Learning Mandarin – Difficulties and Opportunities

Mandarin language research is problematic. Mostly because Mandarin is varies greatly from other languages that people inside west have experimented with get to grips with before necessary . learn Chinese, not because learning Mandarin is much harder. Mandarin is strange associated with ways. The writing system is obviously completely different. There is no alphabet as the one that Germanic and Latin derivates have. Instead an image defines every word; or rather a series of what is termed as strokes. For example, three stokes that together make a square means mouth, one combination of strokes that kind of depicts a woman holding a kid means mother and so on. But the differences don’t end on that point. The grammar is largely made up goods is called contaminants. For example; adding a syllable pronounced ma after a sentence turns it proper question, adding guo after a sentence means that in which it happens in in the marketplace. Combining these basic examples; you go shanghai guo massachusetts? 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 test is 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 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, making a total matrix of 5 times 5 possibilities, and just one means mother. The tones are called tones but might not tones such as A minor or G, they are pitch modulation. The first tone is a rather steady high set up. The second is a rising pitch. The third tone goes down and then -up. 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 do you best go about visiting grips with this? Because of course salvaging possible. In fact I know one lovely French girl called Julie, her Chinese is much better than her English. Furthermore know a very talented German videographer that has lived in China only for three years; he often searches for your 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.