É chinês realmente que duro?
Muitos povos consideram o chinês como sendo uma das línguas as mais resistentes a aprender. Aquela nse poder seja razão bastante aprendê-la, desde muitos como o desafio que vem com ela e o relish os olhares da perplexidade que passers pela elasticidade quando se ouvem que você pode falar o chinês! Em minha experiência pessoal entretanto, eu encontrei que muitas das razões dadas para o chinês que é assim duro não eram realmente que duramente quando quebradas para baixo. Isto significou que eu aprendia uma língua que outra pensamento era muito duro, quando realmente aquele não era necessariamente o caso (muito mais melhor do que aprendendo algo de que outros pensam são fáceis mas não é realmente!) Estão aqui alguns dos obstáculos principais que povoam o encontro ao tentar aprender o chinês, e minhas soluções pessoais a superar então.
Os tons
Este é o desafio inicial que a maioria de novatos enfrentam. Como possa mài meio “vender” quando mǎi meio “comprar”? Assim agora, não somente você tem que recordar aquele jiào do shuì os meios “dormem”, você recorda mais melhor que há dois quartos tons lá ou você risco que fala sobre “dumplings” em vez do “sono.” Tendo que certamente memorizar o elemento extra do tom no alto de cada palavra nova do vocabulário dirigiria todo o learner louco?
Minha solução: Esta edição aqui é geralmente bastante remover ervas daninhas para fora de a maioria de novatos, que é grande para o descanso de nós (menos povos para compartilhar do estágio com!). O truque aqui é que este é somente um problema no começo. Mais que você se expõe yourself à língua, mais seu cérebro fundirá automaticamente este elemento na sua aprendizagem de língua até que você começa ao ponto onde você começa unconsciously reconhecer os tons para o vocabulário novo. Compare estes dois scenarios:
Estudante: Como você diz “nações unidas” no chinês?
Professor: Guó do hé de Lián
Estudante: “Lian ele guo”, aprovado. E que tons esse uso?
Professor: Três segundos tons.
Estudante: Começado o, agradecimentos!
Estudante: Como você diz “nações unidas” no chinês?
Professor: Guó do hé de Lián
Estudante: Guó do hé de Lián. Começado o, agradecimentos!
No segundo scenario o estudante aprendeu automaticamente associar tons com o vocabulário novo. If you were to ask him what the tones were, he would have to repeat the words in his mind first and pull the tones out from there, since the tones and the words are already associated together.
A great exercise to get to this level is mindless repetition of sentences from native speakers, so that you start to develop the ebb and flow of the language by yourself. As you listen to the podcasts in this course, use the pauses provided to repeat after the speaker, even with vocabulary you are already familiar with to get yourself in this mode.
The Writing System
This is of course a challenge for many, including native speakers themselves. One of the reasons given for the slowness in progression of Chinese learners is that because reading and writing takes so long to learn, we learners lose out from the experience of learning from reading. In English, if we come across a word we don’t understand we can easily write it down and look it up later. How do we do that in Chinese when you come across a word you don’t know that uses characters that are equally unfamiliar? How do Chinese speakers look up unfamiliar characters in a dictionary?
My solution:There are a couple of separate issues here. If it’s just learning new vocabulary and language usage from reading you are looking for, there are plenty of pinyin resources out there, including on this website. Similarly, if you come across a new word in your learning, it’s easy enough to write it down in pinyin and look it up in a pinyin dictionary. Learning characters of course is another story, and one that has been touched upon in other categories.
Grammar: This is an aspect of Chinese that is often neglected because it actually is much simpler than in other languages. The extra time put in learning to read and write is offset by the time you don’t have to put in learning conjugations of verbs, tenses and other issues present in other languages. This can be a problem in itself since the lack of grammar rules makes Chinese very context sensitive. Sentences can have multiple meanings that may seem to contradict each other with only subtle clues to distinguish between them.
My solution: The answer here is the same as the answer for tones. Fortunately (or unfortunately for some), it’s not something you consciously study or memorize to understand. You learn by getting the feel for the language from experience. Listen to enough podcasts, and get yourself experienced with enough dialogues and you’ll slowly start to gather a “feel” for the language. You’ll find yourself instinctively responding with the right expressions without even knowing how or why.
The road to fluency: When learning any language, you will find some aspects easier than others. This is a result of usage patterns. In my daily life, I find myself listening to a lot more Chinese than I speak. As a result my listening skills are greater than my speaking skills. Similarly my reading skills are more advanced than my writing skills. The nice thing about all of this though is that my fluency matches my level of requirement. My listening skills are greater because I have to do a lot more listening than speaking in my daily life. Similarly I rarely have to physically write anything in my daily routine (especially in this age of computers), whereas reading is more useful for me, so the latter skill is more developed.
There’s no rule that says all skills have to be equal. Focus on the areas of importance for you and improve those areas first. Learning any language (or any skill for that matter) is only as hard as you make it out to be. Take advantage of the many tools available in this course and on the web to focus on your areas of weakness. Then gloat that you are able to do what so many others have failed or given up on doing. Jiāyóu!
October 21st, 2007 at 6:14 pm
[…] Learning Mandarin Chinese Insights has some great advice for language learners. […]
October 22nd, 2007 at 6:00 am
I agree with everything written on this insight blog. People think it is impressive when you can speak languages such as Spanish, German and French, but they think it is more impressive and much cooler if you can speak Chinese.
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.
October 23rd, 2007 at 6:49 am
Thanks Tom - I agree that listening to or reading European languages is certainly easier for English speakers. However there are other aspects of Chinese that are much easier, which makes up for its difficult areas. For example, a lot of Chinese vocabulary is just a combination of smaller simpler words such as dàxué (university) being “big school” or cāntīng (restaurant) being “meal hall.” It’s much easier for me to remember new words in this way than having to remove brand new words like “university” or “restaurant.” So the time you save there, you can put towards figuring out the written side!
October 23rd, 2007 at 7:38 am
Thanks Adam
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.
October 23rd, 2007 at 10:13 am
Yes Tom, the simplicity can definitely lead to confusion. Part of the fascination with learning Chinese for me, as I’m sure it is with most others, is the culture associated with it. So I like to break down new words into their literal meaning just to get a feel for how the concept was originally described. The examples you gave of “I’ll be right back” and “train” are perfect since you can visualize exactly how and why they came to describe it that way, which also helps in remembering it.
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!
October 24th, 2007 at 2:38 am
It’s always fun to read such things like “People think it is impressive when you can speak languages such as Spanish, German and French” because I’m actually a German.
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.
November 29th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
[…] Is Chinese Really That Hard? The Truth About Spoken Chinese […]