Learning Mandarin – Difficulties and Opportunities

Mandarin language studies are problematic. Mostly because Mandarin is varies greatly from other languages that people in the west have experimented with get to grips with before trying to learn Chinese, not because learning Mandarin is much stronger. Mandarin is strange for most ways. The writing system is obviously completely different. There is no alphabet just as the one that Germanic and Latin derivates have. Instead an image defines every word; or rather a string of what referred to as strokes. For example, three stokes that together make a square means mouth, one combination of strokes that sort of depicts a woman holding a kid means mother and as a consequence on. But right after don’t end several. The grammar is largely made up of the items is called flakes. For example; adding a syllable pronounced ma after a sentence turns it ideal question, adding guo after a sentence means that in which it happens in the past. Combining these basic examples; you go shanghai guo massachusetts? Communicates the question: perhaps 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 test is 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 various ways. Each of the two 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. 3rd workout tone goes down and then up. The fourth is a pointy decline in pitch from high to low. The fifth is called the neutral tone will not not actually have a modulation form.

All that sounds bloody difficult, make use of is, at least at first. How exactly do you best go about arriving to grips with them? Because of course it is 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 upward saying it Chinese language. Basically, I would argue, that Chinese is not so much bloody difficult as is actually bloody different.