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Mandarin:really interesting and easy... | ||
Tags: Difficulty | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 5842 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 9 of 10 09 April 2011 at 6:57am | IP Logged |
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If Mandarin is so easy, why is it rated a Level III language by FSI, requiring some 2,000 hours of study, including one year in China?
I really wonder about people who claim that any language is "easy". I wonder about their ability in that language to be honest, or if they have even learned a language through hard study before. Even "less difficult" languages for English speakers like Spanish, French, etc, require massive amounts of work and dedication, and experienced language learners should know better. Besides, in my opinion the principle reason for difficulty in a language is it's "distance from one's native language", not the supposed simplicity, lack of conjugation, tense, or whatever. Binary numbers are very simple, but have you tried using them in daily life? Multiplying them? Not so easy. And Mandarin is not "singing". I don't even notice the tones anymore and that's how it should be. Ask a native about tones and they'll look at you blankly, sometimes get it wrong. They don't notice and couldn't care less. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6374 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 10 of 10 09 April 2011 at 8:30am | IP Logged |
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My thoughts on the matter:
1: Mandarin IS easy. It's, in my experience, a lot easier than French, for example. But easy != quick to learn. Mandarin takes a lot more time to learn than French, for a native speaker of English. There's just so much information to memorize. All those characters, all those words, virtually no cognates … But actually figuring out how the language works and using it is a breeze, because of the extremely simple grammar. I speak Mandarin with much more confidence than I speak French. When speaking French I'm always second-guessing myself. Even when my French skills were at their top there was a little voice in the back of my head going "Shouldn't it be a subjunctive after that 'que'?" This hardly ever happens in Mandarin. What does happen is that I'm not sure of the right word and need to "talk around it". So in my mind the difference between learning French and learning Mandarin is like the difference between building a house and building a mountain. The house is actually more difficult to build, but it's gonna take a lot less time than the mountain. 2: Mandarin is not like singing. The tones in Mandarin are mostly defined by their contour (rising, falling, etc.), whereas in singing, you're working with different levels. This is why tones are ignored in Mandarin songs. In Cantonese, however, you've got three or four (depending on who you ask) level tones separated by their pitch. This IS just like singing, and if you just add rhythm to any Cantonese sentence, it becomes a melody. This also means that the tones of the lyrics need to correspond to the melody in Cantonese songs, which is, as I mentioned, not the case in Mandarin. So you could take any Cantonese song (they're mostly written in Mandarin but pronounced in Cantonese) and sing it in Mandarin without problems, but you couldn't do the same thing the other way around. Mandarin is not like singing, but Cantonese is. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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