Is it really hard to learn Chinese as a foreign language?Is it true Chinese is difficult language to learn as a foreign language?Strictly speaking, it’s not so. Comparatively grammar in Chinese is much simpler than that of the European languages. At times, there is a complaint from English speakers that languages like Spanish have a perplexed grammar (masculine and feminine genders, verb conjugations, etc),, but the Chinese language has virtually no syllable structure or grammatical paradigms either to by heart. Each word has a fixed and single form: verbs do not take prefixes or suffixes showing the tense or the person, number, or gender of the subject. Nouns do not take prefixes or suffixes showing their number or their case. I do not mean that Chinese has no grammar; What I want to say is Chinese grammar is primarily concerned with arrangement of words to form meaningful sentences as they inflectional morphology. Plus each Chinese character pronounced in one syllable, that’s why when watching Chinese movies, you find that a few words can be translated into a syllable mapping in the English subtitle. Probably, you would say that the above is far from enough to convince you. Alright, there is another encouraging and definitive proof with me for you. A couple of days ago I fortunately came across one piece of inspiring news when reading Beijing Times. Now you can be allowed to read 90% of the current Chinese publication with less than 1,000 Chinese characters as per the survey conducted by the Education Ministry and Language Commission of China. The survey’s claim is based on 900 million characters used in more than 8. 9 million files selected from newspapers, magazines, the Internet and television. Nowadays, the Chinese media is using fewer characters, and to understand 90 percent of the content in publications, you need only to know about 900 of around 50,000 individual characters that are made up of Written Chinese. On the other hand, how many words are there in English? Nearly 100,000 and still increasing. There is one significant reason for this and that is Chinese characters focus on meaning, not pronunciation like in English, and further, many characters are primitive and a few are found only once in the entire history of the written language . Only about 6,000 are known by an average graduate of Chinese university. Now, would those all above relieve you a little bit in your Chinese language study? Hope so, but do not misinterpret this. I do not intend to convince you that Chinese is very easy to learn or other languages like English are much harder. What I mean is that Chinese is not as difficult as you imagined or heard about, but different from your mother tongue, but difference does not mean tough necessarily, Isn’t it?What it means is that Chinese is certainly simpler than you imagined or heard about, it’s just very dissimilar from your mother tongue, but dissimilar does not mean difficult necessarily, Doesn’t it? And that hard Chinese idea won’t be of any help in your study. Trust yourself, once that fear factor is overcome, the language is actually not that hard to learn. Wish you good luck with your Chinese language study.
Posts Tagged ‘Chinese Characters’
An Average Graduate KnowS Only 6000 Words In Chinese Language
January 3rd, 2010The Composite Models Of The Chinese Language And Difficulty In Understanding It
December 10th, 2009This is true that only 10,000 characters are being used regularly out of 20,000 characters of Chinese language. To be able to fully understand the language, at least when it comes to reading of course, you need to learn Chinese characters. Out of many languages in this world, the most engrossing and complex language is Chinese. Excluding Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and other parts of Malaysia, more than one billion people live in china. The Chinese language has become the most spoken language in those countries apart from china. It is known for being indirect or to understate meanings. This indirectness is attributed to a cultural trait, older than the language itself. The high degree of internal diversity brings attraction to the Chinese language and many are learning it with much interest. The ‘chinese radicals are the 214 elementary pictographs, combination of which form an infinite number of words leading to constant evolution of Chinese language. Alternatively, a new word can be formed by combining two or more radicals. Out of oldest languages around 3000 years, Chinese is one among them in this world. Chinese has developed tremendously over these long periods but the basic grammar, vocabulary and writing system have not much changed. If gender is taken into consideration, it is neutral as compared to a Latin-based language like French and hence easy to learn. Unlike English, where one might say, “I will eat,” “I ate,” or “I have eaten,” in Chinese one would say, “Wo chi” (which means “I eat” ) plus the time phrases, today, later, tomorrow, etc. The Chinese language is written in characters, each of which consists of one, up to dozens of strokes, and a phrase or sentence can be made of several characters. Due to shortness of characters as compared to English words, a translated Chinese version takes lesser spares always than English original. Chinese can be though of as a tool, without which the Chinese could not do, even for a moment in their daily life and work. If a person’s knowledge about the Chinese language is not up to a certain standard, if he or she cannot speak distinctly and fluently, or what he or she writes does not read smoothly, then the effect on that person as a Chinese is all-weather and all-directional, so the influence is obviously far greater than that of English. People’s Republic of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong is served with Mandarin as the official language as it is spoken in excess of 50% of the huge Chinese population. Mandarin also serves as the second official language of Singapore. Like Latin which helps in learning other Western languages, Mandarin is helpful in learning other Asian languages. Highly influenced by it already are the Asian languages, in particular written Chinese language. Mandarin, a widely spoken language, can be learnt through many online sites available though it is tough to learn. <a onClick=”javascript:pageTracker. _trackPageview(‘/outgoing/article_exit_link’);” href=”http://www. squidoo. com/learn_chinese_faster”>learn chinese faster</a> with the help of best online teacher and participation of conversation with your friends. The best way to learn and enjoy learning chinese language is to speak regularly.
Japanese Language Accelerated Learning Techniques
December 8th, 2009Japanese is anything but an easy language to learn, regardless of one’s mother tongue. Still, it is one of the most popular foreign language choices in America and Europe, for two main reasons: the economical importance of Japan and the numerous businesses contracted between Japan and these areas and the fascination for Japanese culture that mainly formed up through modern Western media. Regardless of which reason you want to learn it for, the Japanese language cannot be learnt easily unless you know how it works.
Japanese is spoken by over 130 million people all over the world, obviously most of them being in Japan’s mainland. The Japanese language’s grammar is usually very complex to foreigners because it uses a specific speaker-listener status vocabulary that is unlike anything English or other western languages can offer. Another showstopper when learning Japanese is its writing style, which uses a combination of three alphabets: Chinese characters (also known as Kanji) and two syllabic scripts known as Katakana and Hiragana. In addition, modern Japan uses the Latin alphabet for more and more purposes, which makes it slightly easier for English speakers to grasp this new language than say, a hundred years ago.
Many Japanese learning courses and books start off slowly, in a gradually increasing order of steps. Although this is the correct way to go with any language learning process, it takes a lot of time and you might simply not have that available time to invest in it. For this reason, there are a series of accelerated learning techniques that skip through some of the basics and try to accumulate these fundamentals over more advanced chapters, naturally. Take note that although this is definitely a faster way to learn Japanese, there’s a good chance that someone that takes the “stepwise”, slower technique will almost always speak and write better and more correctly.
One of the most common Japanese language accelerated learning techniques is to plunge you head first into some easier texts, as soon as you know the basic alphabet, then provide a translation in English (or your mother tongue) of the same text. This obviously skips a lot of steps such as basic grammatical structure, pronunciation of words, punctuation and so forth. However, this accelerated learning technique has the advantage of building up your vocabulary quickly. Doing several of these translated reading exercises per day, you will soon get some of the grammar and spelling foundations that you’ve skipped in the first place, up and running.
The next step in most Japanese language accelerated learning techniques is to play a tape followed by a translated text. After you’ve built on your Japanese reading and understanding skills, the audio technique is the logical step forward. This will correct any pronunciation problems and will also have a positive effect on your vocabulary gain. There are several sources offering Japanese language accelerated learning techniques, including books and courses. You can find some very useful sources online, on sites dealing with Japanese language learning, Japanese language translations and tests.
