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 Language’
An Average Graduate KnowS Only 6000 Words In Chinese Language
January 3rd, 2010Why Chinese (Mandarin) Is One of the Easiest Languages to Learn – Reason 2
December 22nd, 2009In my 1st article I discussed how Mandarin Chinese is an easy language to learn because of the lack of verb conjugations. Now I want to demonstrate to you how easy Mandarin Chinese is when we look at how they describe verbs in the Past Tense. Using English again as a comparison lets take the verb “to go” as an example. I go -> I went What relation does the word “go” have with “went”? NONE! There isn’t even 1 common letter between them! So think about how hard life is for the foreigner who is learning English that they must simply memorize these words that have no logical relation to one another. How about Chinese? SO EASY! In Chinese when you want to describe past tense you simply ad the sound “le” after ANY verb and it becomes past tense. So using the verb “to go” as an example, in Mandarin Chinese it goes like this: I go -> I go “le” In order to simplify things above, I have used the English words of course. But that’s all you need to learn in Mandarin Chinese. Learn the verbs and just add “le” when you want to express that verb in past tense. SO EASY! It’s kind of like how we add “ed” to regular verbs in English. I play -> I played But of course in English we have many exceptions to this “ed” rule, making foreigners wonder if it even is a rule at all. French of course is the same which is again why I struggled with 10 years of French. But after only 2 years of learning Mandarin Chinese it was already better than my conversational French. Let me show you yet again how easy Mandarin Chinese is when using the Past Perfect tense. Look at these 2 English sentences: I ate fish I have eaten fish Both are using the verb “to eat” but the meanings are completely different. The first sentence is referring to something in the recent past (perhaps today or yesterday) while the other referring to eating anytime in the past, perhaps many years ago, conveying the idea that I have eaten fish at least once in my life at some point. In English the verb again must change (“ate” becomes “eaten”) and further we need to add the verb “to have” in order to convey this meaning. Mandarin Chinese? Again VERY EASY. Simply add the word “guo” to any verb and you convey the idea of Past Perfect. So the 2 sentences above would be “ I eat “le” fish I eat “guo” fish Notice how I kept the verb as “eat” in the above examples, as that is how it goes in Chinese. Keep the original verb exactly as is and just add “le” or “guo” depending on what kind of past tense meaning you want to convey. Hopefully in these 2 short articles I have already built up your confidence in your ability to master this surprisingly easy language. But I have not even begun! In the next article I will show you how easy it is to express Future Tenses.
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easy learn mandarinChinese Is Most Toughest Language For Most Of The English Speaking People
December 14th, 2009Learning Mandarin can be a enjoyable and can be a very beneficial skill. Learning Chinese language is utmost imortant in this modern world. The Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. If you study chinese language, you will have a lot of options to get the employment in several fields like manufacturing, teachingand travel industry. As there are a lot of chinese communities in the westren countries, the employers are giving extra priority to chinese people . With Asian economies growing considerably, learning Chinese significantly improves your chances of victory in job markets dealing with these economies. More over, learning chinese is more fun too. Even if your just a casual traveler, learning it can also be beneficial since a good number of the sign boards and instructions in China are purely written in Chinese, though the appearance of English signs is increasing. It will positively help while speaking with taxi drivers and order foods . Studying Chinese is one step to joining the ranks of the businesses elite oriented toward the growing China market. Chinese is one of the eminent languages of the world. Learning Chinese is, as it is all over the western world, part of a world-class educationWe will have numerous professional ways to learn chinese language wherein it takes more investment and time. So its important to vary your income to insure that you boost your language learning experience. English speaking people discover more difficulty in learning chinese language. Choosing the right tactic is of course vital and that can make learning the language a relative cake walk or much more tough. Take supreme care about pronunciation and accent while learning chinese languageStudying Chinese doesn’t require costly personal tutors. Better you take the precautions of not paying extra money for the tutors. Learning Chinese will take more time and it is an evolving process. While you can’t learn the language overnight, you can find resources that may give you an edge time wise and easily the amount of effort you exert . A crucial challenge to bear in mind is that of vocabulary. Pimsleur method is the greatest one among all other methods to learn Chinese very hurriedly . The most valuable ones were those who made sure to present new vocabulary first. If you take the Mandarin Chinese, The script will paly key role in learning the language. Then a story using this new vocabulary in conjunction with previously learned vocabulary was presented. In terms of audio only programs, a mixture of excellent courses are available.
