In 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.
Posts Tagged ‘Chinese Mandarin’
Why Chinese (Mandarin) Is One of the Easiest Languages to Learn – Reason 2
December 22nd, 2009Much Importance Should Be Given To The Accent And Pronunciations While Learning Chinese
December 10th, 2009Definitely, the spirit may be there to learn, but Chinese is a bit complicated to teach yourself, to say the reality. Chinese language emerged from a variety of tones and sounds which are not familiar to American speech patters. It is an appreciable effort for many to learn to speak and write Chinese language. There are a wide variety of books, CD-ROMs, and other formats available to help them along the way, if anyone has the inclination to learn how to speak Chinese Mandarin should get ready to purchase them. Actually, I don’t think so. Comparatively grammar in Chinese is much simpler than that of the European languages. English speakers sometimes complain that languages like Spanish have a complicated grammar (masculine and feminine genders, verb conjugations, etc), whereas the Chinese language has little or no bound morphology and there are no grammatical paradigms to memorize. Verbs do not take prefixes and suffixes to show the tense or the person, number, or gender of the subject as each word has a fixed and single form. Prefixes or suffixes showing their number or their cases are not taken by nouns. I’m not trying to tell you that Chinese has no grammar; what I mean is that due to the lack of inflectional morphology, Chinese grammar is mainly concerned with how words are arranged to form meaningful sentences. 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. Learning Chinese can be achieved with a grand wealth of books available out there from learning Chinese the ‘fast and fun way’, to Chinese for Dummies to Chinese ‘made easy for kids’. Of course, there are a wealth of basic courses on beginner’s Chinese, and let’s not forget a massive number of Chinese phrases and Chinese language dictionaries. However, these books are not produced at an economical price and the format is not comfortable for users . Now, would those all above relieve you a little bit in your Chinese language study? Hope so, but do not misinterpret this. I am not in any intention 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. Believe in yourself, the language is certainly not that tough to learn once that fear factor is overpowered. Wish you good luck with your Chinese language study. Many people who have spent hundreds of dollars on multiple Chinese language learning materials often wish they could utilize the services and expertise of a private tutor to help them grasp the many nuances and rules involved in speaking Chinese. Many people think it is expensive to engage private tutors and those who live in rural areas and want to learn Chinese language do not find them at all. The ideal way to learn any language is to be able to communicate with someone who speaks that language.
