|
 |
Learning chinese - a discouraging article | ||
Tags: Mandarin | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 6975 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 17 of 39 11 August 2007 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I thought the article was really funny because a lot of it was true. Not that I think that doesn't mean you shouldn't learn Chinese of course.
The sad fact is after 3 years of learing Chinese I feel i'm just not near the mark of native fluency. You could say i've just not studied hard in the language but I find i'm usually better in most aspects of Chinese than many elite (say Harvard/Yale) university students, who come to study Chinese at the Uni in China where I teach English). I've just worked my way through the "7 Little Goats" and "Red Riding Hood"! Don't get me wrong I didn't necessarily need a dictionary to understand these children's stories. Characters I didn't know could be worked out most of the time through context or by the phonetic markers contained in the character. Still I did find about 100 or so characters that I had never come across before! Many of these characters in this children's book alone are not in the top 2000 / 3000 list. I was going to make a start on a 'proper' novel but after the shock of realising my reading is still at a child's level I think I'll have to buy some comics. I do see students of 3 years being given complicated newspaper articles by their teachers but more often then not the entire page is full of personal notes by the student otherwise the majority of the meaning would be incomprehensible. Edited by delectric on 11 August 2007 at 11:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| labouillie Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6110 days ago 91 posts - 97 votes Speaks: Haitian Creole, English* Studies: French, Spanish | Message 18 of 39 14 August 2007 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | ||
|
That's discouraging for many people learning Chinese, but it seems to deal mostly with the written language. Spoken Mandarin should be a lot easier now that many of the self-teaching texts use Pinyin. Once you are familiar with the tones, then you should be ok. I plan on learning Mandarin some day. I just hope there's enough learning material in Pinyin to bring me to fluency. I guess the written language will have to come afterwards, but then there's the dilemma of choosing between the traditional and simplified character sets. I think it'd be possible to become familiar with some of the high frequency characters, but to learn to read and write at the native level just wouldn't be very practical for me.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6344 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 19 of 39 14 August 2007 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I love that article - it's hilarious to me. And very encouraging. I'm doing waaay above average by his account, which makes me feel good. If he didn't learn to read after 6 years, he either had a really poor study plan, or he didn't put in enough hours (most likely the latter).
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6241 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 20 of 39 24 August 2007 at 10:24am | IP Logged | ||
|
"the abysmal ratio of effort to effect"
"daunting complexity and difficulty" "Why in the world am I doing this?" 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| furyou_gaijin Senior Member Japan Joined 6180 days ago 540 posts - 631 votes Speaks: Latin* | Message 21 of 39 24 August 2007 at 11:08am | IP Logged | ||
|
I happened to see this article a long time ago and I do believe it's tongue in cheek and it also has great entertainment value and is excellent for impressing those with no prior exposure to Oriental languages with the magnitude of the task ahead... So that hopefully some of these people can drop off before even starting... ;-)
I also have a suspicion that it uncovers everything that is wrong with the 'traditional' methods of learning Chinese. I have never taken a single formal class in it and yet found myself capable of reading 'novels for pleasure' after about 1.5 years of a very part time study. But then again, I'm just not a fan of formal classes... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6233 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 22 of 39 24 August 2007 at 11:33am | IP Logged | ||
How did you do this study? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| furyou_gaijin Senior Member Japan Joined 6180 days ago 540 posts - 631 votes Speaks: Latin* | Message 23 of 39 24 August 2007 at 1:23pm | IP Logged | ||
Tons of authentic audio input (until subconsciously memorised) and a thorough study of the writing system. Zero time wasted in the class environment and zero contact with non-native speakers trying to use Chinese (as the guy behind the AllJapanese website points out: listening to girls called Stacy squeaking out “ah ree gar toe go zai moss oo” is not to your advantage). Approaching Chinese-looking (and otherwise attractive :) ) individuals wherever I went, to get some speaking practice - but not before I was actually able to have a meaningful conversation. Flying to China for a few days every 3-4 months for more in-depth exposure (which eventually led to Shanghai-zation of the way I sound). Etc., etc., etc... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Georgi87 Triglot Groupie Israel Joined 6095 days ago 43 posts - 44 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, French Studies: Japanese | Message 24 of 39 25 August 2007 at 2:18pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Spoken mandarin isn't very hard at all. Here's a more encouraging story: a good friend of mine travelled in China for about half a year, mainly in Mandarin-speaking areas*, and, according to him, would always go to markets to and talk to the vendors, who were always interested in chatting with a foreigner. Anyway, by the time he got back, he could hold quite a good conversation in Mandarin. Before that trip, he thought he was absolutely terrible at languages!
*A bit of a simplification, but you can think of them as Mandarin-speaking areas for now. From my own (limited) experience, I can also tell you that it's not a difficult language! There's no verb conjugations to worry about, and no cases or grammatical genders. Okay, there's 5 tones (4 if you don't count the toneless tone), but other dialects of Chinese have considerably more, and people manage to learn those! Now.. The one difficult bit of Mandarin is reading it. Unfortunately, in my year of studying Chinese, we were taught by a teacher who did absolutely nothing to ease the pain of memorising 200 characters. Throughout the year, I simply drilled myself by writing them over and over again, and as soon as the final exam was over, I probably forgot a good 30%+ of them, and another 20% since then. However, studying Japanese this summer, I chanced upon Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji." His method of remembering completely changed my whole approach to Chinese symbols, whatever the language! I'm unsure if there's an equivalent of Heisig's text for Mandarin Chinese, but: 1) In Heisig's book, you learn symbols and their meanings in English; of the kanji I've learned so far, a lot have the same meaning in Chinese as they do in Japanese, even if they have been simplified in Mandarin. 2) Regardless of how consistently true point 1 (I only ever learned about 200 mandarin characters), you should still have a look at Heisig's method. There's a sample somewhere online, which will work perfectly fine; you only need to go as far as Kanji 100 or so. All you have to do after that is apply Heisig's method to your Chinese studies. Even if his method isn't reliable for those who want to know how kanji came to be the way they are, it certainly makes memorising them very easy. Since getting Heisig's book, I've been memorising 20-30 kanji every day! When I was studying Chinese, I'd be lucky if I could memorise 15 Chinese symbols a week, with poor retention over longer periods. And I certainly put in a lot more effort into it back then! In short, I'd say that Chinese isn't half as hard as some people make it out to be if you approach it the right way. No difficult verbs, no grammatical genders, no cases, and symbols you can remember through a system such as Heisig's (I guess it might not work for everyone, but I'm sure there are alternatives)? Sounds brilliant to me! :) Please keep in mind that, unlike Cantonese or Japanese, Mandarin uses simplified chinese symbols, and this will make your life considerably easier than it could've been. Don't get down, and keep going at it! You'll get there sooner than you think :) If you can't find the free sample of Heisig's Remebering the Kanji, feel free to email me at p.georgi at gmail.com and I'll forward it to you. Edited by Georgi87 on 25 August 2007 at 2:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
