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I've heard it's a pretty straightforward language --- every syllable is a word in its own right, and multisyllable words are compound words[ * ]; and that the g

I've heard it's a pretty straightforward language --- every syllable is a word in its own right, and multisyllable words are compound words[ * ]; and that the grammar is supposed to be really straightforward, at least for English speakers, with no inflection, SVO sentence order, limited tenses, and sentences made from gluing words together. Unfortunately every written tutorial I've found seems heavily focused around ideograms, which I find completely impossible, so I don't know what it's like in practice. Can any beginner learners comment? (It's also a tonal language, which I am completely unable to pronounce intelligibly. On a trip to Beijing a few years ago I tried to learn a few basic phrases, like 'hello', 'please', 'thankyou', etc. Ha ha fat chance.) [ * ] It can be interesting to use Google Translate to turn an English word into Mandarin, then insert newlines between each ideogram and reverse translate it to see what it is literally. 'Grammar' is 语法, which is 'language law'...

foldr 10y ago
>every syllable is a word in its own right, and multisyllable words are compound words[ This is an artifact of the writing system. Mandarin Chinese has multisyllabic words in exactly the same way that e.g. English does. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3330 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3330
- nneonneo 10y ago
  Despite the article's enthusiasm for polysyllabic characters, these remain exceedingly rare in day-to-day use, whereas polysyllabic words in English are basically unavoidable. There's no equivalence here. The writing system remains very strongly monosyllabic, in that one character corresponds to one syllable >99% of the time.
  - foldr 10y ago
    The point I was referring to is that the words are not all monosyllabic. The existence or nonexistence of multisyllabic characters is irrelevant. Character != word. https://www.jstor.org/stable/595185?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/595185?seq=1
    - nneonneo 10y ago
      Ah, I see. I was confused because you linked to a LanguageLog article specifically about polysyllabic characters. Yes, indeed, "compound words" as mentioned by the GP post are just plain words that are composed of multiple characters.
      - foldr 10y ago
        Yes, I should have explained that I was just referring to the examples of multisyllabic words at the beginning of the post, sorry.
        david-given 10y ago
        I don't really follow here. One of the examples of a multisyllabic word given is fēijī, 飛機, 'aeroplane'. But this breaks down into 'fly machine', which is a classic example of a compound word. Later on it talks about 'library', túshūguǎn, or 'picture book museum' (according to the dictionary I just found). Again a compound word, and one which raises fascinating questions about whether they had museums before they had libraries. The article says that it can be written as a single character, 圕, or as multiple characters, 图书馆, but surely that's just an artifact of the writing scheme?
        foldr 10y ago
        The meaning of the compound words isn't predictable in general -- a library is not in fact a picture book museum. And remember that many multisyllabic words in English are composed of morphemes with a distinct meaning, with varying levels of compositionality. E.g. we would not say that "airport" is two words just because its meaning has something vaguely to do with the meanings of "air" and "port", or that "return" is two words because it can be split into "re" and "turn" (again with each component contributing some element of its usual meaning). But of course, you can imagine a parallel universe where the orthographic conventions of English are such that we write "air-port" and "re-turn", and such combinations are referred to as "compound words". As far as I can see I'm not saying anything controversial here. As the article I liked to earlier points out, there are at most a few thousand distinct syllables in Mandarin Chinese, and it would be absurd to suggest that Chinese is limited to a vocabulary of a few thousand words.
- foldr 10y ago
  I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted for this. It is a trivially verifiable fact that Mandarin Chinese has multi-syllabic words, and that these are not particularly uncommon. It's also trivially verifiable that the writing system is (to an extent) syllabic, which can give rise to the misperception that each character is a word and that each word is monosyllabic. This is all widely available, easy to verify information.
nneonneo 10y ago
I'm not a beginning learner - I grew up in a Chinese household with weekly lessons from a young age. However, this is still a far cry from real, immersive learning, and I've recently recommitted to learning the language more fully. If you don't mind being thoroughly unable to read or write the language, you can ignore the ideograms. I've found that spoken Chinese and written Chinese differ quite significantly anyway in grammatical convention, word choice, and concision, so it kind of feels like learning two separate languages with overlapping vocabulary sometimes. Of course, you'll probably still want to learn _some_ ideograms so you can navigate around, but luckily English translations are widely displayed in China nowadays. Spoken Chinese is really only challenging because of the tones; the rest is vocabulary and a _small_ amount of grammar. Written Chinese is challenging because of the need to recognize thousands of characters, and the general concision of the written language. If you're going to focus on spoken language, you'll have to get good at the tones - there's no way around that. I lucked out by hearing Chinese [Mandarin] spoken consistently from a young age, but this will be a big challenge for people who only speak English (or any number of other Western European languages).
- david-given 10y ago
  Does such a thing as a completely pinyin tutorial exist everywhere? I am quite happy (or would be, if I had the time for this to be more than a theoretical exercise) with ignoring the ideograms completely. ...when I was working in Beijing, with 45 minute tedious taxi journeys to and from work, I amused myself by trying to learn enough ideograms to puzzle out street signs. The only one I can remember now is 门, mén, which is 'gate'. Beijing had quite a lot.

foldr 10y ago

>every syllable is a word in its own right, and multisyllable words are compound words[ This is an artifact of the writing system. Mandarin Chinese has multisyllabic words in exactly the same way that e.g. English does. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3330 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3330

nneonneo 10y ago
Despite the article's enthusiasm for polysyllabic characters, these remain exceedingly rare in day-to-day use, whereas polysyllabic words in English are basically unavoidable. There's no equivalence here. The writing system remains very strongly monosyllabic, in that one character corresponds to one syllable >99% of the time.
- foldr 10y ago
  The point I was referring to is that the words are not all monosyllabic. The existence or nonexistence of multisyllabic characters is irrelevant. Character != word. https://www.jstor.org/stable/595185?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/595185?seq=1
  - nneonneo 10y ago
    Ah, I see. I was confused because you linked to a LanguageLog article specifically about polysyllabic characters. Yes, indeed, "compound words" as mentioned by the GP post are just plain words that are composed of multiple characters.
    - foldr 10y ago
      Yes, I should have explained that I was just referring to the examples of multisyllabic words at the beginning of the post, sorry.
      - david-given 10y ago
        I don't really follow here. One of the examples of a multisyllabic word given is fēijī, 飛機, 'aeroplane'. But this breaks down into 'fly machine', which is a classic example of a compound word. Later on it talks about 'library', túshūguǎn, or 'picture book museum' (according to the dictionary I just found). Again a compound word, and one which raises fascinating questions about whether they had museums before they had libraries. The article says that it can be written as a single character, 圕, or as multiple characters, 图书馆, but surely that's just an artifact of the writing scheme?
        foldr 10y ago
        The meaning of the compound words isn't predictable in general -- a library is not in fact a picture book museum. And remember that many multisyllabic words in English are composed of morphemes with a distinct meaning, with varying levels of compositionality. E.g. we would not say that "airport" is two words just because its meaning has something vaguely to do with the meanings of "air" and "port", or that "return" is two words because it can be split into "re" and "turn" (again with each component contributing some element of its usual meaning). But of course, you can imagine a parallel universe where the orthographic conventions of English are such that we write "air-port" and "re-turn", and such combinations are referred to as "compound words". As far as I can see I'm not saying anything controversial here. As the article I liked to earlier points out, there are at most a few thousand distinct syllables in Mandarin Chinese, and it would be absurd to suggest that Chinese is limited to a vocabulary of a few thousand words.
foldr 10y ago
I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted for this. It is a trivially verifiable fact that Mandarin Chinese has multi-syllabic words, and that these are not particularly uncommon. It's also trivially verifiable that the writing system is (to an extent) syllabic, which can give rise to the misperception that each character is a word and that each word is monosyllabic. This is all widely available, easy to verify information.

nneonneo 10y ago

I'm not a beginning learner - I grew up in a Chinese household with weekly lessons from a young age. However, this is still a far cry from real, immersive learning, and I've recently recommitted to learning the language more fully. If you don't mind being thoroughly unable to read or write the language, you can ignore the ideograms. I've found that spoken Chinese and written Chinese differ quite significantly anyway in grammatical convention, word choice, and concision, so it kind of feels like learning two separate languages with overlapping vocabulary sometimes. Of course, you'll probably still want to learn _some_ ideograms so you can navigate around, but luckily English translations are widely displayed in China nowadays. Spoken Chinese is really only challenging because of the tones; the rest is vocabulary and a _small_ amount of grammar. Written Chinese is challenging because of the need to recognize thousands of characters, and the general concision of the written language. If you're going to focus on spoken language, you'll have to get good at the tones - there's no way around that. I lucked out by hearing Chinese [Mandarin] spoken consistently from a young age, but this will be a big challenge for people who only speak English (or any number of other Western European languages).

david-given 10y ago
Does such a thing as a completely pinyin tutorial exist everywhere? I am quite happy (or would be, if I had the time for this to be more than a theoretical exercise) with ignoring the ideograms completely. ...when I was working in Beijing, with 45 minute tedious taxi journeys to and from work, I amused myself by trying to learn enough ideograms to puzzle out street signs. The only one I can remember now is 门, mén, which is 'gate'. Beijing had quite a lot.