Learning Chinese?
News March 5th, 2008
Here’s a great article on Lost Laowai from Matt, about the fallacies of Chinese learners.
Learning Chinese is so completely different from learning a Romance language (or even an Indo-European language, for that matter). I think I picked up as much Italian in my few weeks in Rome as in my first six months in China. Reading a menu in Italian, or most European languages, is difficult, but there are enough similar words to guess what you’re ordering and the alphabet’s sounds are close enough to the English sounds that you can pronounce words well enough to be understood. But a Chinese menu? It’s hard to know what “line squiggle squiggle curve” means OR how to pronounce it.
Anyway, if you’re planning to travel to China for the Olympics, this is an informative post.
3. I just need to learn how to identify #### characters- then I can read a newspaper.
For some reason, a lot of people believe that if you can master a certain number of characters (a few thousand or so) then you鈥檒l be able to get the gist of a typical article in a Chinese newspaper. This, alas, is a myth. Granted, if you do know several thousand characters, you鈥檒l probably be able to read quite a lot- but that鈥檚 putting the cart in front of the horse. Let me explain.
Most Chinese words are made up of combinations of two or more individual characters, characters that have meaning in and of themselves. For example, you might know that the word 鏈� means something like 鈥渕achine鈥� and that 浼� has to do with 鈥渁bility鈥�, but you still might not know (unless you鈥檙e a genius with lateral thinking) that 鏈轰細 means 鈥渙pportunity鈥�. There are countless other examples of whole phrases or sentences comprised of simple characters that are nonetheless somewhat difficult to understand entirely.
The Chinese language is pretty logical, but learning characters in isolation won鈥檛 do the trick. So while you might be looking forward to boasting about how many characters you know (as if you could ever be sure in the first place), forget about it. It鈥檚 the words that matter, not the characters.
I think Matt’s right about all three fallacies, they’re shortcuts that we wish would work, but sadly, don’t really work. But I also think that the worst toneless attempt at a few words of terrible Chinese is better than hanging out solely in the Westernized areas of town. Give your language tapes, phrasebook or ChinesePod a try, even if you never become fluent.
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Interesting- my first foreign language was Italian, as well. I studied it for two years in college before studying abroad in Padova for one year, and within six months in country I was just as competent in the language (if not more so) then I am in Chinese after more than three years here. Chinese is not unlearnable, for sure, but anyone who thinks it’ll be a walk in the park ala a Romance language is sadly mistaken!
I agree that Chinese is hard, but at least there are no tenses. On the other hand there are measure words which are quite confusing when first learning Chinese.
But at the end of the day its all about motivation and perseverance. I’m trying to learning Chinese now with poems and jokes, which makes it very enjoyable.
Oliver from
http://www.chinese-course.com/
I don’t think I’d say there are no tenses… isn’t that what “le” is for?
It does have the advantage that once you learn a verb, that’s the verb for first, second and third person, singular and plural, and you never have to conjugate it.
Take that, high-school Spanish!