Chinese has got to be one of the toughest languages in the world. Not wanting to be racist or otherwise offensive, I think they end up with narrow eyes because of the effort and strain the kids have to put to learn the language in their childhood.
Naaa.. just kidding, but someone please educate me about this language. I so want to learn chinese sometime in the near future. I always want to learn languages not only to speak but also to read/write. Thats how I feel one should learn a language, and thats the best way to grasp/remember a language too. Thats one of the reasons learning latin(esqe) or roman(ce) language is so much simpler. They all share the english(latin actually) script
Ahhh.. but chinese.. now one must be nuts to even think of learning this. Its simply too overwhelming. First there are two peculiarities about this language that fails to make any sense to me. Chinese obviously has a very limited vocabulary of words. Every sound/syllable can be pronounced in 4 different ways – steady, rising, falling, falling+rising. So you often end up with single words that spell the same(in english) but depending on the way it is pronounced it can mean different things and mostly unrelated to each other. A different pronunciation of an otherwise harmless word can even be rude, insulting and definitely dangerous to use in public. When its like this, who will risk learning chinese and then having to actually practise it with chinese speakers.
So, that brings me to the second interesting thing. If there is a limited vocabulary, I would imaging chinese to have fewer letters in its scripts. Well, not exactly, the two are definitely not dependent on each other but when I read the extract below, I definitely dont find an excuse for having that many characters in its script.
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese.htm#characters
“The Chinese writing system is an open-ended one, meaning that there is no upper limit to the number of characters. The largest Chinese dictionaries include about 56,000 characters, but most of them are archaic, obscure or rare variant forms. Knowledge of about 3,000 characters enables you to to read about 99% of the characters in Chinese newspapers and magazines. To read Chinese literature, technical writings or Classical Chinese though, you need to be familiar with about 6,000 characters.”
My gawddd… poor poor chinese kids. And btw, the underlines part really makes sense reading over and over again. Gawd… who invented that language? Gosh… I am sort of expletives that reflect my emotion.
The following reading my shed some light on things. Enlighten me please, if you understand why this language is this way.
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese_horse.htm#horse
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Mandarin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Mandarin#Tones
No Trackbacks
5 Comments
Of what i know, there is no language called Chinese.
mandarin is one of the language spoke in china.
It is like in India you speak Hindi and not “Indian”.
in China you speak mandarin and not “Chinese”.
Mandarin is the most widely spoken form of Chinese in China. Wiki describes Chinese as a language family. The chinese language can be compared to the Hindi script. In Hindi, there is nothing called the hindi script – the script is the devanagari script. Similarly, there is nothing like a chinese language but the most adopted form of chinese is mandarin. There is other very popular forms of chinese such as wu, min and cantonese. Of course mandarin accounts for almost 75% of chinese speakers and hence thats what ‘foreigners’ learn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devan%C4%81gar%C4%AB
Oh, and I don’t think there is any other country in the world, other than India, which doesn’t have a language or dialect named after its country. Of course one could get around arguing that Hindi is derived from Hindustan, but I don’t have a clue on how Hindi got its name, so lets leave it at that.
ah well….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi#Origin_and_history_of_the_word_.22Hindi.22
oh yes…. America has to be one. Never heard of something called American/Amerikish.