Has anyone here actually taught themselves Mandarin? It genuinely seems extremely inaccessible unless you either live there or speak a very similar language
Has anyone here actually taught themselves Mandarin...
Oliver Anderson
Other urls found in this thread:
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
twitter.com
Wyatt Clark
why would it be inaccessible?
Camden Foster
The entire writing system is crazy and unlike anything else. The language has 4 tones where each tone can be the same word but a totally different meaning. Some dialects have at least 6 tones apparently.
Nolan Howard
It's very difficult but it can be done. It's easier if you already speak an Asian language. But I've seen White Brits who speak very good Mandarin.
Hunter Bell
There's plenty weebs who teach themselves a bit of Japanese but I've genuinely never met anyone who knows self taught Mandarin. Let alone being able to read or write it.
Nolan Baker
>self taught
Yeah not gonna happen. You'll never get the sounds correct. Self teaching any language is already difficult let alone a language that is completely different from English. I suppose with the internet, if you spend lots of time with Chinese to get the slangs correctly. It's better than just reading books.
Joseph Bailey
Spoken Japanese is a million times easier than mandarin
Xavier James
Yeah exactly. Crazy that it's got so many speakers yet so difficult to learn.
Lincoln Cox
No. Chinese is a ugly, disgusting language that should have been forgotten ages ago.
Joseph Ortiz
For a native speaker it's never hard, though
Nolan Peterson
The writing system is pretty grammatically similar to English. It shouldn't be harder than Japanese considering how you have to learn kanji in Japanese.
Anthony Clark
我愛英國帥哥。。。
Angel Hernandez
Kanji is an archaic writing and reading method that's based more off an obsession for calligraphy than actually expressing sentiment or detail.
Switching between katakana and hiragana for loan words and "native" words is annoying, but at least there's always romaiji which is at least consistent in it's rules. Use of multi faceted intonations for changing the meaning of individual words however is retarded, and indicates either some kind of cultural split, or running out of useable syllables in your alphabet.
Christopher Martinez
>Yeah not gonna happen. You'll never get the sounds correct.
the Chinese themselves can't get the sounds right. Chinese people barely understand each other. Imagine not being able to understand someone's English just because they have an English accent. that is what the Chinese language is like.
Adam Gutierrez
Is that why chinese people are always yelling at each other?
Ryder White
I'm just saying it's prolly easier to learn how to read Chinese considering you really just have to remember 3000 characters. Tones on the otherhand is just natural to native speakers but strange to foreigners.
Andrew Cox
hmmm
Brody Taylor
well if they yell at each other then they're not getting the tones right so they aren't saying anything really. the language is non-functional.
Like chinese people listen to someone singing, and they sound beautiful, but they are speaking gibberish because all the tones are wrong. So that is why all chinese music has subtitles.
Liam Nelson
Logan Howard
>Use of multi faceted intonations for changing the meaning of individual words however is retarded, and indicates either some kind of cultural split, or running out of useable syllables in your alphabet.
tonogenesis
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
apparently the only one retarded here is you
Justin Stewart
Tones are straightforward unless you are tonedeaf or retarded. There are really five but only two are difficult to distinguish. Context is way more important than tones anyways, despite what american HAPAs on youtube will who have never been to china will tell you. Intonation is generally light to non-existent on many words in normal speech. It is important when two near-homophones that both work contextually exist, or to make obvious a change of subject or similar situations.
They are kind of intimidating at first but they are not the difficult part. though if you dont get them early on you might as well switch languages, because its hopeless.
>The writing system is pretty grammatically similar to English
only on basic levels. It is more familiar than japanese, but upper-level chinese is full of all manner of inscrutable structures and endless idioms. People constantly underestimate this because someone once told them it was SVO like most western languages.
>considering how you have to learn kanji in Japanese.
kanji has only a fraction of the number of characters compared to how many are used to 'read a newspaper' in mandarin.
Large portions of china dont speak mandarin natively, and even those that do have all manner of different accents and whatnot. If you have a decent grasp of mandarin its easy to pass as an actual chinese person on the phone because there are a zillion dfifferent accents and dialect peculiarities
you might not be able to scream with tones, but you can most definitely speak loudly without any confusion on intonation.
Jacob Moore
I studied mandarin in Taiwan for two years
Hudson Cruz
You just need to study user, i've just barely started and I could already read and understand some. Just speaking is difficult in my opinion
Thomas Gray
I took two years of Mandarin in high school. I remember next to nothing.
Blake Robinson
I know a couple guys who learned it. They're some of the very few white people I know who can speak it.
Asher Lewis
Mandarin is one of the easiest lamguages to learn.
The grammar is one of the simplest in existence. The hard part is learning the vocab and the symbols. Mao really should have adopted pinyin.
Luke Robinson
I am Chinese I know mandarin automatically
Robert Brown
>muh difficulty-is-morphology myopia
kys