Today, I saw an interesting post on the foreign version of Zhihu quora: “what’s the feeling of foreigners learning Chinese?” Let’s experience the experience of foreigners learning Chinese together. Many netizens lament that learning Chinese is simply too difficult, and it is the most difficult language on earth.
There is a Justin Wilson netizen who has studied in China for 4 or 5 years!
He thinks that it is difficult to learn Chinese well. Even after 10, 20 and 30 years, he may not be able to master Chinese vocabulary such as melancholy, sadness and depression. If he really wants to learn it, he may spend a long time with his teacher.
The netizen continued to comment that in the initial stage of learning Chinese, it is particularly difficult to learn the pitch of syllables! He suggested listening to audiobooks and novels for a long time when learning Chinese! This way you can have 10 hours of interesting audio to improve your listening skills. If you don’t, you will commit suicide in frustration! This reminds Xiaobian of the sour days when she used to learn English. It’s so hard to see foreigners learning Chinese. How can I feel inexplicable pleasure.
Another foreign netizen who has studied Chinese for 10 years (not very hard) replied:
I’ve heard that Chinese is one of the most difficult languages in the world. I think it may be true. I have a strange Russian neighbor who is an outstanding linguist who can read and / or speak 20 languages, including Greek, Hebrew, several forms of hieroglyphs and Esperanto. He told me that he tried to learn Chinese and gave up three months later. “It’s too hard!” He said.
Another Ka Basha netizen who has studied Chinese for three years replied:
It’s incredible that I have studied Chinese myself for three years. In the first days, I felt like I wanted to die.
The netizen continued to comment that he translated a song that you are the wind and I am the sand.
You are the son of the wind, I am the sand! I interweaved at the end of the sky, this is the soundtrack of a legendary TV play! Finally, the netizen replied that he could understand Ma Yun’s Chinese economy and Chinese comics, and the editor really admired him. Not easy
Another netizen Antony vitillo replied:
He has studied Chinese for five years
When I try to talk to the Chinese… Well, I can’t understand that much, I can’t say that much, except for simple sentences. I don’t even know cartoon! It’s very frustrating.
I’m Italian, we have a lot of grammar rules, but Mandarin seems to have no rules, which makes it difficult for me to learn it. I mean, as my teacher always says: the only real way to learn Mandarin is to go to China, listen to people speak Chinese and learn from you. There are no books that really explain how you speak Mandarin. In fact, when I try to use the rules that my book teaches me, the Chinese always answer, “your sentence is correct, but it doesn’t make big sense.
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Chinese is a language spoken by about one fifth of the world’s population. It consists of many dialects which differ significantly from one another.
Mandarin and Cantonese (cantonese) are two of the most widely used dialects. Mandarin speaks 1.3 billion people and its headquarters is Beijing (汉语 han yu) and cantonese are mainly spoken in Hong Kong.
Mandarin is one of the 8 most important dialects in China. Since 1958 it has been taught in all schools in the country to facilitate the communication of citizens and to strengthen the cohesion of the state. It is the official language of PR China, Singapore and Taiwan. It is widespread throughout the world.
If you have already tried to learn a Latin-based foreign language, you will surely know the fatigue and hassle of keeping up with the verb tenses, pronouns, gerunds, singular plural and irregular verbs. The good news is that with Mandarin you won’t have such problems.
Mandarin Chinese dialect has a relatively small number of different sounds. The small number of sounds and the fact that a number of ideograms often have the same sound, help to understand without problems. There are cases in English where many characters share the same sound while other concepts are for example too with to and two. With Mandarin you won’t have this problem
PIINYIN 拼音
PinYin is a writing system that uses the Western alphabet to capture sounds and approximate ideograms. It uses 1 or 2 letters of the western alphabets to represent a sound in the mandarin, that is to say the word pronunciation.
PRESENTATION TONING
The sounds of the words are easy to reproduce. They look a little like English, as long as the word is properly emphasized. There are many ideograms that their pinyin is written and pronounced the same way but they mean something completely different. Eg The expression ‘I am pregnant’ (huái yùn) incorrectly emphasizing the words, we could have the expression (huài yùn) meaning ‘bad luck’.
The Chinese have 4 tones and one neutral, all placed above a vowel.
The flat tone is marked with an outline (ē) and it sounds flat, eg we tell our students during the course of spelling, it’s like going to the Otolaryngologist and the time he puts this tool in to see our neck tells us to say ‘aaaa’. This sound represents the first tone.
The second rising tone is marked by an acute right-to-left (é). We hear this sound as a question mark eg ‘where? how? The third (failing an rising tone) is marked with an inverted hat shaped (ě). Here our voice goes low and rises again!