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Learning chinese - a discouraging article | ||
Tags: Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| audiolang Diglot Senior Member Romania Joined 6114 days ago 108 posts - 109 votes  2 sounds Speaks: Romanian*, English | Message 9 of 39 08 August 2007 at 11:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The only thing/person that could discourage me from learning Chinese is me.
It was too long to read,but I could predict that it had a little fiction in it too. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Guests Guest Group Joined 7170 days ago 0 - 22 votes Logged on | Message 10 of 39 09 August 2007 at 11:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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You could try to ask your question on learning Chinese community, just as this Chinese Language Forum...
Chinese is definitively not a difficult language. | ||||||
| LilleOSC Senior Member United States lille.theoffside.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6485 days ago 545 posts - 546 votes 4 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 11 of 39 09 August 2007 at 11:50am | IP Logged | |||||
What makes you say that? The consensus is that it is a very difficult, and time-consuming language to learn for most people. The difficulty does depend on your native-language, but in general Mandarin is really challenging. I am really surprised you said that. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Asiafeverr Diglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6136 days ago 346 posts - 431 votes 1 sounds Speaks: French*, English Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, German | Message 12 of 39 11 August 2007 at 11:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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No single/plurals, absolutely no verb conjugations, no verb tense either, very simple grammatical structure with rules that are consistent most of the time, etc.
That's quite easy for me! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6684 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 13 of 39 11 August 2007 at 11:56am | IP Logged | |||||
So I suppose the writing system can be learnt in 5 minutes, huh? Even books aimed at children can be a challenge to get through if there are many unknown characters and plays on words. The Harry Potter books are full of words you'd never normally come across (I certainly never had to ask for a wand when I lived there!) and even long-time learners have to check unknown characters and words once in a while. The relative simplicity of the grammar is definately outweighed by the time it takes to learn to read fluently and, for some people, mastering the tones and speaking the language properly takes time and effort. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6264 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 14 of 39 11 August 2007 at 12:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Spoken fluency in Mandarin is definitely much easier to achieve than in French or German. As for the characters they do make the language harder to learn, but just how hard they make it depends on you. I argue that they need not be much more difficult to learn than English spelling, but Westerners don't have practice memorizing seemingly random shapes and since learning Chinese has only recently become fashionable there are no great methods available yet. For Japanese however there's Heisig's method that can teach you 2000 characters in about 6 months. If you learned the same amount of characters for Chinese (and using the same approach is possible, so it should not take longer), you would know enough characters for a vocabulary of at least 5000 words , which should situate you quite comfortably, even if you need to look up words like "wand" or the like. And whoever said that children's books are necessarily easier than adults' books? "Harry Potter" contains tons of unusual vocabulary, "The Little Prince" contains outdated grammar and still some unusual vocabulary (though it's rather easy in Chinese), but "The Stranger" by Albert Camus is so easy that I could have read it after one year of High School French. Yet it's definitely a book for adults, as its a literary application of some of Camus' philosophic ideas. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| LilleOSC Senior Member United States lille.theoffside.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6485 days ago 545 posts - 546 votes 4 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 15 of 39 11 August 2007 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
How can that be? Don't the tones make it really difficult? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6264 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 16 of 39 11 August 2007 at 4:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Not really. You can learn them, especially if you speak English or German. We actually use tones already, e. g. when asking a question, so the only thing we need to learn is to use tones consciously. Chinese sounds are also quite straightforward and there are no long words or annoying consonant clusters that would take much practice. Then, there's the immense amount of time you save by not having to learn declensions, conjugations, plural, articles, prepositions, composite tenses, liason and so on. Learning to apply these all at the same time while having a conversation is particularly hard. Reported speech for example is one area that requires major grammar in all European languages, including English. In English and French it's a tense shift, so you have to learn e. g. "simple present turns into simple past; future turns into conditional 1; past progressive turns into past perfect progressive;" and so on. In German, you have to use the subjunctive. Hence, it's a subject that will only come up in the 3rd year or so. In Chinese, you use the same words and forms as in the speech you're reporting (minus the obvious exchange of pronouns). Reported speech could be taught in the first month without problems. It's the same with most grammar. Students of Latin wouldn't even recognize that Chinese has a grammar. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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