Tag: Learn chinese

Learning Mandarin – Difficulties and Opportunities

Mandarin language research is problematic. Mostly because Mandarin is unique from other languages that people inside of west have experimented with get to grips with before desiring to learn Chinese, not because learning Mandarin is much more troublesome. Mandarin is strange in any ways. The writing system is obviously completely different. There isn’t any no alphabet just as the one that Germanic and Latin derivates have. Instead a picture defines every word; or rather a string of what referred to as strokes. For example, three stokes that together make a square means mouth, one combination of strokes that type of depicts a woman holding a kid means mother and as such on. But the differences don’t end on that point. The grammar is largely made up of what is called fibers. For example; adding a syllable pronounced ma after a sentence turns it best suited question, adding guo after a sentence means that so it happens in the past. Combining these basic examples; you go shanghai guo mum? Communicates the question: an individual have gone to Shanghai? The differences are however much more explicit that this type of. Even the sounds of spoken Chinese are completely different from western counterparts.

Chinese spoken words are not only based on syllables as western words are. Hugely for mother in English is just 6 different sounds noted by each character; M, O, T, H, E and R. In Chinese there is 2 syllables, not four characters, ma and ma. The twist is that “mama” can be pronounced in twenty-five approaches. Each of 2 syllables, ma and ma, can be pronounced with 5 different tones, developing a total matrix of 5 times 5 possibilities, and just one means mother. The tones are called tones but are generally not tones regarding A minor or G, they are pitch modulation. The first tone is a rather steady high address. The second is a rising pitch. 3rd workout tone goes down and then out. The fourth is a sharp decline in pitch from high to low. The fifth is called the neutral tone and does not actually possess a modulation form.

All that sounds bloody difficult, of course you can is, at least at first. Exactly how to learn chinese do you best go about arriving to grips with this? Because of course salvaging possible. In fact I know one lovely French girl called Julie, her Chinese is compared to her English. I also know a very talented German videographer that has lived in China only for three years; he often searches for the English word to describe something and ends up saying it Offshore. Basically, I would argue, that Chinese isn’t so much bloody difficult as is actually bloody different.