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Is that true? Chinese has tones but English has a huge number of distinct vowel sounds to distinguish between and often has syllables with both two consonants
by Symmetry 8y ago
Is that true? Chinese has tones but English has a huge number of distinct vowel sounds to distinguish between and often has syllables with both two consonants in front and two in back, like "thrones". In terms of bits per syllable they're both near the top, in contrast to languages like Spanish or Japanese.
That's just spoken Chinese though. Writing in a language that doesn't use an alphabet or syllabary is of course clearly much harder.
- pertymcpert 8y agoThere are some things easier in Mandarin, but I still think it's far more difficult than English. The number of homophones is much higher than English.
- nneonneo 8y agoIMHO spoken Chinese is not so bad. The grammar is simpler than English (no verb conjugation is a big one), and with the exception of tones, the phonetic inventory is fairly straightforward to learn. Although individual characters are frequently homophonic, treating groups of them as words (as you do in English) reduces the number of homophones significantly. If you're only going to learn Mandarin without the written language, it's very much doable, and possibly even easy depending on how quickly you pick up on the tones. Written Chinese is, of course, a totally different matter.
- Baeocystin 8y agoOn the bright side (and I am saying this genuinely) if you enjoy wordplay, puns, and double-meanings, Mandarin is hilariously awesome at it, even compared to English, which is no slouch itself.