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Every language has its difficulties. Chinese grammar is very easy compared to English. However, to get to a basic reading level, you need to know at least 230
by rick888 16y ago
Every language has its difficulties. Chinese grammar is very easy compared to English. However, to get to a basic reading level, you need to know at least 2300 characters (in other languages, the alphabet is very small). There are also tones (mandarin only has 5. Other dialects like Cantonese have 9).
It's also nearly impossible to know the meaning of a character (or how to pronounce it), unless you have already seen it (you can look at the root, but that doesn't always work).
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- iamwil 16y agoThis is true. In Chinese, there's no such thing as articles like 'a' 'an' and 'the' to trip you up, much less gender to every noun. And verb conjugation is pretty much non-existent.
- vorg 16y ago"In Chinese, there's no such thing as articles like 'a' 'an' and 'the' to trip you up, much less gender to every noun." The 50+ classifiers can be hard to remember, though admittedly you can just use 个 every time when speaking and it doesn't sound too bad. "And verb conjugation is pretty much non-existent." When to use each verb modifier (e.g. 了, 过, 正在, 起来, 下去) and how they combine with negators and auxiliaries (e.g. 没, 不, 会, 能) seems more difficult than in English.
- CWuestefeld 16y agoThose things may well trip you up when writing. But in reading English and other European languages, those things can be clues to deciphering the stuff you don't know. They help you see how the words of the sentence relate to each other, so without them you've got a little less information for puzzling it out.
- Naga 16y agoArticles are used to distinguish between whether or not you are talking about a specific item, or a general item (which I'm sure you know). This is actually very valuable. I've studied Latin, and sometimes you can't know which is which, because Latin doesn't distinguish. Also, I don't think 'a' and 'an' are fundamentally different. 'An' just has the extra sound to smooth speech over. It doesn't really matter if you write "a apple" or "an apple". Also, verb conjugation in English is pretty nonexistant, compared to other languages, like Romance languages. There are usually three different verb forms: the standard (write), the past (writed) and the third person singular present (writes). I know there are some irregularities, but generally if you want to say a verb, you use the standard.
- vorg 16y agoI know more than 2300 characters, and can read stuff and verbalize the correct pronunciation, even recognize which characters go together as words. But I often still don't understand the meaning of what I'm reading because I don't know the meaning of enough two-character words. The Chinese govt language proficiency test (HSK) proscribes knowledge of 2900 characters and 8800 words for literacy. Learning those 8800 words is the toughie.
- rick888 16y agovery true. I've been studying mandarin for a year and I still can't read newspapers.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]