[*watcher]

Perhaps, but only being able to understand it and not saying it or writing it...totally kills 1/2 of the reason why you're taking it in the first place.

When you learn a language, wouldn't you want to feel proud by being able to speak it, read it, write it, and translate it? Not just read and translate?

Basing everything on english works, but to me, it's pretty stupid cause then you're not really learning the language, but it's more like you're just learning various ways of looking at the word. To learn a language effectively is to disregard the whole translating concept and go

Like how 1 can be represented as Uno/Un/One/одно/ένας/ein/00110001/etc, except in this case {english word} would be the 1 and {everything else} would be Uno/Un/One/одно/ένας/ein/00110001/etc.

But it's your choice, and I won't go against your methods.


Chinese not much harder than french or whatever, however...it's actually a lot more complicated. There are some "rules" that just can't be used when translating. I'd give examples, but I can't think of any right now. I'll re-edit this post or something later on.

It's true that only writing and reading defeats one-half of the purpose of learning a language, but there is no point in practicing the pronounciations if I am not going to, for example, live in a Chinese-speaking country or become a diplomat. I learn what is convenient and useful, in this case being able to read, write, and translate Chinese effectively is good enough for the web as I rarely come into contanct with the language in real life.

Translating is a first step. Without some way to first get started with cracking the code of a language, there is no way to understand its deeper concepts fully. Translations gradually ease into thinking in the language and comprehending it not based on its relation to another.

It's interesting you should bring that up, I went to a famous linguist's (Elenor Jorden) lecture on East Asian languages while studying at Cornell, and she claimed that if it wasn't for all the characters in Chinese then the language would be ranked around a Tier 2 language or even lower (Tier 3 has moderately-easy languages such as Spanish, Swedish etc, Tier 2 has moderately-difficult languages like German and French in it, Tier 1 has very difficult languages such as Korean, Japanese and Arabic). Why? Because Chinese word order (Subject-Verb-Object) is the same as English, and all Tier 1 languages are Subject-Object-Verb which is much harder for English speakers, and also because Chinese has basically no grammar or conjugations, whereas other Tier 1 languages have an assload of grammar, and it also has no politeness / honorific ways of speech that you find in Japanese and Korean (besides that 'ni' can switch to 'nin' and some other small thing). And as for tones, they're hard but I think people tend to over-exaggerate the difficulty alittle, the factor which puts Chinese in Tier 1 is the necessity to be able to read and write alot of characters.

And also in comparison with the grammar for some of the other languages, in this case I'm thinking of Spanish, there are no stem-changing and conjugating the ending involved.

[Tetra]

^I remember there was an example where in english, there was a specific rule when turning a phrase into the negative, but in chinese, there is no such rule. Or maybe it was something involving "someone" and "anyone" + the word "none"...

blah, I don't know, I forgot >_____>

Mostly traditional I guess, but simplified is used by some teachers etc. am i seriously the only one who prefers Traditional ?? =.=

Oh, I also think Chinese is quite easy to learn...easier than french or german for example.

I go to a traditional-based chinese school, so naturally it would attract cantonese speakers and taiwanese. It being traditional-style and all.

Chinese is in fact one of the more difficult languages to learn.
Why? Because there just is no set "alphabet". Look at the roman-based languages you mentioned - they are all simply a set of letters combined together to form words.

Sure, there are radicals, but it's not like you can learn the language from radicals alone.

Japanese seems to be half-and-half of both chinese and the whole "alphabet" system (hiragana and katana), and korean is essentially the system where you just put together various characters from the set of characters you have to form words. Sure there's pronounciation, but you can just read it.

With chinese, you can't "just read it". Even if you use pinyin or zhuyin fuhao, who knows what exactly you would be trying to say.

feng could be a whole bunch of words (風，峰，丰，封，縫，奉，逢, 灃, 僼, 崶, etc), but you wouldn't know what I was trying to say, unless of course it was painfully obvious if you looked at the words around it.

[putasmileon]

It's true that only writing and reading defeats one-half of the purpose of learning a language, but there is no point in practicing the pronounciations if I am not going to, for example, live in a Chinese-speaking country or become a diplomat. I learn what is convenient and useful, in this case being able to read, write, and translate Chinese effectively is good enough for the web as I rarely come into contanct with the language in real life.

Oh come on - no offense but do you think that's all Chinese is good for? More than 1/6 of the world's population is Chinese; Mandarin is the world's most spoken language; China is becoming one of the most powerful countries in the world and its economy is rising rapidly.. there are so many uses for Chinese outside of the Chinese world and becoming a diplomat..

Reading and writing isn't the most effective as 15% of people in China are illiterate.. psh haha bad reason. Ok well, still - you need to be able to speak. What is reading and writing good for without a penpal? Without blah blah blah.. yeah ok, well it's your loss for not being able to speak because you don't find it necessary (I am at a loss of reasons. I'm tired )

Sure, there are radicals, but it's not like you can learn the language from radicals alone.

Radicals do help though - most of the time.

[x_shirley]

hahaha im cantones and i need help.. i cant read.... speak... and write chinese at alll. hehe yeah im an abc =] bayarea love =]

[Tetra]

hahaha im cantones and i need help.. i cant read.... speak... and write chinese at alll. hehe yeah im an abc =] bayarea love =]

Try the sites and post up questions.
外國人如果學國語然後也很難...

[putasmileon]

Try the sites and post up questions.
外國人如果學國語然後也很難...

But Cantonese isn't 外國人...

[Tetra]

看不懂，不會寫，不會講。
有差別嗎？

Is there a way to make the text appear clearer?
...without enlarging the window's font size...

[putasmileon]

看不懂，不會寫，不會講。
有差別嗎？

Is there a way to make the text appear clearer?
...without enlarging the window's font size...

lol good point.

about the font thing, unfortunately im no sure - i don't think so.. enlarging won't really matter though (just enlarge the chinese parts). :-?

[HKS457]

i learned chinese in asia, but in the states, comic books were my best friend for keeping in touch with chinese. =]

[HaRuEhUn]

THIS SHOULD BE PINNED ASAP~

wo ai zhong wen~

[trueloveway]

thanks for the links.. my speaking and reading skills are okay - thanks to Chinese school and reading Chinese books/websites.
可是，没什么机会写中文所以这方面有点差了。。 希望将来能多学学。。 真的不想丢了我的中文 ~__~

[Tetra]

^Could you recommend any good books?

[trueloveway]

most of the books were ones my dad bought for me from China. they have one page of Chinese and the next would be the same thing but translated in English. pretty handy but still needed to pull out the dictionary more than a few times.
haven't read anything recently or anything that's really worth recommending :/.. i guess you could try 三国演义 San Guo Yan Yi. found a link: http://www.chinapage.com/sanguo/sanguobg.html

[Juli~<3]

thank you for this thread! =)

what she said

[putasmileon]

^Could you recommend any good books?

I may be able to recommend some books - depending on your reading ability, though.

[Tetra]

most of the books were ones my dad bought for me from China. they have one page of Chinese and the next would be the same thing but translated in English. pretty handy but still needed to pull out the dictionary more than a few times.
haven't read anything recently or anything that's really worth recommending :/.. i guess you could try 三国演义 San Guo Yan Yi. found a link: http://www.chinapage.com/sanguo/sanguobg.html

I have a paper-back version. It's got like pronounciation guides

I may be able to recommend some books - depending on your reading ability, though.

Try...um...weak

[lOstie]

wow! great thread ^^

i`ve been attending chinese school here in Australia for 5 years, and is currently doing Chinese Second Language 3/4

my mum is from Guangzhou and my dad is from vietnam so we speak a lot of cantonese as home .. as well as watch a lot of chinese t.v/movies
because i use it so much, and it`s a big part of my life, chinese becomes easier for me to learn [mandrin], whereas, my other friends find it a lot more difficult .. because they rarely use it in their daily lives ..

by the way .. does anyone here have any software where i can type in traditional chinese by typing in the pinying, or something like that?

my computer can`t type chinese, and it`s difficult for me to communicate with my friends and family in China because they can`t read pinying ..

thanks in advanced ..

[trueloveway]

^ i did Chinese Second Language 3/4 as well. i heard they have some new system where there's advanced and intermediate now O-O. yeah, it really helps if you speak it at home. my parents forced me to start speaking Mandarin at home from a couple of years back. usually we speak a different dialect. well, good luck with that

[dead-nova]

I was born in Hong Kong but came to Australia when i was 1 years old.
I had 6 years of chinese school, then stopped for 4 years and started again last year.
So now, my chinese is crap! My situation now is that i can understand cantonese but can't really speak it. My chinese reading and writing skills are close to nothing and when i do read chinese, i read it in MANDARIN! can't even read it in canto (thanx stupid chinese school!!!)
i can also only read simplified chinese.. although i can recongnise some traditional (in most dramas, chinese subtitles are in traditional)
I want to go back to HK =(

[Tetra]

^。。。你還是在學中文。。。有什麽問題？越來越多人在學國語， 所以我不覺得有問題=/