Learning Mandarin – Difficulties and Opportunities

Mandarin language studies are problematic. Mostly because Mandarin is distinctive from other languages that people inside of west have experimented with get to grips with before shopping learn Chinese, not because learning Mandarin is much harder. Mandarin is strange in any ways. The writing system is obviously completely different. There is no alphabet once the one that Germanic and Latin derivates have. Instead an image defines every word; or rather a sequence of what referred to as strokes. For example, three stokes that together make a square means mouth, one combination of strokes that sort of depicts a woman holding a kid means mother as a result on. But distinctions between don’t end and then there. The grammar is largely made up goods is called particles. For example; adding a syllable pronounced ma after a sentence turns it suitable question, adding guo after a sentence means that going without shoes happens in items on the market. Combining these basic examples; you go shanghai guo mum? Communicates the question: perhaps you gone to Shanghai? The differences are however much more explicit that your. Even the sounds of spoken Chinese are completely different from western counterparts.

Chinese spoken test is not only based on syllables as western words are. The word for mother in English is just 6 different sounds noted by each character; M, O, T, H, E and R. In Chinese there is two syllables, not four characters, ma and ma. The twist is that “mama” can be pronounced in twenty-five various ways. Each of the two syllables, ma and ma, can be pronounced with 5 different tones, creating a total matrix of 5 times 5 possibilities, and one means mother. The tones are called tones but might not tones like A minor or G, they are pitch modulation. The very tone is a slightly steady high pitch. The second is a rising pitch. The third tone goes down and then up. The fourth is a pointy decline in pitch from high to low. The fifth is called the neutral tone will not not actually possess a modulation form.

All that sounds bloody difficult, as well as is, at least at first. How exactly do you best go about coming to grips with out? Because of course moment has come possible. In fact I know one lovely French girl called Julie, her Chinese is better than her English. In addition know a very talented German videographer that has lived in China for less than three years; he often searches for that English word to describe something and ends up saying it Offshore. Basically, I would argue, that Chinese is not so much bloody difficult as is actually bloody different.