... It's a super easy language to speak. ...
The reason Mandarin is easy for Americans to speak is ....
No, it's not. That is a ridiculously ignorant claim. People sometimes make absurd generalizations about languages until they actually learn more about them.
That's not at all ignorant. I began working in the PRC in 2008 and taught myself how to speak it then. I don't ever have to speak it at work because I have a translator, but I practice here and there and I have learned to understand more and more of it. Mine (in this post and the prior one) are assertions based on the comparative ease with which I learned to speak Mandarin vs. that for learning French, Japanese Spanish, German and Dutch.
I'm not the only one who thinks so. Just thinking one way or another isn't the only reason.
It may have escaped your purview, but over half the Chinese population is functionally illiterate, yet they can all speak Mandarin just fine. That alone suggests the language cannot be that difficult to learn to speak. I cannot say the same of functionally illiterate native speakers of English. Heck, I can't even say that of folks who presumably have learned to read and write English, so much of accurately communicating one's fully in English being dependent on correctly using tense, mood,
case, connotation, person, punctuation (which doesn't always effectively convey the meaning carried by vocal intonation) etc. One need only look around on USMB to find ample evidence of that.
Additionally, there are scores of objective reasons why Chinese is friggin' easy to learn to speak.
- Chinese, like any other language, is just made up of repeated patterns, which can be practised and learnt.
- Verbs don’t conjugate in Chinese.
- There are no noun cases in Chinese.
- There are no ‘irregular’ nouns/verbs in Chinese
- If you can learn whether a noun is masculine, feminine or neuter in another language, then why should remembering the tones for a word in Mandarin be any more difficult?
- You don’t need to be able to sing to pronounce Chinese tones. (But being a good singer will help you meet people because karaoke is very popular in China, and lots of Chinese people can sing pretty well, especially considering that they are amateurs.)
- All languages have intonation, you use it when you raise your voice to ask a question, therefore tones are not that difficult for anybody to use.
- Even if you make mistakes with tones, people can generally still understand.
- Like most other places on the planet, it is still perfectly possible to communicate even if your pronunciation is not completely right.
- China has set down a standard for the language and pronunciation – Putonghua – which makes a learner’s life easier.
- Tones are not hard if you copy native speakers and recordings as closely as you can, and build good habits.
- Cantonese also has tones, but people just learn them by repeating and ‘getting used to them’. If you ask somebody from Hong Kong which tone a character is, they often don’t know.
- Tones are actually very familiar things; it's just that in the West, we think of them as inflections and stress instead of as tones. Their actual implementation to convey meaning is no different than what we use in the West to say things like Polish and polish, or to convert a statement into a question by raising the tone of our voice at the end of the sentence.
- Chinese teachers and broadcasters are tested for perfect pronunciation, so you have good models to learn from.
- There is a standard system of Romanisation for Mandarin, Pinyin, used in all new dictionaries and courses. Pronunciation is easier to learn from the Roman alphabet.
- There are many websites and apps with pronunciation audio, which makes it easy to practice problem syllables.
- Pinyin follows a logical system, once you know it, you can pronounce any character.
- There are fewer phonemes in Mandarin than in other languages.
- Mandarin only has 4 tone contours, some languages have more.
- Chinese people are very willing to speak Mandarin to foreigners (this is my experience), and are also very patient with learners. Tons of Chinese folks below the age of 35 know English too, but they are often not confident in their speaking skills when one is a stranger to them. With someone whom they know, they are more than happy to give it a shot, especially if one tries to use one's Chinese with them. Without exception, my Chinese colleagues and clients speak better English, by far, than I speak Mandarin.
- The Chinese will encourage learners by complimenting even the most simple efforts to say things in Mandarin. I heard, "Oh, your Chinese very good" tons of times when all I said was "thank you." Interestingly, now that my Chinese is passable for basic daily life situations, I don't hear that so much. LOL Folks just talk to me like I'm Chinese now.
- Even if you just know some basic phrases, numbers and vocabulary, it will get you a long way in China.
- Once you start opening your mouth and practising Chinese, you will actually find that you progress in it very quickly.
The stuff above is just what I can think of quickly.
As I said before. To just learn to speak Mandarin well enough to do basic stuff -- shop, chat in bars, go out to eat, etc. -- it's very easy. If you feel compelled to have a discussion about art, religion and politics, well, that's going to take a larger vocabulary. If you want to read it, there's more to learn, and writing it will require learning to read plus learning to write it and practicing doing so.
