They say it's incredibly hard for a westerner
to learn to speak or write in Chinese.
It's like teaching an hippopotamus
to play the trombone.
I’ve read that it takes a lot of time to learn a Small amount of the language.
Learning Chinese
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Monster
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Learning Chinese
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I.D.10-t
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Re: Learning Chinese
The opposite is also true (I believe). Yet most Chinese girls the age of three can speak well enough to get around. If you have desire, what would be difficult becomes a challenge and then fun.Monster wrote:They say it's incredibly hard for a westerner
to learn to speak or write in Chinese.
It's like teaching an hippopotamus
to play the trombone.
I’ve read that it takes a lot of time to learn a Small amount of the language.
"Be not deceived by the sweet words of proverbial philosophy. Sugar of lead is a poison."
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missy
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not sure of Chinese, but my youngest had two years of Japanese. He did quite well with reading and writing it - the pattern recognition made "sense" to him, more so then spelling in English does (although he's a decent speller, too).
What I found interesting is that if he spoke with someone from Japan, they would "know" he had a female teacher. Evidently there are some inflections in some words that are favored by female speakers, and he picked those up from his teacher.
What I found interesting is that if he spoke with someone from Japan, they would "know" he had a female teacher. Evidently there are some inflections in some words that are favored by female speakers, and he picked those up from his teacher.
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Innocent Bystander
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My wife used to be fed up with the local Chinese giving her chicken leg when she wanted chicken breast.
So next time we got something I ordered as usual and then said
"Gi shuang tang" which, if I remember rightly, means "breast of chicken".
The guy behind the counter said, "Chicken Breast, right," and then he twigged that I was European. He was suddenly all interest, saying, "I send my kids up to a school in Gerrard Street (Chinatown) to learn Chinese. Where do you go?"
Sadly, to the second hand bookshop to pick up an old Edwardian Phrase-book.
But it just proves you can make yourself understood.
So next time we got something I ordered as usual and then said
"Gi shuang tang" which, if I remember rightly, means "breast of chicken".
The guy behind the counter said, "Chicken Breast, right," and then he twigged that I was European. He was suddenly all interest, saying, "I send my kids up to a school in Gerrard Street (Chinatown) to learn Chinese. Where do you go?"
Sadly, to the second hand bookshop to pick up an old Edwardian Phrase-book.
But it just proves you can make yourself understood.
Wizard needs whiskey, badly!
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djm
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Cran is correct, but it is much more complicated. There are many dialects, even of just Cantonese, so that people from one side of the bay can't understand people from the other side. Chinese people have told me they were most impressed by English diplomats coming from language training in the British embassy. For some strange reason, Scots make the most understandable Chinese speakers - this I got from Chinese people. I questioned the British embassy here about their language training, but it is not available to the public.
Mandarin (Pekinese) is the official language of government. It has 4 major tones. If you want to go to China, this is the language you want first. If you want to speak to Chinese here in the West, most of them are Cantonese speakers (13 major tones) of one form or another, but all can understand a little Mandarin.
Good luck on your attempt to learn to speak Chinese. I believe you will find that total immersion at some point will be your best teacher.
djm
Mandarin (Pekinese) is the official language of government. It has 4 major tones. If you want to go to China, this is the language you want first. If you want to speak to Chinese here in the West, most of them are Cantonese speakers (13 major tones) of one form or another, but all can understand a little Mandarin.
Good luck on your attempt to learn to speak Chinese. I believe you will find that total immersion at some point will be your best teacher.
djm
I'd rather be atop the foothills than beneath them.
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Monster
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Here's a course listing at a local university.
CHINESE I 1001
Curricular Area: Chinese
Course Number: 1001
Reference Number: 43396
Section Number: 001
Credit Hours: 5.0
Seats Left: 14
Day, Time & Location: MTWRF 10:00 AM-10:50 AM 215 CLARK HALL Recitation/Seminar/Discussion
Instructor: LI, XINGBO
Course Description: Emphasis is placed upon the understanding, speaking, reading, and writing of Mandarin Chinese and upon the acquisition of the fundamentals of grammar and syntax.
Additional Comments:
5 days a week for an entry level class. 5 credits though.
CHINESE I 1001
Curricular Area: Chinese
Course Number: 1001
Reference Number: 43396
Section Number: 001
Credit Hours: 5.0
Seats Left: 14
Day, Time & Location: MTWRF 10:00 AM-10:50 AM 215 CLARK HALL Recitation/Seminar/Discussion
Instructor: LI, XINGBO
Course Description: Emphasis is placed upon the understanding, speaking, reading, and writing of Mandarin Chinese and upon the acquisition of the fundamentals of grammar and syntax.
Additional Comments:
5 days a week for an entry level class. 5 credits though.
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I.D.10-t
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I an envious. That sounds like fun. I can only imagine the first day that you think of something in Mandarin Chinese and are unable to translate it into English.Monster wrote:Here's a course listing at a local university.
CHINESE I 1001
Curricular Area: Chinese
Course Number: 1001
Reference Number: 43396
Section Number: 001
Credit Hours: 5.0
Seats Left: 14
Day, Time & Location: MTWRF 10:00 AM-10:50 AM 215 CLARK HALL Recitation/Seminar/Discussion
Instructor: LI, XINGBO
Course Description: Emphasis is placed upon the understanding, speaking, reading, and writing of Mandarin Chinese and upon the acquisition of the fundamentals of grammar and syntax.
Additional Comments:
5 days a week for an entry level class. 5 credits though.
"Be not deceived by the sweet words of proverbial philosophy. Sugar of lead is a poison."
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buddhu
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Most of the Chinese people in my area seem to speak Cantonese, not Mandarin. A very good friend with whom I work has taught me a little Cantonese - very little, so far. It is a tonal language (as, to a lesser extent, is Punjabi which I also learned for a while) so the way you pitch the syllables of a word can change its meaning!
Not for the faint hearted.
My friend's parents don't speak very good English, so at home a Chinese dialect is the day-to-day tongue. Despite that, my friend (who has lived in England since she was 2 or 3) can't read or write Chinese. Apparently it is that hard if you don't get it while you're young.
Either that or she's just lazy.
Edited to add: She tells me that the written form is the same regardless of which variant of spoken Chinese one uses.
Not for the faint hearted.
My friend's parents don't speak very good English, so at home a Chinese dialect is the day-to-day tongue. Despite that, my friend (who has lived in England since she was 2 or 3) can't read or write Chinese. Apparently it is that hard if you don't get it while you're young.
Either that or she's just lazy.
Edited to add: She tells me that the written form is the same regardless of which variant of spoken Chinese one uses.
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djm
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Yup. There were so many languages spoken within the Chinese empire even from earliest of days that a standardized, pictur- based writing form (ideogram) turned out to be the best way to convey thoughts across the empire.Buddhu wrote:She tells me that the written form is the same regardless of which variant of spoken Chinese one uses.
Today, many off-shore Chinese are upset that the Communist govt has been "modernizing" some characters to make them more machine-friendly, stuff that has been standardized among all Chinese for centuries. Its a whole nuther world ....
djm
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Tony
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Not sure why... but it's 2022 and I'm mysteriously baack... - Location: Surlyville
I communicate with friends in China on a daily basis and have some limited knowledge to the use of computer translation.
England has a great influence on the educational system in China with regard to language. This started generations ago with their involvement in the export trade. For generations, the books and translation dictionaries came from the UK. They actually teach the Chinese people to speak with a British accent and use many phrases common to England.
Using a normal Windows based computer, if you see Chinese characters then you are looking at picture files and not 'text'. Many websites display Chinese words/symbols this way. If you don't have 'Asian fonts' installed and they are using letters (and not pictures) you will see mostly screen garbage in place of the letters/symbols.
Unless Chinese is installed on your computer, you will get what appears to be garbage on your screen.
Seeing pictures of Chinese language won't be of help unless you already know and understand the language. If it's in a text form you can manipulate it using cut & paste technique and pass it into a translator. You cannot do that with pictures unless you are running a scanner with OCR and conversion software. That's a big undertaking to say the least!
If you want to get started with Chinese study, I suggest you purchase a computer based dictionary. Many will speak the words if you want more than reading and translation.
Running Windows XP, (probably works similar with other versions) install the foreign language pack from the original XP disks and you will have access to seeing text based Chinese characters. With this, you can go to any online translator and turn English into Chinese and vise versa.
http://world.altavista.com/ works fairly good... especially since it's free!
I suggest you open two windows using translators. One in English to Simple Chinese and the other in Simple Chinese to English.
practice using the converter. Type a sentence in English, translate it to Chinese. Cut & paste it into the other translator and convert it back to English. Expect varied results.
Over the years I've dated a few Chinese born women who spoke broken English (despite college degrees, both China and the US, professional careers and holding US citizenship) They just can't seem to speak perfect English. All of them seemed to make the same grammatical errors... sorta like they were reading from the same lesson books!
Using that to my advantage, I typed grammatically incorrect, 'broken English' (like I was used to hearing) into the translator, converted it to Chinese then converted it back to English. The result was far more readable than starting out with correct English!
Although I cannot speak any Chinese and really cannot understand more than a few symbols, I can keep a fairly quick nearly 100% Chinese conversation going in Yahoo Instant Messenger with little lost time fumbling for the correct way to present a sentence to the translator.
I guess you can say I'm getting good at 'translator manipulation"
England has a great influence on the educational system in China with regard to language. This started generations ago with their involvement in the export trade. For generations, the books and translation dictionaries came from the UK. They actually teach the Chinese people to speak with a British accent and use many phrases common to England.
Using a normal Windows based computer, if you see Chinese characters then you are looking at picture files and not 'text'. Many websites display Chinese words/symbols this way. If you don't have 'Asian fonts' installed and they are using letters (and not pictures) you will see mostly screen garbage in place of the letters/symbols.
Unless Chinese is installed on your computer, you will get what appears to be garbage on your screen.
Seeing pictures of Chinese language won't be of help unless you already know and understand the language. If it's in a text form you can manipulate it using cut & paste technique and pass it into a translator. You cannot do that with pictures unless you are running a scanner with OCR and conversion software. That's a big undertaking to say the least!
If you want to get started with Chinese study, I suggest you purchase a computer based dictionary. Many will speak the words if you want more than reading and translation.
Running Windows XP, (probably works similar with other versions) install the foreign language pack from the original XP disks and you will have access to seeing text based Chinese characters. With this, you can go to any online translator and turn English into Chinese and vise versa.
http://world.altavista.com/ works fairly good... especially since it's free!
I suggest you open two windows using translators. One in English to Simple Chinese and the other in Simple Chinese to English.
practice using the converter. Type a sentence in English, translate it to Chinese. Cut & paste it into the other translator and convert it back to English. Expect varied results.
Over the years I've dated a few Chinese born women who spoke broken English (despite college degrees, both China and the US, professional careers and holding US citizenship) They just can't seem to speak perfect English. All of them seemed to make the same grammatical errors... sorta like they were reading from the same lesson books!
Using that to my advantage, I typed grammatically incorrect, 'broken English' (like I was used to hearing) into the translator, converted it to Chinese then converted it back to English. The result was far more readable than starting out with correct English!
Although I cannot speak any Chinese and really cannot understand more than a few symbols, I can keep a fairly quick nearly 100% Chinese conversation going in Yahoo Instant Messenger with little lost time fumbling for the correct way to present a sentence to the translator.
I guess you can say I'm getting good at 'translator manipulation"
All the comments about differing dialects but standardized written forms is spot-on, I think. And the unhappiness with simplified characters (though I believe the original goal was to make it easier to learn, not to make it machine-readable). Not that I speak any Chinese dialect myself - I'm just passing on things I've heard from my wife over the years.
But although I've been married to a native Cantonese speaker for over 20 years, I find it *very* difficult to learn due to the large number of tones/inflections.
In most (all?) Indo-European languages, tone doesn't change the basic word (but may convey mood or convert a statement to a question). But for the Chinese family of languages, tone can change meaning - and a one-syllable word can potentially have as many meanings as there are distinct tones.
Even Mandarin has quite a few (5? 6?) but Cantonese has even more (I asked my wife's brothers how many, and got answers ranging from 8 to 11 - concensus was "probably 8 or 9"). There are a lot of words I recognize when I hear them, but can't reliably pronounce. And a lot more words that I consistently mispronounce horribly.
Years ago, I read that for most people leaning languages is easiest when we're young for a very good reason - apparently, the brain optimizes itself to handle the sounds of languages we hear during the first few years of life. EEGs of infants showed that they reacted to the sounds of ANY language with the same intensity - but by the time they were 5 or so they reacted much more strongly to the language(s) the child heard regularly, and much less strongly to any sounds they had not been previously exposed to. And folks with an "ear for languages" seem to have retained or regained more of this youthful ability than their less-gifted compatriots.
FWIW, my wife didn't seriously attempt to teach our daughters Cantonese until the older girl was 6, although she'd used bits and pieces around them from birth. By that time, the older girl was firmly set in English (and the baby copied her). They never learned much vocabulary, but they do seem to have a (marginally) better accent than I do for the few words they know.
This has led me to wonder if the same brain development path is true for children who grew up around music - there may be more than simple genetics to account for families of musical prodigies. I can only speculate - and wish I'd heard more IrTrad when I was growing up
But although I've been married to a native Cantonese speaker for over 20 years, I find it *very* difficult to learn due to the large number of tones/inflections.
In most (all?) Indo-European languages, tone doesn't change the basic word (but may convey mood or convert a statement to a question). But for the Chinese family of languages, tone can change meaning - and a one-syllable word can potentially have as many meanings as there are distinct tones.
Even Mandarin has quite a few (5? 6?) but Cantonese has even more (I asked my wife's brothers how many, and got answers ranging from 8 to 11 - concensus was "probably 8 or 9"). There are a lot of words I recognize when I hear them, but can't reliably pronounce. And a lot more words that I consistently mispronounce horribly.
Years ago, I read that for most people leaning languages is easiest when we're young for a very good reason - apparently, the brain optimizes itself to handle the sounds of languages we hear during the first few years of life. EEGs of infants showed that they reacted to the sounds of ANY language with the same intensity - but by the time they were 5 or so they reacted much more strongly to the language(s) the child heard regularly, and much less strongly to any sounds they had not been previously exposed to. And folks with an "ear for languages" seem to have retained or regained more of this youthful ability than their less-gifted compatriots.
FWIW, my wife didn't seriously attempt to teach our daughters Cantonese until the older girl was 6, although she'd used bits and pieces around them from birth. By that time, the older girl was firmly set in English (and the baby copied her). They never learned much vocabulary, but they do seem to have a (marginally) better accent than I do for the few words they know.
This has led me to wonder if the same brain development path is true for children who grew up around music - there may be more than simple genetics to account for families of musical prodigies. I can only speculate - and wish I'd heard more IrTrad when I was growing up
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Monster
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Good stuff DC. I've read similar reports. It'd be great if we could get that brain elasticity back as adults, but alas the reason an infants brain is so elastic is that there are many many spare neurons. Having so many spare neurons it is like a gift, new connections are formed rather easily, neurons that are not used are "pruned" or they just die off.DCrom wrote:
Years ago, I read that for most people leaning languages is easiest when we're young for a very good reason - apparently, the brain optimizes itself to handle the sounds of languages we hear during the first few years of life. EEGs of infants showed that they reacted to the sounds of ANY language with the same intensity - but by the time they were 5 or so they reacted much more strongly to the language(s) the child heard regularly, and much less strongly to any sounds they had not been previously exposed to. And folks with an "ear for languages" seem to have retained or regained more of this youthful ability than their less-gifted compatriots.
So yes, since I wasn't exposed to Mandarin Chinese before I was 2 years old (ok maybe I was exposed to some Mandarin Chinese restaurants by age 2), I may have a long way to go. Adults learn language a lot differently than infants, basically it's just a heck of a lot harder.
Exactly how we learn as adults I don't know, maybe we have to put brain cells on double duty.. If those reluctant buggers just want to tie shoelaces and make pancakes for breakfast, and have no interest in saying "Excuse me, but are you a Buddhist?" in Mandarin, I'll just have to force them to learn,, yes Gollums we will forces them to learns...
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