Peeps! A question for those who learned Chinese.. Obviously it's do-able. BUT-How hard is it? As honest as you can be, how long did it take you to learn Chinese (Mandarin) at a "Can watch the news and understand level"?
Also: Once one has learned how to write, how much Japanese can they really understand? I know phonetically they're different, that's why I'm referring to the texts mostly.
Peace and love to everyone!
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a turkish-chinese mix friend of mine told me that it would take around 5 years.
It was just informative friend, other than the Toyota Supra and the Mitsubishi Evo there's not many things in Japan that would make me a "fan" :P
Wow.. And he's half Chinese, so he must have had some knowledge prior.. 5 years.. Vay vay :/
I've been learning Chinese since 1st grade (so for 13 years now), but my family is white/doesn't speak it, so the only Mandarin exposure I get is from classes. I'm at a conversational level and fully understand the grammar, but my vocab is still far from fluent (understanding Chinese news is pretty difficult and most of the time I can only grasp like 25% of it) My writing level is probably middle-schooler level, and I can read Chinese comics without much trouble. Books in Chinese are a huge pain though.
On the upside, I have no discernible white person accent.
Knowing Chinese characters was super useful for reading signs in kanji when I was in Japan. As for full-on sentences, I can usually get the gist of it if it contains enough kanji.
Very relevant thread to my interests. Any recommended resources for learning chingchong?
not really much free stuff
chinese are fucking jews
HelloTalk, language exchange app with loads of Chinese people want to learn engrish. Bonus points for you if you're white: qts will love you
It depends on how intensively you study, whether you study in China or not, etc.
As an example, I currently study Chinese at college under a government funded program that is super intensive, where most students, after 4 years of classroom instruction plus 1 year of studying and working in China are essentially fluent in Chinese in that they can read newspapers/watch news, discuss politics, and even write master's degree theses completely in Chinese.
For reference, regarding my own experience, I'm currently in a 3rd year level class and we use newspaper articles/broadcasts as study material, but because newspapers use highly formal language, it's quite challenging. If I pick up a magazine or newspaper from a store, I might be able to get the general gist of an article.
If you're studying it on your own, if you put in enough time you can also quickly learn it, but if you just study like 20 minutes a day, it'll be a long while before you're even close to fluent. Plus on top of modern Chinese, you have to decide whether or not you want to study Classical Chinese (and if you want to participate in discussions with Chinese people regarding ancient Chinese history and culture, you will want to study it).
Don't fall for the meme that Chinese is impossible, but understand you just need to put in a lot of work to learn it.
Regarding Japanese, as I've studied Japanese in the past I can't really give an accurate description of what it's like to read Japanese with just Chinese knowledge, but a few of my Chinese friends have said if they look at a Japanese news article or something, they might have a very general understanding of what it's about, but due to hiragana, katakana, etc. they can't understand much.
learnnc.org
resources.allsetlearning.com
resources.allsetlearning.com
mdbg.net
gloss.dliflc.edu
it's not that difficult
...
this
Chinese is a good deal easier to learn than Japanese. Chinese follows the same grammatical structure as English (SVO) while Japanese is like French (SOV).
Half-Chinaman here and I probably speak Mandarin at a 1st grade level but I'm taking Japanese in school rn. Yes, the Japanese use Chinese characters so you can read signs but it would be tough to understand more complex sentences because of the grammatical differences.
What drives me crazy about Japanese is that there are many different ways to pronounce the same character depending upon the context. I don't think that is a thing in Chinese.
>I don't think that is a thing in Chinese.
Not in the same way it is with Japanese. There are a few cases of that, but they're very few in number, ex. with shuijiao 睡覺 and juede 覺得, the 覺 character is pronounced differently.
I apologize to everyone for leaving the thread earlier - Only now do I read your replies.
Wow, imagine that, I mean you yourself are half Chinese and you speak it at a 1st grade level.. But the good thing is that it's the same as English structurally? (I am not sure what SVO means but I definitely know how hard French is, so I'm glad about that)
Wow, thank you for your insight brother very detailed answer! Basically it takes people years to read it, however it is easier to speak it? I can kind of get that though, as in the characters are a thing you've gotta memorise whereas the language sticks in your head.. (I learned the Korean script but I have no idea how to say anything - Whereas my Arabic is very good, both writing and speaking)
Thank you for your links too and I wish to you good luck and that your studying goes well! :-)
Yeah, it's definitely easier to speak and listen to it than read and write (though speaking is still difficult due to the tones and due to a few consonant/vowel sounds). There's no way around learning the characters but just studying them. Studying characters isn't difficult, it's just a grind. The good thing is you can just type characters easily nowadays. Honestly, 90% of writing in Chinese I do is over the computer, with the remaining 10% being handwriting for my class.
Ironically, in both China and Japan young people sometimes forget how to write characters because they type so much. Even older people and academically inclined people forget how to write some characters. I remember reading about how a few Peking University students (one of the best universities in China) were asked to write 喷嚏 (sneeze) and none of them were able to write it completely correctly, probably because they're all so used to typing everything. I still feel handwriting is useful in order to memorize the characters when you learn them, though.
>I wish to you good luck and that your studying goes well! :-)
Thanks. If you do end up studying Chinese, be sure to stop by the /East Asia/ or Chinese threads if you have any questions about the language.
¿Is there a free app for looking up the stroke order of chinese characters?
Pleco is the best Chinese dictionary app there is, and I'm pretty sure in the free version stroke order is included.
Amazing! Academics couldn't remember, imagine the villagers then..! (Or actually villagers might remember it since they don't type a lot on the computer I presume!)
I was just checking out those links, and like you said it's a grind although it is kind of "connect the dots" like I already learned that mouth (that square thing) comes before the number of people in a household etc !
>Thanks. If you do end up studying Chinese, be sure to stop by the /East Asia/ or Chinese threads if you have any questions about the language.
Thank you again my brother and I will! ! 多的爱
>Ironically, in both China and Japan young people sometimes forget how to write characters because they type so much. Even older people and academically inclined people forget how to write some characters. I remember reading about how a few Peking University students (one of the best universities in China) were asked to write 喷嚏 (sneeze) and none of them were able to write it completely correctly
that's how you know you have an awful writing system
It doesn't have it >4 free
and I'm definitely not going to pay money to the Jews
whoops
SVO means Subject Verb Object.
SOV is Subject Object Verb.
Ex: "I eat food" in English is 我 (I) 吃 (eat) 饭 (food) in Chinese and わたわ (I) は (noun particle) ごはん (food) お (verb particle) たべます (eat) in Japanese.
Pronunciation is probably the hardest thing to pick up on when it comes to Chinese bc English doesn't have anything like the tone marks.
>わたわ
Ah, ok. There's an app called "Chinese Stroke Learner" that I see. Haven't used it, but maybe it'll help you. I also think www.mdbg.net might have a mobile version of their site.
>not really much free stuff
すみません。
わたし*
No worries
Ahaaa, okay okay I get it and thank you! Do you speak both btw? If so congrats to you brother! (I was reading up earlier that one of the other "fun facts" about Japanese is that you use completely different words depending on who you're talking to, i.e boss, mother, friend etc!)
No offense but are you from Reddit/an Arab?
thanks!
No friend, I just happen to know Arabic and I do admire Arabs - As far as reddit goes, I don't "go" there if that's what you mean, I mean I've only have an account so I can follow the android and pirated games subreddits :P
youtube.com
>tfw no 小妹妹
It's probably not that hard.Learning the characters is not so hard tbqh,but it takes some time.Not so sure about grammar.
>how much Japanese can they really understand
This is a text in Japanese:
あなたのマンコ見せてください。(I hope that this shit is tadashii,because my grammar sucks.)
I'm pretty sure that Chinese people will recognize "見",but not the other shit.Even then,they will not understand it very well,because "見" means "see" in chink,but "見せる" means "to show" in Japanese."To see" is "見る".
So yeah,I hope I answered your question.
I've only had 1 university year of it so far
The only languages I have studied are French and German, but that was years ago in secondary school, and it was only for 1 hour a week and I can't speak a word of either now.
Speaking has been easier than I thought it would be, but reading has been harder than I thought and writing has been a nightmare. At best, I think I can only write 20 characters
I can't really understand the news, but occasionally when I hear native speakers speak it I can sometimes get the gist of what they're saying
For example, I had to drop off some work in my lecturers office that she shares with 3 other Chinese people. One of them was talking about going to some city to see her sister on her birthday, and another person said that it was a beautiful city. I was quite surprised that I could understand what I did.
As for Japanese, I've never had a go at it because I only know a hand full of characters.
>I don't think that is a thing in Chinese.
Eh sometimes I think you get that
Like you can't do two 4th tones or a 1st and 2nd tone together so you change the 1st to a neutral
Something like that, I can't really remember
加油
Oh, I think you're thinking about tone sandhi and related phenomena
resources.allsetlearning.com
That's a good page on it, though it doesn't include everything (it seems to be missing the rules regarding multiple 4th tones in a row for example).
There are also words that are pronounced one way according to dictionaries and standard Chinese rules, but most natives pronounce them differently resources.allsetlearning.com
Not really.
That's like asking
user, spell "imprimatur" properly.
If you haven't used it in years, you won't remember how.
Wow, yeah you did.. So basically it's like English to French, here and there you might recognize "Renaisance" or "General" or something like that, but it's going to be like understanding only a word, you can't really make out the whole sentence..
Did you learn both Japanese and Chinese brother?
why China exploding ownself?
操你妈
YW
Do you think that there will be any reform of the writing system in the future? I mean simplified makes things a lot easier but even so...
I speak some Chinese with my family and very little Japanese. Currently taking it in college. Yeah I think that the honorific speech makes things pretty difficult to learn unless you are immersed in the culture because it is so different. Good luck with your studies though my man.
how can you even reform mandarin? pinyin already exists, and it is not complex enough for that retarded inefficient language.
Simplified fucked up the whole script.
That's so cool that you can converse, it might sound funny but I like when someone is speaking that fast Chinese, because it just doesn't sound like anything out of "our" regions, like when I speak Arabic it might turn a few heads, but if I could speak Chinese I'd definetely be "that guy" xD
Oh and that's why I also think Chinese is cooler, as you say for learning Japanese you gotta get into the culture, and to be honest I like Chinese culture a bit more because I feel they're more of the "working class" type of people, just like the people I grew up around and I feel more in-tune.. Japs make great technology don't get me wrong, as a nation they're really cool, but I can't get into that anime cultures and all that.
Thank you my brother and I wish you the same and more!! With all your endeavors :-)
Haha fuck
I attended chinese school from 8 to 13
It gave me enough chinese to be able to flirt with chinese qts fluently but I could not fully understood news because of difficult words and expressions
Its difficult for chinese themselves
Ahahahah, so basically "How you doin'" and all that? Can you write it too or is it just verbally?
Wow.. "Its difficult for chinese themselves" - That oughtta tell you something about the Chinese language.. :S
>tfw shitty in chinese
>tfw shitty in cantonese
I've learned it to a pretty high level both abroad and at home. I feel an interesting thing about Chinese is that there aren't too many specific "difficult times" when learning the language. For example, when learning Spanish a lot of classmates felt second year was harder than other points. For me, Chinese is just one slow long grind. I never feel like it's super difficult, rather, I feel like there's always more I haven't learned yet. Like trying to walk an extremely long distance at a constant moderate incline versus climbing a mountain then progressing on a plateau I guess?
I studied off and on since about 2009ish, took classes for 4 of those years, lived abroad for 2-3 of them. Now I might read textbooks for fun and study idioms on my own, then take the information with me to language exchanges I do with a Chinese friend. We discuss pop culture to Chinese-US economics and relations, finance to technology. Probably took me about 3-4 years of study to get to that point as a whitey with no background.
Regarding Japanese, I can get the gist of the facebook posts my previous classmates might post in Japanese, but don't understand the hiragana or whatever.
>mfw I see an actual language learning thread on Sup Forums
Same, my school made me learn Chinese and Arabic since first grade and it's been a bitch trying to practice it in real life.
As you said, there already is simplified, and a lot of people credit that with massively improving China's literacy rate.
There actually was a second round of simplification of Chinese characters, but it was a failure and repealed: en.wikipedia.org
Many people don't think Chinese can switch to exclusively using Pinyin due to homonyms (while Vietnamese was able to switch from characters to the Latin alphabet, I think that because Vietnamese has more tones than Mandarin, there isn't as huge of a homonym problem as Mandarin), however I don't necessarily agree with those people.
A well known Chinese professor, Victor Mair, has been a strong advocate for Chinese switching to Pinyin, though: en.wikipedia.org
What's interesting is that Dungan, a language mutually intelligble with some Chinese dialects, and which only has 4 tones, manages to use Cyrillic for writing en.wikipedia.org
This question is also addressed in this really good Quora answer: quora.com
Basically, a switch to an alphabet could be pulled off, contrary to popular belief, but it would present some new challenges.
Very insightful friend, if I got into it it would probably the same for me, just a really long grind.. It seems to be the common thing, I don't remember what post but if you scroll up you'll find another bro said it's a grind as well!
Also, congrats to you brother because it's a hard language, and being a fellow "whitey" I know that it must have felt cool reaching that point where you're like able to understand the Chinese ladies gossiping on the train xD :-)
Greets to you my man!
Ahahah, good point!
:-O How does a school teach both Chinese and Arabic? That sounds fascinating but scary because that's not a usual combination! xD
I always really like these kinds of threads too. Do you study Chinese?
I was interested actually, but I was always too scared because of the "Chinese is too hard" meme. I don't know.
If you're interested in it, you should study it. Memes are just memes, don't listen to them.
STARTING LESSONS IN SEPTEMBER
I WILL PROGRESS SO QUICKLY, BY JUNE NEXT YEAR I WILL HAVE MASTERED THE LANGUAGE AND LIVE IN TAIWAN
MARK MY WORDS
chinese is hard is not a meme my friendo
Make sure your teachers are Taiwanese.
Tai-who? :^)
It's kind of a widespread meme you know. Everyone I ask in real life tells me it's too hard.
Okay bro, relax hehehe, Intense capsing - Oh and I wish you luck my man, just stay out of trouble :-)
It's hard, but 99% of the people who say it's impossible or that you shouldn't study it are people who've never even studied it themselves.
>and it is not complex enough for that retarded inefficient language.
Mandarin is more efficient (information density) and rule-based than almost any other Chinese spoken language.
How do you think should I start? Is there even a way to do it without school? That's my main concern.
Just realized the creator of Pinyin is still alive at 110 years old. en.wikipedia.org
learnnc.org
resources.allsetlearning.com
resources.allsetlearning.com
mdbg.net
gloss.dliflc.edu
...
They don't want to lose connections to overseas chinese and Taiwan Chinese.
It's a matter of cultural importance as well.
In 20-30 years, who knows though. Communists are all about simplification and usually care less for old traditions.
it isnt as hard as people say it is
honestly, tonal languages are the same as any other as long as you remember that english and many other languages is the same way in some regards - like "it's a windy day" or "the windy river"
in all honesty, characters are easy to memorize because with the amount of compound words there are in the language youll get used to it fast
the grammar structure in chinese is incredibly simple to understand, though, the most difficult part in learning the language would have to be getting used to the 30 or so measure words that there are for different contextual situations.
Honestly, Chinese seems like a nightmare.
-weird phonetics
-toned
-writting system where you need to know thousands of characters
>traditional and simplified characters
>fuckton of mutually unintelligible dialects
Japanese looks easier imo
Thanks.
*tones
How the fuck do you learn tones?
I'm too white for this shit, I just can't grasp them.
>outliving your daughter
JUST OLD MY SHIT UP
>Japanese looks easier imo
Spoken? Equally difficult.
Written basically? Japanese is easier.
Written fluently? Chinese is easier.
I agree that there is the cultural important factor and that it is useful for communication between different Chinese people, though at the end of the day, ease of communication tends to win out (but you could argue that Chinese people using characters today don't really experience any major difficulties with communication, so they'll continue using characters). As you say, you knows what will happen, though.
>fuckton of mutually unintelligible dialects
That's not really an issue though, in that all Chinese, with the exception of some elderly people, can speak Mandarin. Also once you have a solid knowledge of Mandarin, if you want to learn a local Mandarin-based dialect, it won't necessarily be super hard, as pronunciation can be similar (for example, America is Mei Guo in standard Mandarin and Mei Gwei in the Guizhou dialect).
I believe they will eventually move to a latinized system.
Then again, telepathic technology may make that irrelevant.
Japanese Kanji have multiple readings but you can gigure it out based on context. Hiragana helps in that.
It's also nice that there are government issued guides. You have to learn just about 2000 to be on a level of a high school graduate and those characters are consistent.
Japanese has different grammar than English, but that doesn't really matter since that's not my native tongue anyway.
Pitch accent is way easier than a system with four tones.
Phonetics are also quite easy.
Honorifics may be challenging though.
...
I'm doing both Japanese and Mandarin. In my mind, Japanese is definitely intuitively harder since the grammar is very foreign for a Westerner. Mandarin is more like ours. On the other hand, Mandarin's got all these tones and even readings that sometimes change. I fucking hate it when they change. With Japanese you're always on your guard with readings because they constantly change but Mandarin stabs you in the back.
almost 10k vocab on Japanese and read doujinshi without much trouble (doesn't say much I guess)
still kinda new at Mandarin, only >3k vocab and some formal education.
but it's not exactly the same thing, I mean "windy day" and "windy river" are different vowels (simply written the same way because English orthography is dumb). If they were written phonetically they would be something like "wyndi" and "waindi". But, in the case of tones, they're the same vowel, just with different intonation (correct me if I'm wrong).
1) If you aren't a native speaker you will never be fully fluent
2) You can't, they are completely different languages and even if Japanese alphabet is based on Chinese, they use the characters differently.
From my experience:
Communicating on a basic level is actually pretty easy. The grammar is generally not complex, although it can be hard to say something very specific. Tones aren't that big of a deal, there's only 4 and most of the time you can tell the meaning from context even if you don't pick up the tone. Listening is a bit harder since people talk very fast and there are regional dialects/accents, but if you ask the speaker to slow down a bit it becomes much easier.
Reading is pretty difficult since there are so many characters to memorize. Common, everyday symbols you'll pick up quickly enough but to get a level where you can read a poster, magazine or website will take committed practice and plenty of time.
Writing is the hardest, although there are electronic tools to assist.
I think the best way to learn would be to start with Michel Thomas (very good) or Pimsleur to get the basic grammar and pronunciation down. From there look into some classes, or if poorfag start learning more nouns/characters online. From there make sure you start getting some real practice in with native speakers. That will be enough to get to a decent 'conversant' level, if you want to get to a high level you will need some formal training to fix any mistakes you may have. It's like when you speak to a foreigner with limited English, you usually don't correct their mistakes if you get the gist of what they mean.
A bit about speaking Chinese in China: I found that often if you open a sentence in Chinese the other person will overestimate your ability and reply at a fast pace, so you often need to specify that your abilities are limited and you need slower speech. Most Chinese people are pretty stoked you are trying to learn their language and are keen to help you out and will compliment you even though you both know your skills are shitty. Of course you'll encounter a few who are assholes about it but that is the case no matter where in the world you are.
Somewhat off-topic, but has anybody on Sup Forums ever learned Mongolian?
It seems quite challenging, and incredibly irrelevant, but holy fuck is it a beautiful language.
>1) If you aren't a native speaker you will never be fully fluent
I will look into everything you said my brother thank you so much for your big heap of information!! I've saved this thread and will save it later too so that I can read it up offline too!
OP here, first of all I wanna thank each and every one for your beautiful insight! I always love it when a community supports newcomers, and it just goes to show that all of us who love languages, love talking about them and giving suggestions (Kind of like the car scene!)
I'm sorry if I couldn't reply to each and every one!
Oh and Hah that's an interesting question friend xD Mongolian IS interesting I'll give you that, the sounds are just amazing (It kind of sounds like Turkish with lots of ChinoRussian to me, like a huge mix! The closest thing I could find is Kyrgyz and Kazakh though)
The other day I was watching online TV for the lulz, and I switched to this mongolian channel and incidentally it was a kids show that was teaching them the numbers and all that, and I sat there like a kid in pre-school counting to 6 in mongolian xD (FYI squidtv.net
I can understand , but it's necessary training all the time.
>my brother
>xD
I'm also interested in Mongolian. The country seems beautiful but I guess everything around China tends to become China
Sorry if I'm not keeping up with Sup Forums etiquette of calling everybody a fag, I'm a simpleton, I call people brother and put MSN era emoticons because that's how I'm used to typing like that (Sorry but that's the way it is) :-)
>I call people brother
Muslim detected
One of my friends was taking Mongolian lessons in Shanghai. He seemed to like it.
>If you aren't a native speaker you will never be fully fluent
I don't agree with this statement, which I often see people saying. The only reason why people say this is because so few Westerners study Chinese. You never see people say this about English, Russian, German, etc. because so many Westerners study those languages, and you never hear people say "Chinese people will never be fully fluent in English" because so many Chinese study English.
There are a good amount of Westerners who are near-native in Chinese that come to mind: Dashan
who is even able to perform crosstalk - something considered challenging for even native speakers
Mike Campbell
Brandon O'Kane chinadaily.com.cn
Among others.
Will many Westerners who start studying Chinese not ever become fluent in it? Probably, but that's just because most people who start studying Chinese do so on their own and aren't super super serious about learning the language.
So to you Muslim=bad? I also call women sister just fyi :-P
>he bought a jew pass
someone post the "never learn chinese" screencap
so OP will know how to use his knowledge of chinkspeak peroperly
Yes, Muslims are considered bad by everyone apart from Muslims themselves (and cucks)
Why the hate my man? Don't you feel empty inside with so much hatred for a whole community of people who believe in the same God as you (Or your parents if you're Atheist) ..?
Just a suggestion bro, let go of the hate and you'll look at the Earth much more beautifully.. There's too much too love, not too much to hate.. Peace and love to you friend..
>加油
what did he mean by this?
>le religion of peace
I'm
Us Anglos are notorious for not learning languages so you can imagine the reactions I get from people when I told them I was going to go to university to study Mandarin
Don't let people put you off
Forget writing Chinese.
Reading characters is doable.
Give two years of intensive study to reach a conversational level.
I studied Chinese on and off for around 3 years and spent one year in Taiwan.
People make wars, not religions bro - A relevant quote (Said by a wise Chinese man) “Don't do unto others what you don't want others to do unto you.”
Hate only brings hate, now if you have something to add on Chinese please by all means I am accepting any help, if you're here to insult then sorry my man but you ain't going to get more replies. Peace and love to you and Germany (Assuming you're German[?]).
>I think I can only write 20 characters
一二三四五六七八九十