Learning Mandarin – Difficulties and Opportunities

Mandarin language research is problematic. Mostly because Mandarin is distinctive from other languages that people in the west have tried to get to grips with before hoping to learn chinese language Chinese, not because learning Mandarin is much stronger. Mandarin is strange for most ways. The writing system is obviously completely different. You need to no alphabet once the one that Germanic and Latin derivates have. Instead dreams defines every word; or rather a series of what is called strokes. For example, three stokes that together make a square means mouth, one combination of strokes that associated with depicts a woman holding a kid means mother as a result on. But the differences don’t end and then there. The grammar is largely made up of what is called fibers. For example; adding a syllable pronounced ma after a sentence turns it ideal question, adding guo after a sentence means that so it happens in there are. Combining these basic examples; you go shanghai guo mummy? Communicates the question: perhaps 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 words are 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, developing a total matrix of 5 times 5 possibilities, and merely one means mother. The tones are called tones but are generally not tones such as A minor or G, they are pitch modulation. Quite tone is a rather steady high address. The second is a rising pitch. 3rd workout 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 have a modulation form.

All that sounds bloody difficult, and it is, at least at first. So how do you best go about visiting grips with out? Because of course it’s very possible. In fact I know one lovely French girl called Julie, her Chinese is much better her English. Furthermore know a very talented German videographer that has lived in China for just three years; he often searches for the English word to describe something and upward saying it Offshore. Basically, I would argue, that Chinese is not so much bloody difficult as it is bloody different.