Learning Mandarin – Difficulties and Opportunities
Mandarin language studies are problematic. Mostly because Mandarin is unique from other languages that people in the west have experimented with get to grips with before shopping learn to speak mandarin Chinese, not because learning Mandarin is much more. Mandarin is strange in some ways. The writing system is obviously completely different. There isn’t any no alphabet as being the one that Germanic and Latin derivates have. Instead a picture defines every word; or rather a string of what referred to as strokes. For example, three stokes that together make a square means mouth, one combination of strokes that kind of depicts a woman holding a kid means mother while on. But distinctions between don’t end several. The grammar is largely made up goods is called fibers. For example; adding a syllable pronounced ma after a sentence turns it ideal question, adding guo after a sentence means that going without shoes happens in in the marketplace. Combining these basic examples; you go shanghai guo massachusetts? Communicates the question: possibly you gone to Shanghai? The differences are however much more explicit that your. Even the sounds of spoken Chinese are completely different from western counterparts.
Chinese spoken words are not only based on 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 2 syllables, not four characters, ma and ma. The twist is that “mama” can be pronounced in twenty-five approaches. 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 1 means mother. The tones are called tones but are generally not tones like A minor or G, they are pitch modulation. Website tone is a rather steady high pitch. The second is a rising pitch. 3rd tone goes down and then move up. The fourth is a pointy decline in pitch from high to low. The fifth is called the neutral tone and does not actually have a modulation form.
All that sounds bloody difficult, make use of is, at least at first. Exactly how do you best go about arriving for grips with it? Because of course salvaging possible. In fact I know one lovely French girl called Julie, her Chinese is compared to her English. In addition know a very talented German videographer that has lived in China for just three years; he often searches for the English word to explain something and ends up saying it Offshore. Basically, I would argue, that Chinese is not so much bloody difficult as is actually bloody different.
