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In China it's also hard to speak with Chinese people because many of them aren't used to communicate with foreigners. If I speak in French with a non-French spe
by laurent123456 8y ago
In China it's also hard to speak with Chinese people because many of them aren't used to communicate with foreigners. If I speak in French with a non-French speaker, and they don't understand, I'll try to use different words, or I'll say the sentence more slowly.
In China, not really - if you don't understand, often they'll repeat the exact same thing, the exact same way, and again and again. You can end up in a deadlock as they won't try to use simpler words or speak more slowly. Chinese people know that their language is hard, but I don't think all of them realise just how hard it is for foreigners.
Of course as he mentioned in the article, when it's your turn to speak, even if you know how to say what you want to say, if you don't have all the tones exactly right, you won't make sense to the other person either.
- colordrops 8y agoBased on my 9 years in China learning the language I would have to disagree with your characterization. I've changed pronunciation and ways of saying things successfully. I just think it takes longer to get to that point than other languages. Language difficulty is relative to your native tongue. Learning English is as hard for a native Chinese speaker as Chinese is for an English speaker. And learning Chinese for a Korean speaker is much easier than English. Chinese is not exceptionally difficult. Over a billion people speak it.
- laurent123456 8y agoYes with practice things get easier and the language is not impossible to learn. However I think it is an exceptionally difficult language.
- theaeolist 8y agoI think the author of the post makes a compelling argument that what you say is not true. Just the convenience of dictionary lookup and quasi-phonetic spelling should make learning English far easier for a native Chinese speaker.
- colordrops 8y agoPronunciation and grammar are much harder in English than Chinese though. Each language has many facets. The author is missing the forest for the trees. Chinese grammar is ridiculously simple. There is no tense and no gender. Subject can be dropped from the sentence. Phonetically, pronunciation is always the same for a particular character. The language is like Legos, where you snap together a limited subset of sounds. Memorizing characters is not the only aspect to the language.
- chillacy 8y agoAn example is the Chinese word 海军 which an intermediate learner would recognize as “ocean army” and a beginner learner might recognize as something to to with water and maybe vehicles. Whereas in English the word Navy gives no indication to its meaning, only its prononciation.
- laurent123456 8y agoNot really, memorising is nearly everything in language. If you don't even know the terms to communicate what can you do at all? What's easier? - Memorising English Grammar (even if you forgot an "s" somewhere everybody will still understand you) or memorising 3000+ characters? Sure, Chinese characters are beautiful (pretty much why I started learning Chinese) but they just aren't practical to communicate. Pinyin is just weird and became the main phonetic transcript probably (as many things in China) for political reasons rather than practical ones.
- huxflux 8y agoChinese people doesn't believe "foreigners" can speak Chinese. That's it. He is right, I don't care if you been over there for twenty years.
- mr_overalls 8y agoWhat do you think about Dashan? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POzdgjdlKwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POzdgjdlKwo