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 hoping to learn Chinese, not because learning Mandarin is much stronger. Mandarin is strange for most ways. The writing system is obviously completely different. You need to no alphabet as being the one that Germanic and Latin derivates have. Instead a picture defines every word; or rather a series of what is addressed strokes. For example, three stokes that together make a square means mouth, one combination of strokes that regarding depicts a woman holding a kid means mother and as such on. But right after don’t end and then there. The grammar is largely made up in the is called flakes. For example; adding a syllable pronounced ma after a sentence turns it proper question, adding guo after a sentence means that so it happens in the past. Combining these basic examples; you go shanghai guo master of arts? Communicates the question: have you gone to Shanghai? The differences are however much more explicit that these. Even the sounds of spoken Chinese are completely different from western counterparts.
Chinese spoken words are not only defined by 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 two syllables, not four characters, ma and ma. The twist is that “mama” can be pronounced in twenty-five means. Each of 2 syllables, ma and ma, can be pronounced with 5 different tones, creating a total matrix of 5 times 5 possibilities, and only one means mother. The tones are called tones but they are not tones because A minor or G, they are pitch modulation. The very tone is a rather steady high address. The second is a rising pitch. The third tone goes down and then out. The fourth is a clear 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 do you best go about beginning to grips with it? Because of course moment has come possible. In fact I know one lovely French girl called Julie, her Chinese is much better than her English. In addition know a very talented German videographer that has lived in China for just three years; he often searches for that English word to describe something and ends up saying it Chinese. Basically, I would argue, that Chinese is not so much bloody difficult as is actually bloody different.
