Quote: (01-23-2013 12:12 PM)Vorkuta Wrote:
I know you said students want to learn the characters but for someone like VP who wants the language for business deals and wheeling and dealing more then say for taking the HSK exam would you not advise him to learn with Pinyin? He could get fluency so much quicker.
I'm not sure if I would recommend VP to learn solely with pinyin, but I would certainly recommend he not bother learning to write. Learning to read has its benefits and although takes time, is nowhere near as time consuming as learning to write.
Some benefits of learning to read Chinese characters:
- You can use a computer to write. You type in the pinyin and then select the character, so if you can recognize the character, you can write on a cellphone or computer. This is often necessary for texting girls, as many of the local girls cannot read pinyin.
- You can read basic directions, road signs, menus in a restaurant, etc. Many will have English translations, but not all. Even in Shanghai which is probably the most international city in China, there are restaurant menus only in Chinese.
Also I find just having some knowledge of Chinese characters is preferable if you're serious about learning the language. That way you're not a complete illiterate. I would say a good approach would be to make an effort to learn the characters for your basic vocab - food, colours, places, words like 'restaurant' and 'coffee' and Beijing. Then when you start really building your vocab with words like 'jealous' and 'elephant' and 'earthquake', its pinyin all the way.
Quote: (01-23-2013 12:12 PM)Vorkuta Wrote:
Shibby,I've had a long held view about Mandarin since spending time in China. I wonder if you could tell me if I am right or wrong to hold it? It's namely that the language has an undeserved reputation for difficulty. The main reason it's undeserved is because the grammar is actually very simple as in apart from rules with word order and especially in relation to 'quantity',there are no case endings like Russian for example or masc/fem/neut words as in French for instance. The real difficulty is the written form and maybe mastering the tones but from a grammatical point it's simple. Therefore once you have a vocab built up you can speak very good grammatically correct Mandarin. Would you agree with that or is it an erroneous view?
I would agree. Grammatically its an extremely simple language, compared to say English or Spanish. Verbs don't even change when speaking in past/future tense. Meaning the exact same sentence could be past tense or present tense, depending on context. Compare this to Spanish where you have 8 (or more?) past tense forms of a verb to choose from, and all mean something slightly different. So yes, relatively speaking the amount of grammar you need to learn is minimal. Your time will be mostly spent learning to read and write vocab lists.
I wouldn't consider the tones an area of difficulty, there are only 4, and they are tones that are fairly easy to reproduce (at least I thought so). Some students do have difficulty with them, but the majority don't. In my course we spent the first 2 weeks just practicing tones, and that was enough.
I also wouldn't consider the written form
difficult, just very time consuming. 90% of the time I spent studying for exams was just memorizing how to write characters. This is brainless work, there is no problem to solve, you just need a pen, lots of paper, and a shitload of time. Imagine someone gave you a page of 500 silly shapes and you had to memorize them all and redraw them in an exam. That's basically studying Chinese characters. It isn't a question of whether you're smart or dumb. It's just a question of do you give a shit.
In fact, I don't really consider any part of the language difficult per se. When you learn French or Spanish, there are areas of difficulty that you really need to think about. In this sentence should the verb be in subjunctive or conditional? Things like that. These issues don't exist in Mandarin, or at least not that I am aware of. I studied until HSK-5, and currently the highest level is HSK-6.
This is why I say, remove the writing component and you can learn the language fairly quickly. On another note, speaking the tones is not terribly difficult but recognizing them is much harder. Even when spoken slowly they can sound similar so when natives speak naturally fast, it can be really hard to understand. You need to make an effort to train your ear in this respect. Out of reading, writing, listening, speaking, my listening exam was always my lowest mark.
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