Comments on: Learning Chinese: How Difficult is It? http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2007/08/18/learning-chinese-how-difficult-is-it/ Cross Cultural Communications in Greater China Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:33:10 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 By: truettblack http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2007/08/18/learning-chinese-how-difficult-is-it/#comment-317 truettblack Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:25:59 +0000 http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2007/08/18/learning-chinese-how-difficult-is-it/#comment-317 Sorry for my late reply, manifestus. 1-Start with <em>Reading and Writing Chinese</em> by William McNaughton. You might also pick up a set of flashcards (or use the digital equivalent) to help you learn stroke orders. You might then graduate to the elementary school texts, which have writing workbooks. That's if you want to learn to write like a native does. Personally, I never learned to write much using a pen and paper, but I type a great deal of correspondence in Chinese on a regular basis. I never really need to write using a pen, so I never learned. 2-There is no way to pick up peripheral vocabulary other than to converse with native speakers, write down what you don't understand, and then use it in another conversation. I filled 6 notebooks with vocabulary the first year I lived in Taiwan. I reviewed the words constantly, and I remembered them because I'd been exposed to them first in a specific context. Chinese is a gorgeous language. Best of luck to you in your endeavors. Sorry for my late reply, manifestus.

1-Start with Reading and Writing Chinese by William McNaughton. You might also pick up a set of flashcards (or use the digital equivalent) to help you learn stroke orders. You might then graduate to the elementary school texts, which have writing workbooks. That’s if you want to learn to write like a native does.

Personally, I never learned to write much using a pen and paper, but I type a great deal of correspondence in Chinese on a regular basis. I never really need to write using a pen, so I never learned.

2-There is no way to pick up peripheral vocabulary other than to converse with native speakers, write down what you don’t understand, and then use it in another conversation. I filled 6 notebooks with vocabulary the first year I lived in Taiwan. I reviewed the words constantly, and I remembered them because I’d been exposed to them first in a specific context.

Chinese is a gorgeous language. Best of luck to you in your endeavors.

]]> By: manifestus http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2007/08/18/learning-chinese-how-difficult-is-it/#comment-314 manifestus Mon, 08 Jun 2009 05:25:01 +0000 http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2007/08/18/learning-chinese-how-difficult-is-it/#comment-314 I'm curious as to what a good strategy would be for an individual like myself: Moved to the USA when very young (Taiwanese), with easy accessibility to fluent speakers and writers, and conversant (but not "fluent") in Mandarin. I've never really bothered to pick up writing in Chinese and haven't had any sort of structured study in verbal communication (in Mandarin, or for that matter, in Taiwanese). In terms of verbal communication I'm not that daunted, given the network of native speakers I can surround myself with at any given time. I'm looking for a good place to start with writing, without all the repetition of tones, grammar, and miscellaneous tidbits that are already second nature. Additionally, what did you do to build peripheral vocabulary? I can hold a conversation fairly well, but once in awhile find myself reaching either for: (1) words that are slipping my memory but I know when someone directs them back at me; or (2) words I absolutely don't know. What sort of practice would you recommend to focus on to extend and build peripheral vocab? I'd like to work towards building "true" verbal fluency as well as work towards a solid foundation in writing. I do have a vested interest in learning this, so motivation is pretty sky-high. Any recommendations as to where to begin would be pretty helpful. I’m curious as to what a good strategy would be for an individual like myself:

Moved to the USA when very young (Taiwanese), with easy accessibility to fluent speakers and writers, and conversant (but not “fluent”) in Mandarin.

I’ve never really bothered to pick up writing in Chinese and haven’t had any sort of structured study in verbal communication (in Mandarin, or for that matter, in Taiwanese). In terms of verbal communication I’m not that daunted, given the network of native speakers I can surround myself with at any given time. I’m looking for a good place to start with writing, without all the repetition of tones, grammar, and miscellaneous tidbits that are already second nature.

Additionally, what did you do to build peripheral vocabulary? I can hold a conversation fairly well, but once in awhile find myself reaching either for: (1) words that are slipping my memory but I know when someone directs them back at me; or (2) words I absolutely don’t know. What sort of practice would you recommend to focus on to extend and build peripheral vocab? I’d like to work towards building “true” verbal fluency as well as work towards a solid foundation in writing.

I do have a vested interest in learning this, so motivation is pretty sky-high. Any recommendations as to where to begin would be pretty helpful.

]]> By: oohkuchi http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2007/08/18/learning-chinese-how-difficult-is-it/#comment-291 oohkuchi Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:32:30 +0000 http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2007/08/18/learning-chinese-how-difficult-is-it/#comment-291 As a Chinese-to-English translator who is self-taught in Mandarin, I can only say I agree entirely with the writer of this article and commend him for re-sounding this warning. You often read on the Net that Chinese is not so hard because the grammar is ‘simple.’ And indeed, it is quite easy to order a beer or drool ‘wo ai ni’ to a good-time girl in a Shanghai bar. Taking it beyond there, though, is another matter altogether. You just do not pick up this language. Mandarin mastery, or even maintenance, cannot be achieved without serious study or REGULAR STAYS IN A CHINESE-SPEAKING ENVIRONMENT. Absent this, and it is not worth it for most people. I’d like to cover here a few points I think the writer could have said more about, coming at this as a linguist who works in several languages. (1) The hardest thing with Chinese, I think, is aural comprehension. Compared with Japanese or Korean, which are no pushover either, Chinese is much more difficult in this area. This is due to the unfamiliarity of tones and homophones, the speed with which Chinese speak, the heavy use of dialect in all Chinese communities, which often blurs the already difficult distinctions between words, and not least to the complete lack of English loan words (in total contrast to Japanese and Korean) to fall back on when all else fails. You just cannot bluff it as you can with Spanish or Italian. Even after years of study, you will still find that entire sentences are just mumbo-jumbo to your ear because you have missed one key syllable. (2) The pronunciation and the tones. Most people think the tones are the big problem, but in fact basic pronunciation is very hard as well, as Chinese (of all dialects) has many tricky consonants that do not exist in western languages (here Japanese is much easier). The basic pronunciation—being able to distinguish and reproduce ci, zi, ce, se, ze, she and shi for example—takes weeks of tape recorder work. The tones are never fully mastered by a foreigner, though this is a similar problem to that of gender in French or Spanish—you build up a hard core of words with the right tones, and the rest sort of fall into place eventually. You will still fall over repeatedly, but after a couple of years it will stop being a problem. You do have to get pronunciation and tones basically right, though, or you simply will not communicate. (3) Learning to read is, predictably, an enormous job of work, but this is not primarily due to the characters. Characters are actually not that hard to read, for reasons I do not have space to go into; but if you doubt this, try turning a chunk of Chinese text into pinyin using one of the online converter sites and see how easy it is to understand. If you have intermediate Chinese, you will soon be wishing to have the characters back, because they eliminate the ambiguity. What makes Chinese infernally difficult to read is, believe it or not, the ‘simplicity’ of its grammar. In Chinese, everything that can be abbreviated is, and sentences often seem pared down to piles of words without any markers of grammatical function—no articles, no subject sometimes, no tense, no plural, no conjunctions. It or them? Will or would? A or the? Because of or in spite of? Sometimes it is not clear. It can even be hard to distinguish nouns and verbs. Plus, the Chinese love long, long sentences. Unless you can read between the lines, you will have difficulty in fully understanding most text, and will not be able to read quickly for years (about five to ten). (4) Writing. But let me end this thoroughly disheartening essay on a bright note. Once upon a time, up till about ten years ago in fact, writing Chinese was beyond the hope of any normal foreigner. Handwriting competently still is, though it can be fun trying, but something wonderful happened a few years back. Predictive IME fonts and other software tools mean you can now just type in lines of pinyin and up pops the Mandarin, for the most part with the right characters. Even I can fix the errors. In short, foreigners can now write Mandarin fairly easily, for the first time in three thousand years. You can email in Chinese, and with the well-chosen help of Google translator, you can blog and comment comprehensibly in Chinese too. These are seminal steps forward, but, be under no illusion, Mandarin is never going to be a lingua franca. Even within China it is not always a lingua franca—I know of a Hong Kong woman and a Sichuan girl who prefer to use English to communicate. Study it, but do so mainly to better understand what will probably be top dog nation in our lifetimes. Don’t expect much more than that, unless you are a sinophile. As a Chinese-to-English translator who is self-taught in Mandarin, I can only say I agree entirely with the writer of this article and commend him for re-sounding this warning. You often read on the Net that Chinese is not so hard because the grammar is ‘simple.’ And indeed, it is quite easy to order a beer or drool ‘wo ai ni’ to a good-time girl in a Shanghai bar. Taking it beyond there, though, is another matter altogether. You just do not pick up this language. Mandarin mastery, or even maintenance, cannot be achieved without serious study or REGULAR STAYS IN A CHINESE-SPEAKING ENVIRONMENT. Absent this, and it is not worth it for most people.
I’d like to cover here a few points I think the writer could have said more about, coming at this as a linguist who works in several languages.
(1) The hardest thing with Chinese, I think, is aural comprehension. Compared with Japanese or Korean, which are no pushover either, Chinese is much more difficult in this area. This is due to the unfamiliarity of tones and homophones, the speed with which Chinese speak, the heavy use of dialect in all Chinese communities, which often blurs the already difficult distinctions between words, and not least to the complete lack of English loan words (in total contrast to Japanese and Korean) to fall back on when all else fails. You just cannot bluff it as you can with Spanish or Italian. Even after years of study, you will still find that entire sentences are just mumbo-jumbo to your ear because you have missed one key syllable.
(2) The pronunciation and the tones. Most people think the tones are the big problem, but in fact basic pronunciation is very hard as well, as Chinese (of all dialects) has many tricky consonants that do not exist in western languages (here Japanese is much easier). The basic pronunciation—being able to distinguish and reproduce ci, zi, ce, se, ze, she and shi for example—takes weeks of tape recorder work.
The tones are never fully mastered by a foreigner, though this is a similar problem to that of gender in French or Spanish—you build up a hard core of words with the right tones, and the rest sort of fall into place eventually. You will still fall over repeatedly, but after a couple of years it will stop being a problem. You do have to get pronunciation and tones basically right, though, or you simply will not communicate.
(3) Learning to read is, predictably, an enormous job of work, but this is not primarily due to the characters. Characters are actually not that hard to read, for reasons I do not have space to go into; but if you doubt this, try turning a chunk of Chinese text into pinyin using one of the online converter sites and see how easy it is to understand. If you have intermediate Chinese, you will soon be wishing to have the characters back, because they eliminate the ambiguity.
What makes Chinese infernally difficult to read is, believe it or not, the ‘simplicity’ of its grammar. In Chinese, everything that can be abbreviated is, and sentences often seem pared down to piles of words without any markers of grammatical function—no articles, no subject sometimes, no tense, no plural, no conjunctions. It or them? Will or would? A or the? Because of or in spite of? Sometimes it is not clear. It can even be hard to distinguish nouns and verbs. Plus, the Chinese love long, long sentences. Unless you can read between the lines, you will have difficulty in fully understanding most text, and will not be able to read quickly for years (about five to ten).
(4) Writing. But let me end this thoroughly disheartening essay on a bright note. Once upon a time, up till about ten years ago in fact, writing Chinese was beyond the hope of any normal foreigner. Handwriting competently still is, though it can be fun trying, but something wonderful happened a few years back. Predictive IME fonts and other software tools mean you can now just type in lines of pinyin and up pops the Mandarin, for the most part with the right characters. Even I can fix the errors. In short, foreigners can now write Mandarin fairly easily, for the first time in three thousand years. You can email in Chinese, and with the well-chosen help of Google translator, you can blog and comment comprehensibly in Chinese too.

These are seminal steps forward, but, be under no illusion, Mandarin is never going to be a lingua franca. Even within China it is not always a lingua franca—I know of a Hong Kong woman and a Sichuan girl who prefer to use English to communicate. Study it, but do so mainly to better understand what will probably be top dog nation in our lifetimes. Don’t expect much more than that, unless you are a sinophile.

]]> By: truettblack http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2007/08/18/learning-chinese-how-difficult-is-it/#comment-286 truettblack Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:41:17 +0000 http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2007/08/18/learning-chinese-how-difficult-is-it/#comment-286 Mary, You're not going to make much progress using an online course of study. You'll have to get yourselves into a Chinese-speaking environment. Most people don't want to hear that, but there really isn't any way to get fluent in Mandarin unless you live abroad for a while. You can make progress in your home country to an extent, but all you're really doing is building a foundation. You won't experience a breakthrough until you're overseas and completely surrounded for several hours a day by people who will only speak Chinese with you. I suppose there may be a way to create or find such an environment where you are. You'll know better than I will whether that's possible or not given the demographics in your area. I don't know of any correlation between being bilingual in English and French and picking up Mandarin more easily. Sorry. Best of luck to you. True Mary,

You’re not going to make much progress using an online course of study. You’ll have to get yourselves into a Chinese-speaking environment. Most people don’t want to hear that, but there really isn’t any way to get fluent in Mandarin unless you live abroad for a while. You can make progress in your home country to an extent, but all you’re really doing is building a foundation. You won’t experience a breakthrough until you’re overseas and completely surrounded for several hours a day by people who will only speak Chinese with you.

I suppose there may be a way to create or find such an environment where you are. You’ll know better than I will whether that’s possible or not given the demographics in your area.

I don’t know of any correlation between being bilingual in English and French and picking up Mandarin more easily. Sorry.

Best of luck to you.

True

]]> By: Mary http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2007/08/18/learning-chinese-how-difficult-is-it/#comment-285 Mary Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:46:17 +0000 http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2007/08/18/learning-chinese-how-difficult-is-it/#comment-285 Hi, My name is Mary. I am currently trying to study Mandarin with my husband. We take 2 classes a week online with a Chinese teacher from Wuhan, China. It is a internet based school. We have done probably 3o lessons so far so are still fairly new. And we have been doing this for the past year. We probably know about 400 words but making sentences is difficult. We are not learning how to write the characters. Just learning how to speak the pinyin. Outside of our class we probably review for an hour each day after work etc. My question is I am wondering how long it would take us to get really fluent? I would like to be able to converse in basic conversation (more than just asking where something is though!) in about a year. Is this a realistic goal with the pace we are going? My husband is from the french side of Canada so he speaks 2 languages already. Should it be alot easier for him to learn mandarin? Anyfeed back would be great! thanks Hi,

My name is Mary. I am currently trying to study Mandarin with my husband. We take 2 classes a week online with a Chinese teacher from Wuhan, China. It is a internet based school. We have done probably 3o lessons so far so are still fairly new. And we have been doing this for the past year. We probably know about 400 words but making sentences is difficult. We are not learning how to write the characters. Just learning how to speak the pinyin. Outside of our class we probably review for an hour each day after work etc. My question is I am wondering how long it would take us to get really fluent? I would like to be able to converse in basic conversation (more than just asking where something is though!) in about a year. Is this a realistic goal with the pace we are going? My husband is from the french side of Canada so he speaks 2 languages already. Should it be alot easier for him to learn mandarin?
Anyfeed back would be great!
thanks

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