For myself I can agree Adam for it’s important to get the feel for the sound and the language. Tones weren’t that big problem, at least for listening. I don’t have so much possibility to actually talk Chinese. But I think these will come when I have a reasonable amount of words to talk and not just can say “Hi” and “How are you”.

The biggest problem with Chinese is writing and reading. I mean pinyin is fine, but just not widely used on chinese web pages or so. The other things aren’t really problems. I guess most letters in pinyin sound more like German letters than like English letters but a lot of them sound quite different to any Language that I know.

So it’s really challenging and the more satisfied you can be if some chinese people can actually understand you.

It doesn’t always work the other way though, as you said. Seeing “fire vehicle” might not instinctively conjure up images of a train in this day and age. However, if you knew what “small school” and “middle school” meant, you could probably guess that “big school” meant university. I feel for Chinese people having to learn separate names for each of these terms in English!

This has given me a good idea for a future post, so thanks!

Yes I agree with you. If you were learning English and you had never seen the word ‘University’ before, you would have no chance of knowing its meaning. However if you saw dàxué and you knew dà meant big and xué meant school then you could guess that it meant university if it was in the right context. Cāntīng reminds me of the English word ‘canteen’ so that word is easy to remember.

Chinese is a more visual language than English in that they have based their words on combining together two or more words that form an image in your mind such as wǒ mǎ shàng huí lái (我马上回来) (To come back soon). You form the image of a person racing back on a horse which is much quicker than walking.

However this simplicity can lead to confusion. You could easily think dàxué meant a big school and not necessarily University. I think most people the first time they see the word huǒchē (火车) think is means fire vehicle (fire engine) and not train. Once you know that it means train, it does make sense because trains used to burn coal to create the steam to drive the train.

It is true that Chinese is not as hard as it is portrayed to be. It is probably portrayed as being too hard because Chinese characters look like meaningless swiggles to the untrained eye. However, I do think that it is much harder for a western person to learn Chinese than it is to learn other languages. For instance an English person who has never studied Spanish could pick up a Spanish newspaper and understand about ¼ of it because so many Spanish words sound and look a lot like English words. This is not true of Chinese because a person that had never studied Chinese would not be able to read a single word from a Chinese newspaper.