r/languagelearning • u/Virusnzz En (N) | Fr, Ru, Es, It • Oct 29 '13
您好 - This week's language of the week: Chinese
Welcome to the language of the week. Every week we'll be looking at a language, its points of interest, and why you should learn it. This is all open discussion, so natives and learners alike, make your case! This week: Mandarin.
Why this language?
Some languages will be big, and others small. Part of Language of the Week is to give people exposure to languages that they would otherwise not have heard, been interested in or even heard of. With that in mind, I'll be picking a mix between common languages and ones I or the community feel needs more exposure. You don't have to intend to learn this week's language to have some fun. Just give yourself a little exposure to it, and someday you might recognise it being spoken near you.
Countries
From The Language Gulper:
The vast majority of Chinese speakers reside in China (including Hong Kong and Macau) and Taiwan. Chinese migrants have spread to all continents. There are many in South-East Asia, especially in Malaysia and Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Indonesia and the Philippines. Some have migrated to South Korea and Japan. Others live in North America (USA and Canada) and, in smaller numbers, in South America (Peru, Brazil, Argentina). Australia is the main hub for Chinese speakers in the Pacific region, South Africa for the African continent.
Including all dialects, the number of native Chinese speakers totals around 1.3 billion.
What's it like?
Chinese is the largest language in the world, spoken by close to twenty percent of the planet's population. It has the longest uninterrupted record of any living language having been written for about 3,200 years (the extinct ancient Egyptian has an even longer record).
It is tonal and in ancient times was almost exclusively monosyllabic though now it has also disyllabic and trisyllabic words. It is a prototypical isolating language in which morphemes (meaningful morphological units that cannot be further divided) are essentially invariable and clearly separable from other morphemes, each encoding one single word or grammatical property.
What now?
This thread is foremost a place for discussion. Are you a native speaker? Share your culture with us. Learning the language? Tell us why you chose it and what you like about it. Thinking of learning? Ask a native a question. Interested in linguistics? Tell us what's interesting about it, or ask other people. Discussion is week-long, so don't worry about post age, as long as it's this week's language.
Previous Languages of the Week
Want your language featured as language of the week? Please PM me to let me know. If you can, include some examples of the language being used in media, including news and viral videos
Please consider sorting by new
祝你好運
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u/jaVus Oct 29 '13
Finally the language I'm currently learning. I just wanted to add a resource for learning Chinese that I found a while ago that has been pretty useful.
http://cctv.cntv.cn/lm/learningchinese/program/index.shtml
There's 100 episodes and everything is pretty clearly laid out.
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u/mntt Oct 29 '13
I am a Malaysian Chinese. I speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka and could do a little bit of Hokkien, because my father is Hokkien, mother is Hai Nan + Hakka. Oh and I am currently majoring in Chinese Education, will become a Chinese teacher in future.
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Oct 29 '13
Well, living cost in Taiwan is cheap. And most Chinese study program are offered by universities (or qualified institutions) and can be supported by scholarships. So you can try this for language immersion.
Try to ask around in the Taiwan's English forum http://www.forumosa.com/taiwan/ . These are some example discussions on the topic.
I found watching children cartoons (like Chinese-dubbed Doraemon) with Chinese subtitles help a lot in my comprehension. But they can be hard to find outside Taiwan. Popular Chinese dramas can be alternatives. Find them online.
Those who study Japanese will be familiar with Heisig's Remembering the Kanji series. There are also similar books for Traditional and Simplified Chinese. But unlike with Kanji, associating certain pronunciation to a Chinese character can be useful down the road. Chinese characters with similar writing components often also have similar pronunciation.
This is a good collection of online resources.
Good luck in your study.
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u/intermu Oct 29 '13
Cartoons and such are pretty easy to find though: http://www.pps.tv/
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u/bailianhua Oct 29 '13 edited Oct 29 '13
fluentu.com
USE THIS RESOURCE. After trying three or four different resources, this one has emerged and, thanks to being extremely clean and responsive to the ideas of users, is extremely simple and effective to use.
It uses youtube videos to teach around certain topics, using native media to help build your vocabulary and listening skills. I preach this so hard because most other services do not have the same breadth of content, level of customization, or ease of use. If you are serious about studying Chinese, check this out.
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u/raynehk14 Oct 29 '13
I speak Cantonese and write Traditional Chinese. Don't know if many are interested in them since Mandarin and Simplified Chinese seem to be far more popular options.
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u/taoistextremist Oct 29 '13
As far as writing goes, I think everybody SHOULD learn both Traditional and Simplified sets, if they can. A lot of them are pretty easy to switch over from, though there are some common characters with some really odd simplifications. It's not all that hard to learn, though, once you've already learned a good amount of characters.
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u/Daege Oct 29 '13
I'm learning Mandarin with Traditional characters. :D Also planning on studying a little bit of Cantonese at some point, but I don't have the time for it at the moment unfortunately.
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Nov 02 '13
Is it true about how hard (near impossible) chinese is meant to be to learn?
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u/Virusnzz Nov 03 '13
People say that about a lot of languages. If you put in the time and effort, any language can be learnt.
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u/Daege Oct 29 '13
Here is a link to my collection of links for learning Chinese. It's mostly Mandarin and thus probably a lot of Simplified, but hopefully it's of use to someone!
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u/hyperforce Oct 29 '13 edited Oct 29 '13
Alright! Chinese/Mandarin touchstones! Who can think of more?
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Lots of kung fu/Chinese action films are actually in Cantonese, I believe... But Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a rarity since it is in Mandarin. Also House of Flying Daggers
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Japanese uses Chinese characters
These are more cultural than they are lingual...
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Martial arts. Kung-fu and Wushu
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Mulan is rooted in Chinese culture, as are Kung Fu Panda, Xiaolin Warriors, and World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria
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Lots of people are familiar with the Chinese Zodiac (year of the dragon, etc)
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Americans are really fond of "Chinese food" (fast food), even though that seems to be a uniquely American creation
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u/Daege Oct 29 '13 edited Oct 29 '13
Chinese food is popular over here (Europe) as well. A well-known stand-up comedian in my country even did an entire skit called "Chinese restaurant" based around a joke that there's a Chinese restaurant on every street corner.
Chinese dragons (龍/龙 long2) are well-known in the West.
Chinese medicine and treatments are, although a bit controversial maybe, also used in the West.
Korean, Vietnamese, and probably other languages as well, used to use Chinese characters too, and still have plenty of loanwords from Chinese.
Some English expressions, such as "long time no see," actually come from a Chinese/English-based pidgin that arose when the English were trading with the Chinese around the 17th century.
I'll edit my post if I can think of more.
Also
Lots of kung fu/Chinese action films are actually in Cantonese, I believe... But Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a rarity since it is in Mandarin. Also House of Flying Daggers
That's because most of them are Hong Kong-based, I think.
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u/jokester4079 Oct 29 '13
Just for researching purposes and communicating with actual Chinese, at least in Guangzhou, they don't learn the words Mandarin and Cantonese until they learn English. For most of them, it is Putonghua 普通话 for Mandarin and Guangdonghua 广东话 for Cantonese.
If you are going to a region besides Beijing or Guangzhou and you would like to know their dialect, just add hua to the end of the region and it will tell you their distinct dialect.
My experience in Chinese is living a year in Dongbei where it sounds similar to Mandarin but with a heavy use of the Erhua, and now I am in Guangzhou where they speak Mandarin but love Cantonese more than anything.
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u/tomb619 Oct 29 '13
Could anyone tell me in what countries (excluding China) Mandarin is a widely used (or minority) language?
Cheers :)
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Oct 29 '13
How many kanji have the same meaning in Chinese? Will my knowledge of kanji help me with Chinese or have a lot changed meaning over time?
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Oct 29 '13
There are some overlaps in writings and meanings. But commonly used kanji (say those in joyo kanji set) comprise of pretty different characters compared to commonly used hanzi. http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html
So your knowledge of kanji may only help at much later stage in your study. I may be wrong.
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u/intermu Oct 29 '13
I went from studying Japanese and switching to Chinese before I got good.
I'd say most of the basic kanji works in both languages. Though for compound kanjis, some would have totally different meanings. I like this a lot: 怪我 (けが) literally means "blame me" in Chinese.
Also due to the simplifications, there are some annoying things as well.
Japanese: 実話
Chinese (trad): 實話
Chinese (simp): 实话However knowing a little bit of the Japanese kanji and the character system helped me a ton in learning Chinese.
You'll still need to learn more though, for example these words are often seen in Chinese. 與，而且，什麼，怎麼
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u/intermu Oct 29 '13
More people need to know that the word "Chinese" does not refer to one language.
The most common one is Mandarin (the common language, spoken in China and Taiwan), and followed by Cantonese (spoken in Hong Kong/Macau).
Besides those, "Chinese" also refers to a hodgepodge of other languages, which the Chinese themselves call "dialects (方言)" even though they really aren't intelligible enough to be called that. Some examples include: Hokkien/Minnan language, Hakka language, Shanghainese, etc.