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Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Matheus Senior Member Brazil Joined 5065 days ago 208 posts - 312 votes  Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, French | Message 25 of 57 01 April 2011 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | ||
You're right, I use to talk with a native Chinese speaker (she speaks a regional dialect, but also Mandarin). Even studying English for 8 years, she still making sentences like this one "I am happy yesterday".. It's sometimes confusing, but I enjoy this "Chinese" style. Unfortunately, it's not good for my English (I'm also a learner), because sometimes I tend to imitate (unconciously) how she creates sentences. By the months I've been talking to her, she never used a verb in the past tense (but she seems to understand when I use them - or not). Her spelling is hard to understand, but I don't care too much about it, as long as I understand her. I don't feel confident to correct her because I don't have a good English level too. It would be different if I was a native speaker. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tropi Diglot Groupie Austria Joined 5415 days ago 67 posts - 87 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 26 of 57 01 April 2011 at 6:46pm | IP Logged | ||
Don't be scared...by either of them. When I started Mandarin I didn't put in that much thought about the difficulty. If you really want to learn it, do it. If you are not sure about it, than think about it until you are. But: It's said to be way harder than it actually is. "Oh my god, there are so many different characters." If you learn them, you will see that there are very few (okay, still more than our alphabet) elements that are used over and over again. Often these elements even help you do understand it's meaning, popular example "to rest" is made up of a man and a tree. Easy to memorize if you think of a man that leans on a tree. The tones were super hard for me at the beginning. I just had them all wrong. But when you got some listening experience this gradually becomes better. 加油! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jsun Groupie Joined 5069 days ago 62 posts - 129 votes | Message 27 of 57 03 April 2011 at 8:16am | IP Logged | ||
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As someone said, Chinese is a 3D language, which means shape, sound and meaning are
all connected. I don't know if there is a book on the market that can connect these 3 elements. I can just see books that talk about these three elements separately. I saw a Kanji book that uses graphics to illustrate meanings. 
Romanisations in red are Cantonese Yale romanisations. (Well, I put Cantonese in here because Mandarin misses some of the stories) I saw another that discusses about sound and meaning of Chinese. 
Now you understand meaning of initial "m" and look back at Cantonese and even Japanese pronunciations to "feel" the connections.. Consonant m seals your lips and therefore 1. the meanings of final m: mouth closed -> hiding -> dark 
This link is lost in Mandarin as final m doesn't exist in modern Mandarin. 2. the function of initial m: dark, stupid, hiding, blind....etc Modern Mandarin is inconsistent on words like 亡wàng, 忙máng, 忘wàng I'm thinking of grouping these stuffs myself and create better Chinese character resources. Edited by jsun on 03 April 2011 at 8:35am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5677 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 28 of 57 07 April 2011 at 12:00am | IP Logged | ||
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Here's another fantastic resource, for learning to pronounce Mandarin correctly:
Chinese Pronunciation Guide Obviously I can't judge his advice from experience, seeing as I am a complete beginner in Mandarin myself, but his explanations made a lot of sense to me and the part about positioning the tongue was easier to understand than I usually find those sorts of things to be. I recommend it to anyone who's interested! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5982 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 29 of 57 07 April 2011 at 4:59am | IP Logged | ||
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I read this 10 years ago when I was a beginner, and to this very day I remember this
stupid passage: ""My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can't read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to save my life." This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers... " Such an incompetent researcher should be immediately fired. It's not as if there aren't plenty of English professors in Chinese universities who couldn't speak 10 minutes of conversational English with a native speaker to save their life. So why is it surprising that there are Westerners incompetent in Chinese but who have gotten themselves in so deep that all they have left to do is keep pretending to save face...? FAIL. MASSIVE FAIL. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6566 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 31 of 57 07 April 2011 at 8:59am | IP Logged | ||
It's considered by many to be the only accurate guide to Mandarin pronunciation out there. Written by John Pasden, of ChinesePod fame. I recommend it, too! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5677 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 32 of 57 08 April 2011 at 12:08am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the confirmation, Ari! I'm really glad I stumbled upon it.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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