Sarah
Joined: 01 Aug 2006
Posts: 98
Location: London
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 Posted: Sat Aug 05, 2006 3:08 pm Post subject: Why learning spoken Chinese as a foreigner is easy and hard |
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I've heard people describe Chinese as one of the hardest languages to learn for a non-native. Other people have said it is fairly easy. I've been thinking about both aspects and will list them here. Let me know if I'm wrong on anything. I'd especially like advice on dealing with the hard parts.
BTW, this specifically does not deal with the writing system, which has been beaten to death elsewhere, partly by me. I also want to reiterate that the topic covers learning Chinese as a second (or later) language. All languages are equally easy for people who grow up with them. Finally, I know that learning any language that you don't know can be difficult. I know that I've always thought that learning English would be hard. I'd be interested to read what people would say about English if someone wants to start a thread in the "Other cultures and language" forum.
What makes learning spoken Chinese easy:
No conjugation of verbs: Verbs remain the same in the present, future, past, and any other situation. This avoids the problem of irregular verbs because verbs always look the same.
No declension of nouns: Except for personal pronouns, nouns don't change when the become plural, possesive, etc.
What makes learning spoken Chinese hard:
Grammar: I suspect that this is the topic that will cause the most disagreement. It is easy to form declarative sentences using the STVO pattern. Things get difficult after that. Knowing when to use the topic comment construction or saying things like "I like corn more than peas" is non-trivial. On the plus side, a lot of these patterns can be learned by drills and practice.
了: 了 is a multipurpose aspect marker. It is grammar but it is tricky enough I gave it its own entry. The first thing to learn is what it doesn't do. While it is often used in past tense situations, it is technically not a past tense marker. After that the trick is figuring out when to use 了 in its two forms, the perfective and sentence-final. These are technically two different uses, although sometimes they overlap or interact. Some usage cases are clearcut, but it seems like sometimes you just use 了 because you have to.
Tones: It takes some work getting used to a tonal language. Not only do you have to learn to pronounce words according to specific tones, but you have to learn the exceptions that arise from tone sandhi, sentence finals and the like. Plus when you speak with someone else they are probably speaking too fast for you to hear and process the tones.
Way of saying things. Often the problem when translating English to Chinese isn't grammar, but rather rephrasing the sentence into the way the Chinese speak. With its own rich history and idioms often things are just said differently. For example, I recently added the sentence "我等了很久可是没有等到他" to my flashcards because I would not come up with this phrasing on my own. This sentence roughly translates as "I waited a long time but I didn't succeed in waiting for him". Or in regular English "I waited a long time but he never showed up". I have run into this elsewhere but this is the freshest example. Knowing grammatical formulas does not help with this sort of thing.
There are other minor nuisances, like measure words, pronunciation, 把, etc. but I'm not going to whine about everything.
Let me make clear that none of this is meant a criticism of Chinese. I'm actually hoping to hear good answers why I'm wrong on the hard items, because they are all things I'm having to deal with.
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