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How Difficult is *Spoken* Mandarin? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| brian91 Senior Member Ireland Joined 5446 days ago 335 posts - 437 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 16 19 June 2010 at 10:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I would like to learn just spoken Mandarin (or at least start out with it) and was wondering how difficult it is?
Apparently the grammar is quite simple, and spoken Mandarin is much easier than written Mandarin. Would you say this is correct? What do you think? What about the four tones? All the best, Brian Edited by brian91 on 19 June 2010 at 10:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5671 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 16 19 June 2010 at 11:50am | IP Logged | ||
I am pretty heavily into learning spoken mandarin at the moment: The tones are hard at first to get used to if you have never come across using tones so carefully. Of course, we use tones all the time in European languages, but never with the same attention needed here. If you pay attention to it, though, you can master the complexity of tones within a few weeks. The grammar is certainly simple, compared at least to the complexity of many other grammars. However, the language also seems to be quite idiomatic, and in a sense many of the idioms can be thought of as a kind of grammar. Thankfully, you can pick up idioms as you go along. The vocabulary is a big challenge, since there are far fewer sounds in mandarin than in most other languages I have come across. This means that the same sound is used for many different spoken words (as apposed to the written language, where different words are represented by different characters). Sure, this "same sound for different words" problem exists in other languages (think of "there", "their", "they're" in English), but it seems to be much more prevalent in mandarin. Another problem, of course, is there are no cognates (words with share origin) with European words - so there are no "freebies" and little chance to "guess" the meaning of words. As a final point: many people say that you should focus at least as much on the written language as the spoken, and that you are soon going to fall flat on your face if you spend most of your time on the spoken language. Maybe they are right. I am spending around 30 minutes a day on the written, and about two hours a day on the spoken. So far, without problems. However, I am well aware this may prove to be a poor strategy. On the other hand, I have noticed that in many books and classes the focus seems too much slanted the other way: so long as you recognise written characters, and can product them with the right stroke order, you are seen to be mastering the language. Since my focus is on spoken communication (practicing with workers in the local chinese restaurant) I am prepared to take the risk of giving the written form lower priority for now. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5988 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 3 of 16 19 June 2010 at 12:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Check around on the forums, I think there are several threads about this. There seem to be a lot of people who want to avoid written Chinese.
I'd agree with you that Chinese grammar is fairly easy compared to most european languages (at least I found it to be so). The tones are not super tough, you just have to do lots of listening and you start to just know what "feels right". You need to listen a lot to what possible tones are out there, and how different people make them. They change a bit in different situations, but it can all be learned by lots of listening. The real difficulty with Mandarin, in my view, is learning enough vocabulary. As an English speaker, you have to start totally from scratch because there are no related words. I personally find it pretty tough to get lots of vocab quickly purely from listening. Written texts and dictionaries and example sentences are an enormous treasure trove of vocabulary, so without them it might be more difficult. I'm sure someone has succeeded at it, though. Your biggest problem is going to be finding materials. You can't learn Chinese from Pimsleur, for example...it's only a handful of hours. You're going to need hundreds and hundreds of hours of interesting listening material in order to learn the language purely from listening, so get started with collecting it now. This method becomes more feasible if you have a bunch of native speakers around you all the time that are really patient....especially a boyfriend or girlfriend who'll put up with your beginner level longer ;) I'd say don't give up on written Chinese before you've tried it. The characters are very systematic. Considering that it'll take you years to learn the language purely from the spoken form, then it doesn't make much sense (in my opinion) to give up on the written form just because it'll take a little while to learn. Overall, I think it's much more likely that you'll learn the language faster if you learn some of the writing too, because of the expanded sources for interesting and informative material. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| YoshiYoshi Senior Member China Joined 5533 days ago 143 posts - 205 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 4 of 16 19 June 2010 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Some of foreign learners might mistake the meaning of Mandarin, thinking it merely refers to modern colloquial Chinese that is spoken easily in everyday conversation, in general, Mandarin actually consists of oral Chinese, written Chinese, modern Chinese, and quite a bit of widespread elements of classical Chinese, so Mandarin is objectively considered to be a comprehensive language (a combination) which may not be clearly defined in a few words, that is to say, you would probably have a hard time learning Mandarin without getting down to written or classical form at all. And the grammar of Mandarin might not be as simple as people described, there is no doubt that Mandarin does not have the cases, genders, conjugation, or the agglutination in Japanese, it seems certain that, however, Mandarin also has its own special difficulties that could frustrate intermediate learners in the process of study. When it comes to the tones, I think it much easier than those of Cantonese, Vietnamese, or Thai as well, but even so Mandarin still has some erratic tonal changes from time to time, especially the Beijing dialect, you are even unable to classify them accurately according to standard 4 tones. Please do not get me wrong, I did not mean to pour cold water on your enthusiasm for Mandarin Chinese, I just hope you have a basic understanding of Mandarin before you seriously start it from scratch. Good luck to you!
4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| orion Senior Member United States Joined 7023 days ago 622 posts - 678 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 5 of 16 19 June 2010 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have not found spoken Mandarin to be particularly difficult. I was able to use it to communicate with a building custodian who spoke very little English. You must make sure to get the tones down correctly, they are absolutely vital in order to be understood. The characters are interesting, but they have not been my primary focus. I mainly use Mandarin to make chitchat with the people in my local Chinese restaurant as well!
The grammar of Mandarin (at least the beginning stages) is much simpler than Russian, or even German, which I see you also study. As others have said, vocabulary acquisition can be challenging. You may find the Michel Thomas Mandarin course useful, as it really emphasizes the tones. I have also found the Assimil Chinese with Ease to be pretty good. The nice thing about it is that it includes pinyin so you can see what the tones are supposed to be. It also includes the characters, in case you decide to learn them. Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5329 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 6 of 16 20 June 2010 at 1:29am | IP Logged | ||
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Fairly easy, the tones aren't bad at all. The main difficulty is the strangeness of the sounds.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6052 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 7 of 16 20 June 2010 at 6:28am | IP Logged | ||
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No offense, but it seems that all the people that have answered, besides one native, are beginners in Chinese (by their own rating) and don't rate themselves fluent yet, so they will bring a different perspective.
Whatever the difficulty of just the spoken language, I must agree with the native that it would be a mistake to study just the spoken, and would inherently limit your abilities later on if you want to make it to the advanced level. If you goal is to reach solid intermediate level, to talk about day to day topics, handle any common conversation on a tourist trip, etc, then I don't personally see a problem, and would probably be easier. FSI Mandarin (no reading or writing) would be a good program to help bring you to this level. Good luck. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5329 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 8 of 16 20 June 2010 at 6:58am | IP Logged | ||
None taken. I am at a very basic level, but most of what I've heard has said that spoken Chinese was easy. And with no conjugations, particles, and relatively easy grammar, (this is mainly from what I have heard, I haven't delved too deep in it yet) it shouldn't be too bad. The tones are simple: The first one is flat, the second one is rising, the third goes down then back up, and the fourth falls. You're going to want more in-depth explanations than what I just gave on that, but that was just to show it's not as hard as it seems. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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