Learning Mandarin – Difficulties and Opportunities

Mandarin language studies are problematic. Mostly because Mandarin is varies greatly from other languages that people on west have tried to get to grips with before necessary . learn to speak mandarin Chinese, not because learning Mandarin is much more complicated. Mandarin is strange in any ways. The writing system is obviously completely different. There is no alphabet as the one that Germanic and Latin derivates have. Instead images defines every word; or rather a sequence of what is strokes. For example, three stokes that together make a square means mouth, one combination of strokes that type of depicts a woman holding a kid means mother and so on. But distinctions between don’t end there. The grammar is largely made up of the items is called particles. For example; adding a syllable pronounced ma after a sentence turns it suitable question, adding guo after a sentence means that going without shoes happens in the past. Combining these basic examples; you go shanghai guo ma? Communicates the question: have 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 test is not only defined by syllables as western words are. Genuine 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 different ways. Each of the two syllables, ma and ma, can be pronounced with 5 different tones, making a total matrix of 5 times 5 possibilities, and merely one means mother. The tones are called tones but they are not tones because A minor or G, they are pitch modulation. Website tone is a somewhat steady high address. The second is a rising pitch. Method to tone goes down and then out. The fourth is a pointy decline in pitch from high to low. The fifth is called the neutral tone will not not actually have a modulation form.

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