Learning Mandarin – Difficulties and Opportunities

Mandarin language studies are problematic. Mostly because Mandarin is different from other languages that people in the west have attempt to get to grips with before hoping to learn Chinese, not because learning Mandarin is much more complicated. Mandarin is strange in any ways. The writing system is obviously completely different. Presently there no alphabet once the one that Germanic and Latin derivates have. Instead a picture defines every word; or rather a set of what is addressed strokes. For example, three stokes that together make a square means mouth, one combination of strokes that regarding depicts a woman holding a kid means mother as a result on. But the differences don’t end several. The grammar is largely made up of the things is called fibers. For example; adding a syllable pronounced ma after a sentence turns it suitable question, adding guo after a sentence means that in which it happens in the past. Combining these basic examples; you go shanghai guo mum? Communicates the question: a person have gone to Shanghai? The differences are however much more explicit that the. Even the sounds of spoken Chinese are completely different from western counterparts.

Chinese spoken test is not only defined by syllables as western words are. Genuine for mother in English is just 6 different sounds noted by each character; M, O, T, H, E and R. In Chinese there is 2 syllables, not four characters, ma and ma. The twist is that “mama” can be pronounced in twenty-five methods. 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 just one means mother. The tones are called tones but are generally not tones regarding A minor or G, they are pitch modulation. Most important tone is a rather steady high throw. The second is a rising pitch. 3rd tone goes down and then -up. The fourth is a sharp decline in pitch from high to low. The fifth is called the neutral tone and does not actually have a modulation form.

All that sounds bloody difficult, and it is, at least at first. So how to speak mandarin chinese do you best go about arriving for grips with out? Because of course it’s very possible. In fact I know one lovely French girl called Julie, her Chinese is compared to her English. Furthermore know a very talented German videographer that has lived in China for just three years; he often searches for your English word to describe something and ends up saying it Offshore. Basically, I would argue, that Chinese isn’t so much bloody difficult as is certainly bloody different.