning, but I find they straighten things out after a while and you get used to them. The second category is the real killer. It's the single character with not only many meanings, but many pronunciations. The character 朴 in the traditional character set has three different meanings with three different pronunciations in Mandarin (only two in Cantonese). But it gets worse: the communist character reformers, in all their wisdom, thought this was not enough, and merged the character with 樸, meaning the simplified character now has five different Mandarin pronunciations (but "only" three in Cantonese). That sort of thing kills me. That's a difficult vocabulary item. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5770 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 21 of 22 23 May 2011 at 11:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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No, no. Idioms are fine. They have books written about them. You aren't expected to understand them and be able to used them correctly as a learner until you reach an advanced stage. Of course they take some effort, and they can be frustrating, but there are some very easy rules about them: If they're high frequency, you'll pick them up without understanding what exactly they mean and why they do it. If they are rather low frequency, there will be native speakers who don't use them correctly, so you don't have to worry about those too much. And, often they are redundant in their usage. Often enough that you can figure out what they're supposed to mean.
Incidentally, one of the most elusive Japanese words for me is 気. I, of course, know its translations, and have an idea of the concepts it stands for. But it is used in many expressions and some compound words that I find rather difficult to grasp, because I cannot see the pattern. 気 is one of the words that modifies the context in a way that often enough you need to know what it is supposed to mean in that particular context before you can understand the context. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| AlexBlackman Newbie Australia Joined 5513 days ago 11 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 22 of 22 24 May 2011 at 5:46am | IP Logged | |||||
You are right, I don't want to start off another Chinese Vs. Japanese megathread, but one thing I find easier about Chinese is it has a lot fewer multiple pronouncation characters. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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