Is Learning Mandarin Chinese Difficult?
Howdy
China has been my home for over 4 years. In that time, I have managed to learn the language at a decent level and want to share with you guys whether I think Chinese is difficult to learn or not.
From my experience, there are aspects of Chinese that are easier than English, and other aspects that make it difficult.
Why Chinese Can Be Easy
- No prefixes or suffixes. Instead, certain characters are added to sentences to indicate whether an action has been completed. For example, the character “了” (le) is usually added at the end of a sentence to indicate that an action has been completed. The character “要” (yào) can be added before a verb to indicate that you are going to do something.
- No plural forms of nouns. Similar to part 1, certain characters are added to indicate that more of one thing exists. As a result, you do not need to remember the singular and plural forms of a noun because the plural form will just have a generic character added after the noun to indicate more than one. For example, the character “我” (wǒ ) means "me" or "I". However, if you add the character “们” (men) after it to make “我们”, the two characters mean "we". The same rule applies for other nouns.
- No verb conjugation. A verb does not change based on tense. There are no past, present or future tenses of a verb. The verb stays the same but like I said in part 1, certain characters are added to indicate whether an action will be, is currently happening, or has been completed.
Why Chinese Can Be Difficult
- Chinese is a tonal language. Chinese has 4 tones. It is difficult to properly pronounce each character with the proper tone. When you change the tone, you change the meaning. Even some words with the same tone can mean different things and be represented by different characters. This can be really confusing. The characters “要”and “药” (yào) both sound identical. The first character means "want" and the second character means "medicine". When talking to others, you have to understand the context in order to realize which one they are saying.
- Too many accents and dialects. Practically every city and province has it's own accent and dialect. This can make conversations with many people difficult to understand. The only people that really speak "Standard Chinese" are news anchors. The average person will speak with their own flavour and neighbouring cities can have different dialects. For example, I live less than 1 hour away from a city called Tangshan. However, when I go there, I find that they have a really unusual dialect that is difficult for me to understand even though they live fairly close to my city.
Overall, I think anybody with motivation to study Chinese will succeed in learning the language at a decent level. I actually don't think my Chinese is that good because I feel like it should be better for the amount of time that I spent here. I studied a lot in my first year in China, but once I had enough fluency to get by and have casual conversations, buy things and travel, I lost a lot of motivation to keep studying. However, recently I have started studying again because I think Chinese will be an extremely important language to know in the near future and it would be a damn shame if I didn't become at least semi-fluent while in this country. China's economic power is changing the world as we know it and I think those that can adapt by learning how to speak Chinese will benefit immensely.
That's all for now.
Thanks for reading & watching
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Just to be specific, when you change the tone, it actually becomes another word - in most cases. To add to the confusion, sometimes you change the tone of a word without changing its meaning because you have to adapt to the word after it like a word changes from third to second tone if followed by a third tone.
And if you want more confusion, try cantonese with 9 tones !!!
Yeah that stuff still confuses me. I have heard that when you have 2 characters with the 4th tone, the first character changes to the second tone. For example, 不(bù) and 是（shì) are both 4th tone but together they become bú shì but I have seen other characters that don't follow this rule like 望而却步(wàng ér què bù) or 后缀(hòu zhuì). Can you give me some clarification on this?
Cantonese looks and sounds like a nightmare. I have been slowly learning it from time to time just for fun.
Sadly I'm definitely not the right person to ask about learning Chinese as I'm still learning myself. But what I was told with 不 and 一 is that if they follow a 4th tone word they are pronounced 2nd tone, and if they folow a 1st, 2nd or 3rd tone word, it is pronounced 4th tone.
Cantonese and English is my thing, Mandarin I get by winging it !!!
Do you know any good resources for learning Cantonese? I am located in northern China which means hardly anybody (if at all) speaks Cantonese here.
Woah! Good to hear you speak Mandarin Sir...
BTW I think you have generated a good interested among people here on DTube to learn Chinese and that so in such a beautiful manner, describing each nd every thing let it be The things you may find it easy to learn as well as What may be the difficulties that you might face...
謝謝 Sir for presenting This Superb Vlog !
Well learning Chinese can be a mammoth task for me, speakin in the various tones could be an obstacle for me. As well as I don't have anyone to talk within Chinese, maybe that's the same reason we don't learn other languages.
Will Try Mah Best!!
Cheers!
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There is a great app called HelloTalk that allows you to chat with people that speak the language you want to learn.
Thank you so much for this awesome comment.
Woah! That sounds interesting... Would check it out.. Thanks For the info bud..
✌ Cheers!
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Woah! That sounds interesting... Would check it out.. Thanks For the info bud..
✌ Cheers!
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I am impressed.
I too believe this is the language to learn.
Here, Cantonese is the more common dialect though Mandarin is taught at Chinese schools.
And it only took you a year to learn the basics.... hmmm... that gives me hope.
So thank you for making this video.
I had to read the subtitles to understand what you were saying of course but you sound very confident :)
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Which country are you located in?
Chinese is intimidating but it really isn't that bad. Not needing to remember tenses is a huge relief.
I am from Malaysia.
Ok you make me feel I can do this 😊
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There's a good app called HelloTalk that connects you with native speakers of a language you want to learn and chat with. It has a lot of useful functions. Highly recommended.
Thank you so much for the tip.
Will check it out for sure.
😊
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Yeh the tone thing is hard! But I’m glad I’ve got Cantonese as my first language as I hear that one is harder lol.
Also yes there’s dialects and accents that mean I don’t even know what they’re talking about - my grandma-in-law speaks some strange dialect that takes all of my focus to understand at least 50% of what she means.
Props for learning such a hard language 👍🏻
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Cantonese is a nightmare compared to Mandarin lol. But I want to learn it just for fun even though nobody speaks it up in northern China. I may even ask you some questions about Cantonese from time to time!
Yeh! But mandarin is a good useful language to know cos China taking over the world 😝🙊
Sure I look forward to you making Cantonese videos hahaa
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唔该！
Dude I had to pause it so I could start commenting haha. Great work man! Really really good. I want to learn mandarin for sure, so this is right down my wheel well. Not to be putting you down in any way, however, your Mandarin sounds better than your English lol. OK continuing to watch now. Chinese is very important, now and in the future for sure! Thats odd how their dialects differ so much. Why is that, you think? Very very well done bro.
Thanks a lot my dude!
Lmaoo, this country has diminished my vocabulary and grammar. Seeing and hearing "Chinglish" everywhere you go eventually takes its toll you on.
I think there are so many dialects because throughout history, China went through many dynasties and wasn't as "united" as it is now. China was basically a conglomerate of different regions that were ruled by an emperor. Since communication between these regions wasn't as sophisticated as it is now, every region was like its own "country" and messages were passed using letters/text so I suppose over time, it would be difficult to maintain one "standard" pronunciation of all the characters.
Lol Chinglish, I like that. People around LA might get offended if I use it though.
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Wow. I am soooooo impressed.
I am a Chinese from Malaysia and I don't even speak the standard Chinese like you. Also, I was not from Chinese school, so I speak but I don't recognise many Chinese characters.
Regretted not going to Chinese school so I enrolled my son to one. And now I am relearning Chinese again using apps as well as Google translate.
You speak so well. I mean proper Chinese. Mine is mixed Chinese, sometimes I do not know what word then I replace with English.
What a shame! I gotto brush up soon since you inspired me by saying it is not that difficult. Need to have interest and perseverance.
You are so good lah (our Malaysian slang) :)
Let's go girl. Do it!
💪💪💪👍👍😊
Hi there,
I've just upvoted this post
A small contribution from me, to help the steem community to thrive ;)
Well I'll be damned...
not sure I got your comment my friend....
Well I'm not sure I got your comment either. I guess we're both in the same predicament!
Enjoyed watching you speaking Mandarin bro!
Chinese is difficult and I can feel nothing is difficult not for you!!
I'll contact you if need any help with Chinese with finding Investors and developer for our DtubeFamily777!
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Thanks a lot man. Good hearing from you.
Awesome vid bro! I watched whole as well. Nice mandarin :)
I can see you are persistent. At least for 1 year
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Thanks a lot dude. It's improving again and I am happy to see my vocabulary being enhanced.
Man,in my ears your Chinese are good.
5 minutes straight speaking is not that easy.I can undestand tha when I speak English.
Finally,YES,writing with Chinese characters seems hella tough but you know better.
You should try learning some Greeks,now this is a difficult task.
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Thanks dude.
It was a difficult task to speak at length like this. I had to prepare what I wanted to talk about.
Handwriting Chinese characters is difficult, but it isn't necessary these days due to technology. On your phone or computer, you just need to type the pinyin form of the character and then you can select the character.
Learning Greek would be awesome. Looks really cool. I just know... alpha, beta, gamma, sigma.... lol
Άλφα,βήτα,γάμα,σίγμα.
That's the Greek translation in order about the four words you know.
I'll be glad to help you if you ever decide to learn.
Also,I would love to learn how to write and speak Chinese.
Their culture is epic and so is Japanese.
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That's so cool man. Thanks
Writing Chinese is pretty hard in the beginning but it is actually really fun!