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Mandarin Nightmare | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| 吕明扬 Newbie United States Joined 6058 days ago 30 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 25 of 34 14 February 2009 at 10:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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I know for me anyway, its so much harder to read pinyin. Mostly because i have to sound out something, instead of just knowing it by looking at the character.
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| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6274 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 26 of 34 14 February 2009 at 1:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have never seriously studied Chinese (perhaps one day I will) and so I am perhaps making unjustified assumptions about it from checking out library books on it and wondering if Chinese characters can have a negative effect on the literacy rate in China, just because it looks to me like a difficult writing system to learn.
Writing systems are the garb that languages come in. Even alphabets have their problems. It is known that in the English-speaking world, the unphonetic spelling of English can create teaching difficulties, and it doesn't help dyslexics one bit. To me, learning a language that requires the memorisation of thousands of characters, many of them somewhat similar to each other, would appear to be an even more difficult task. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 吕明扬 Newbie United States Joined 6058 days ago 30 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 27 of 34 09 April 2009 at 7:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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So its been awhile, I think I'm just going to put a few more months into Mandarin. I'm starting to feel really burned out now. But on the bright side of things I'm going to a speech competition in San Fransisco at the end of the month, to see how my year long studies measure up to other people.
The more I study this language the further away from fluency I feel. When I attempt to speak I feel like I'm floundering through words, the other day I said “有没有什么什么吗？” So its on to pick the next language to learn. Right now I'm thinking about Japanese, Korean, or maybe something easier, like Spanish. Japanese mostly because that's what I meant to learn when I got sidetracked by Chinese. Korean because my girlfriend speaks it, Spanish because my family speaks it... choices choices choices... anyway enough of my ramblings 非话不多说。 Anyone have any suggestions for what I should do with my last few months of hard Mandarin work? Right now I would consider myself perhaps upper intermediate. Know about 1500 characters and maybe 8-9000 words. active vocabulary of perhaps 1600. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leonidus Triglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 6328 days ago 113 posts - 123 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, French Studies: German, Mandarin | Message 28 of 34 09 April 2009 at 12:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's what I would learn if I were you. When I get bored with Chinese or just get plain tired of it, I learn French to relax a bit and get my ear tuned back into a European language. Because you'd make better use of Spanish in your part of the world, go with Spanish. It'll be easy to learn, somewhat easier than French even, and you are sure to find many speakers of the language. When you feel like you've been relaxing too much with it, go back to Mandarin. The brain needs switching between subjects to keep fresh and focused. That is exactly what you can achieve with the above approach. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| solidsnake Diglot Senior Member China Joined 7043 days ago 469 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 29 of 34 14 April 2009 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
废话。。 personally, i would stick with chinese, until you reach to a decent level, before venturing off into another language. Otherwise, you risk being a 半瓶醋。 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| agimcomas Pentaglot Groupie Canada Joined 6461 days ago 69 posts - 77 votes Speaks: Spanish*, French, English, Portuguese, German Studies: Mandarin, Korean | Message 30 of 34 21 April 2009 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For those who have a gift for languages, who are used to learning faster and better than most people, Chinese will be a sort of party pooper. You realize that it will take you a considerably larger amount of time and dedication to make some progress. However, it is not impossible. Actually, it is quite possible.
I recommend patience. Study 'conscientiously' and you'll get there, guaranteed. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Nick_dm Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5715 days ago 24 posts - 26 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Cantonese | Message 31 of 34 22 April 2009 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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吕明扬, I'm no expert (your Mandarin sounds far more advanced than my Cantonese) but I'd recommend not taking a complete break and at the very least maintaining some form of "lazy" exposure, e.g. TV shows, online radio or podcasts.
You asked about podcasts earlier in the thread, I don't look out for Mandarin in particular but if you have iTunes then you can search by language and "Chinese" returns quite a lot of results with a mixture of Mandarin and Cantonese (and a few others dialects). http://podcast.rthk.org.hk/podcast/allpodcast.php?lang=zh-CN , has a handful listed as 普通話 but the majority are in Cantonese. SBS radio also has a Mandarin podcast - the RSS feed appears to be broken and there are no updates from the last few months but you can download historical episodes here: http://www20.sbs.com.au/podcasting/index.php?action=feeddeta ils&feedid=1&catid=1 William, you're right that Chinese characters take time to get to grips with initially but I'm not convinced they cause significant problems in the long run. Here's a quote I found really interesting from alljapaneseallthetime.com.
Full article: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/you-dont-have-a-fo reign-language-problem-you-have-an-adult-literacy-problem Incidentally while Japanese uses Chinese characters alongside its syllable-based scripts a significant number of Chinese characters are still required for literacy. Literacy is officially defined in China as 1500 characters for rural people and 2000 for urban dwellers, while Japanese schools formally teach over 1900 characters by the end of secondary school. (More characters would be required for advanced reading in both languages). Edited by Nick_dm on 22 April 2009 at 11:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leonidus Triglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 6328 days ago 113 posts - 123 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, French Studies: German, Mandarin | Message 32 of 34 23 April 2009 at 1:51am | IP Logged | |||||
I've heard that although 2000 is a high school level, you can't really read a newspaper unless you know close to 3000 characters, and even then you'll be occasionally looking up characters. Not to mention reading scientific magazines, those require more of them. Thus I am not sure what 1500-2000 can really achieve, being able to read shop signs and books for children? But still I'll be happy one day when I've learned my first 1500 hanzi and be a "rural" literate for starters :) Edited by leonidus on 23 April 2009 at 1:51am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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