Learning Mandarin – Difficulties and Opportunities
Mandarin language studies are problematic. Mostly because Mandarin is varies greatly from other languages that people in the west have attempt to get to grips with before trying to learn Chinese, not because learning Mandarin is much harder. Mandarin is strange in any ways. The writing system is obviously completely different. You need to no alphabet just as the one that Germanic and Latin derivates have. Instead a graphic 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 associated with depicts a woman holding a kid means mother as a result on. But right after don’t end on that point. The grammar is largely made up in the is called particles. For example; adding a syllable pronounced ma after a sentence turns it into a question, adding guo after a sentence means that going without shoes happens in the past. Combining these basic examples; you go shanghai guo mum? Communicates the question: an individual have gone to Shanghai? The differences are however much more explicit that this. 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. Hugely 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, creating a total matrix of 5 times 5 possibilities, and 1 means mother. The tones are called tones but they are not tones like A minor or G, they are pitch modulation. Quite tone is a rather steady high pitch. The second is a rising pitch. The third tone goes down and then -up. The fourth is a clear decline in pitch from high to low. The fifth is called the neutral tone and does not actually possess a modulation form.
All that sounds bloody difficult, as well as is, at least at first. So how to speak mandarin chinese do you best go about visiting grips with out? Because of course it is possible. In fact I know one lovely French girl called Julie, her Chinese is better than her English. In addition know a very talented German videographer that has lived in China combined with the three years; he often searches for that English word to describe something and ends up saying it Japanese. Basically, I would argue, that Chinese is not so much bloody difficult as is certainly bloody different.
