Learning Mandarin – Difficulties and Opportunities

Mandarin language studies are problematic. Mostly because Mandarin is varies greatly from other languages that people inside of west have attempt to get to grips with before trying to learn chinese language Chinese, not because learning Mandarin is much more complicated. Mandarin is strange for most ways. The writing system is obviously completely different. Is undoubtedly no alphabet given that the one that Germanic and Latin derivates have. Instead a picture 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 associated with depicts a woman holding a kid means mother while on. But the differences don’t end generally there. The grammar is largely made up of what is called contaminants. 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 there are. Combining these basic examples; you go shanghai guo ma? Communicates the question: possibly 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 words are 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 methods. Each of 2 syllables, ma and ma, can be pronounced with 5 different tones, making a total matrix of 5 times 5 possibilities, and just one means mother. The tones are called tones but they are not tones such as A minor or G, they are pitch modulation. Website tone is a slightly steady high address. The second is a rising pitch. Method to tone goes down and then out. The fourth is a clear, crisp decline in pitch from high to low. The fifth is called the neutral tone and does not actually have a modulation form.

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