Is your Mandarin so bad that even Chinese people don't understand you? LOL
Well... it depends. Usually it's me who can't understand them. I don't actually talk much Chinese to Chinese people.
I'm learning, not that high up. I can do the basics, I can write basic characters and read bits and bobs.
I'm learning, not that high up. I can do the basics, I can write basic characters and read bits and bobs.
I can read and write one character, but I can chat about basic things -- drinking games and other socializing activities, "bar talk," shopping, traveling, the weather, compliments, restaurant ordering, etc. -- and I can (or at least I could when I was in the PRC for at least a day or two every week) pick up bits and pieces of complex topics.
I wasn't trying to learn Mandarin, however. I sought to understand people and to be understood on a basic expression level. Since I knew I'd never have to write or read hanzi, I didn't bother to learn any of them.
Chinese takes a lot more effort. I lived in Spain and didn't actively set out to learn Spanish but could speak it by the end of my time there.
Chinese is different, maybe it's that I'm older and less willing to punish myself, or just lazy, I don't know, but it's been a long painful process of not being understood.
Chinese takes a lot more effort.
??? Mandarin takes more effort than Cantonese.
Chinese takes a lot more effort. I lived in Spain and didn't actively set out to learn Spanish but could speak it by the end of my time there.
Mandarin is very easy to speak. I'm sure that if you're taking a class of some sort, the instructor is "nutso" about the tones. If one just starts speaking it in a "live fire" situation, one who's clearly just learning to speak Chinese -- Mandarin or Cantonese -- need not worry about the tones. As goes basic pronunciation, I encountered one sound I simply could not accurately utter. (I can't say why that is. Perhaps having taken French and Spanish (Castilian) has something to do with it? I don't know.)
As go the tones, we have substantively the same things in English:
- "polish" and "Polish"
- "read" (Read the book) and "read" (I read the book last night.)
As a native speaker, if someone whom you knew was a non-native speaker mispronounced "polish" or "read," would you be able to figure out from the context of the conversation what they probably mean? At least well enough to know how to ask a suitable question so that you can become sure of what they mean? I suspect you can and would. So it is in China when one is speaking in one's broken Chinese and just learning. One's buddies will periodically help one along when it's necessary and not make a big deal about it when it's not.
When I was in the PRC, my translator was the person who helped me. She very reassuringly told me when I first started Mandarin, in essence:
Don't worry about the tones. Just try to say the word you want to say. Eventually you'll get the tones, but it's easier to say the word the way you say it and then learn to say it slightly differently, than it is to worry about saying it the right way from the start. You'll spend too much time worrying about what your saying and not enough time actually communicating.
From that moment on, Mandarin became easy to speak. I'm sure I wasn't speaking eloquent Mandarin, but then as a non-native speaker who was just trying to be personable and "do my thing," I didn't need to. Had I stayed longer, I'm sure I'd have elevated the quality of my Mandarin, but the quality needed to be "functional" moving about in a PRC city is nowhere near that level.
Now, if your goal is to speak "diplomat grade" Mandarin or Cantonese, well, that could be difficult. I really wouldn't know.
No, Chinese, Cantonese, Mandarin, whatever, takes more effort than Spanish.
The problem I had with the tones was that I didn't set out to learn them properly. I didn't have a teacher or anything like that, just trying to do it myself. I've learnt to do them more or less now.
With German my biggest problem was remembering if something was der, die or das. Usually I'd ignore it because it's hard to remember.
Chinese with the tones I have that problem. Is it 1st tone or 3rd tone for this. Practice makes perfect, but with say, Spanish, you don't really have that. La and el are more or less logical.
I also had a problem with phrasal verbs with German, if a verb starts with the same same combination of letters, like auf or an, then I'd get confused a lot. Spanish doesn't do that at all.
Chinese has a lot of things that look similar in pinyin. Gei is a great one, there's only one word with gei.
But huo, you have perhaps, fire, live, meals, money, capture, be puzzled, misfortune, much, clear, holmium, and loads more. Maybe 40 different characters than can be huo, some of the huo characters can have two different tones too which change the meaning. Then you have words which can go with that.
For some people the lack of difficult grammar makes it easy, for me, as a visual learner, rather than audio, it can be a massive minefield.
The suck is strong with these two.
Holy hell.
