Mandarin is increasing in populiarity because of the China is getting stronger and stronger and take a more and more important role in the world, also beacause of its long history and and exotic culture. Some people think mandarin is the most difficult language to master. Well, as an experienced and prefessional mandarin teacher, I'm presenting few points here to preove that mandarin is not that difficult.
1.Pronunciation
Like other languages, Chinese also has a alphabit whoese pronunciation is gererally very similar to the world language English. The only difference is that Chinese is a tonal language and it has four tones which is not so hard to master through practice
2. Characters and words
Chinese syllable is represent by characters and some people may think that it's hard to write Chinese characters.Well, actually you don't need to know how to write Chinese characters if you just want to speak Chinese. You just need to recoganize them, but Chinese calligraphy is a kind of art and a lot of foreigner may be very interested in learning it.
Since Chinese syllables are represent by characters and each characters may never change, so Chinese words doesn't have any changes,such nouns from singular to plural and verbs change their forms in difference tenses and so on.
3. Grammar
Chinese grammar is a lot easier English and many other languages for there's no tenses, no changes of verb forms in Chinese which is acheived by adding a specific particle(character) to the sentence. So you just need to memorize the function of some specific particles. You don't have to change the form the verb in every sentence.In Chinese, you just need to know one particle for each grammar point.
Comentarios · 8
This looks like something Benny Lewis would write. I don't know why its so popular these days to try to convince people that things are easy. Are we that spolied and weak the we need to be deceived into learning a language? I actually don't think such articles increase the number of Mandarin speakers. When people start to learn, they'll find out for themselves that it takes hundreds of hours just to reach B1, thousands to reach C1. But I'll take the bait, and point out what I disagree with in the OP.
1) Pronunciation - Tones are generally quite difficult for learners without a tonal language background. Yes, there are aspects of pronunciation that are relatively easy, but there is no reason to downplay the difficulty of tones.
2) Characters are extremely difficult, meaning time consuming, to learn. Hundreds if not thousands of hours. The reason western learners often learn to write is that it's actually faster to reach the goal of recognition if you spend a portion of your time writing rather than 100% of it reading.
3) I agree that Chinese grammar is realatively easy for native english speakers, but it makes no sense to say it's easier than english grammar. A native english speaker will find english grammar easier, for example.
Generally, we should give people the facts and let them decide if they want to learn the language. Exaggerating ease or difficulty is not very helpful.
I wrote an article about learning Mandarin here:
http://polydog.org/index.php?threads/how-to-learn-mandarin.234/
As long as you are passionate and have enough time, nothing can trip you.
Great tips! I like Chinese because there are no conjugations and feminine/masculine nouns/articles etc.
I think Chinese pronunciation is a little bit different from English, esp. some sounds like zh, ch, sh and the Chinese "r" but I think people can do it with some practice.
I don't think it's hard to write Chinese characters but sometimes I find it difficult to remember them when I'm reading.
You are right about all features you mention, I only want to say I am not interested in Chinese now in the last few years because of some reasons you have outlined. When I was a child, I liked martial arts and when I was twelve, I started to be interested in Chinese medicine which seemed to be more powerful to me. I did not think about learning Chinese at all, I learned a fer Western languages instead. Finally I also learn Chinese and I enjoy it, I have been to China four times, I have many Chinese friends and they behave so wonderfully to me, I am so surprised. So I plan to go to China again and teach foreign languages there and become fluent in Chinese. I will ask you some questions later when I practise my Chinese again and I can help you with anything you need about English.
thanks!
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