Once a friend of Lingq asked me how to learn chinese well. You know, I was stumped by his question. Though chiense is my frist language, but I really don’t know where to start. Sometimes we just pick up our language in an unexpected situation. Now english is my working language, but I still find my english is not so good, for me ,english is much more difficult than chinese,cause I always forget the words I recite. Everybody, do you think chinese is a hard stuff for learning? why you think so? which part is more difficult?
I reckon the hardest aspects of Chinese are it’s tones, synoyms, characters and the influence of classical Chinese.
Although four tones aren’t incredibly hard, westerners just don’t use tones in the same way, which is a really tricky concept to get around. (Listen to kids speaking Chinese and you’ll understand the huge influence tones have on Chinese as a language). The first year I spent learning Chinese, I just couldn’t understand the relation between tones and the language, it’s really not as simple as it sounds, it depends completely on the attitude of the speaker etc. Also, because of there being so many words that, especially if you find it hard to distinguish tones, are really hard to distinguish, the amount of synonyms in Chinese make listening particularly hard.
Secondly, characters are obviously hell to learn, I know about 2000 now, it get’s easier, but, again it’s still way harder than an alphabet.
Thirdly, the influence of classical Chinese is way stronger than that of Latin in English and, to understand chengyus, you need to either grasp the complex grammer of classical chinese or just learn by rote.
如果你聽到很多種文資料, 我覺得tones不是很重要. 我覺得tones和grammar是一樣一點. 只要你聽到很多native content你不需要over analyze the tones. 我問了很多中國人. 他說 “dont pay attention tones that much” (like grammar). 如果我問他 "which tone is this and this? 他需要想一點. 是因為那個時候他不知道. 最多的人需要考論一點. 然後他會告訴我.