<p>Why is it so difficult to learn? Are there any websites that will prepare me for my Mandarin class, so I will know a little before I go to class?</p>
<p>Uh,it’s kind of complex one to answer.First of all, the difficulty level of learning Chinese mandarin for a foreigner mainly depends on his or her understanding ability and hard working potential.I have got to tell you, I mean ,as an authentic Chinese mandarin speaker who lives in China mainland for over 15 years,I personally think during thousands of Chinese dialects,the mandarin is the easiest to grasp.Here are my reasons:I was born in the borderline part between North and South,so from childhood I have always been exposing to Southern Chinese ,Northern Chinese and sometimes a mixture of both Beijing accent [mandarin Chinese you mentioned] and Southern dialects.So it’s really an advantage for me , you know ,been familiar with various Chinese dialects and always speaking standard mandarin in school help me do better in communicating with strangers whenever I leave home to other provinces. I travel to some quite different parts of China.When I stay in Beijing, I really feel no troubles understanding them at all.But when I was in Hongkong, I’ve got to admit that I did spend some time learning Cantonese in the Internet language learning center before I set on the journey.
Basically,for a foreigner who eagers to grasp Chinese mandarin, I strongly recommend you to nurture yourself in Mandarin world,put it more simply,you’ve really got to talk a lot with different Chinese people.To my knowledge,most citizens in Beijing or other metropolitans are welcoming to polite foreigners ,so don’t be afraid of making funny oral errors ,since most of the Chinese people you talk to don’t really expect your mandarin fluency to achieve a Chinese elementary school kid’s level.Another important thing you need to keep in mind is that you’d better to choose a proper and suitable native Chinese mandarin speaker to teach you.It’s trivial but also vital.Wathing the CCTV is also a convinient way of learning mandarin,remember,the broadcaster’s accent is a little too anthentic and sort of too serious and formal , so my suggestions are:you can admire the newscaster’s " RP MANDARIN" while listening to those dizzy reports that don’t make a sense to you if you don’t see the TV images and live scene,but never put too much effort in modeling the nescaster’s mandarin accent,you know ,it’s weird that you talk to a Chinese adult who probably mix some dialect accent in his mandarin with your stalky but perfectly anthentic speaking mandarin unless you intend to apply to TV host positon speciallized for foreigners to learn Chinese like DA SHAN.
Last but not least,as you mentioned above,the websites teaching Chinese are really rampant in the internet,and I’ve surfed some of them .And in my memory I have once made a SAT Chinese mandarin test online out of pure curiosity.Since SAT is held by ETS ,the listening part’s speakers were all Americans,their accents and pronuncation way betrayed them.I could’t help laughing as I did the test because it’s too ridiculous for a Chinese to learn mandarin in a foreigner’s way,you know?The thins I want to tell you behind this slightly eccentric phonomena and examples are the cliche you’ve heard for hundres times:never try to really “grasp” a new language ,bacause you initially come form a different cultural background.So try to understand the people who speak mandarin before you hastily registered for an so-called online mandarin teaching website,because almost all of those website were set up for foreigners who are too mean to spend time and energy to know mandarin or Chinese thorouly.And consequently,the aim of those websites were quite simple and bald:take money out from ignorant and irrational foreigners’ credit card.
It seems that I am too wordy.But I really hope those were helful when you making your decisions.</p>
<p>Uh,it’s kind of complex one to answer.First of all, the difficulty level of learning Chinese mandarin for a foreigner mainly depends on his or her understanding ability and hard working potential.I have got to tell you, I mean ,as a native Chinese mandarin speaker who lives in China mainland for over 15 years,I personally think among thousands of Chinese dialects,the mandarin is the easiest to grasp.Here are my reasons:I was born in the borderline part between North and South,so from childhood I have always been exposing to Southern Chinese ,Northern Chinese and sometimes a mixture of both Beijing accent [mandarin Chinese you mentioned] and Southern dialects.So it’s really an advantage for me , you know ,have been familiar with various Chinese dialects and always speak standard mandarin in school help me present myself better in communicating with strangers whenever I leave home to other provinces. I traveled to some quite different parts of China.When I stayed in Beijing, I really felt no troubles understanding them at all.But when I was in Hongkong, I’ve got to admit that I did spend some time learning Cantonese in the Internet language learning center before I set on the journey.
Basically,for a foreigner who eagers to grasp Chinese mandarin, I strongly recommend you to nurture yourself in Mandarin world,put it more simply,you’ve really got to talk a lot with different Chinese people.To my knowledge,most citizens in Beijing or other metropolitans are welcoming to polite foreigners . There is no need to be afraid of making oral errors ,since most of the Chinese people you talk to don’t really expect your mandarin fluency to achieve a Chinese elementary school kid’s level.Another important thing you need to keep in mind is that you’d better to choose a proper and suitable native Chinese mandarin speaker to teach you.It’s trivial but also vital.Wathing the CCTV is also a convinient way of learning mandarin,remember,the broadcaster’s accent is a little too anthentic and sort of too serious and formal , so my suggestions are:you can admire the newscaster’s " RP MANDARIN" while listening to those dizzy reports that don’t make a sense to you if you don’t see the TV images and live scene,but never put too much efforts in modeling the newscaster’s mandarin accent,you know ,it’s weird that you talk to a Chinese adult who probably mix some dialect accent in his mandarin with your stalky but perfectly disguised native mandarin speaker’s pronunciation,unless you intend to apply to TV host positon speciallized for foreigners in China to learn mandarin like DA SHAN,by the way,I feel absurd whenever I hear DA SHAN boasting his Chinese fluency and accuracy.
Last but not least,as you mentioned above,the websites teaching Chinese are really rampant in the internet,and I’ve surfed some of them before.And in my memory I have once took a SAT Chinese mandarin test online out of pure curiosity.Since SAT is held by ETS ,the listening part’s speakers were not Chinese,their accents and pronuncations betrayed them.I could’t help sneering as I finished the test because it’s so ridiculous for a Chinese to learn mandarin in a foreigner’s way like that,you know?The things I want to tell you behind this slightly eccentric phonomena and examples are the cliche you’ve heard for hundres times:never try to really “grasp” a new language ,bacause you initially come form a different cultural background.So try to understand the people who speak mandarin before you hastily registered for an so-called online mandarin teaching website,because almost all of those website were set up for foreigners who are too mean to spend time and energy to know mandarin or Chinese thorouly.And consequently,the aim of those websites were quite simple and bald:take money out from ignorant and irrational foreigners’ credit card.
It seems that I am too wordy.But I really hope those were helful for you and others who hold a desire to learn Chinese language deeply.</p>
<p>@sezrenei </p>
<p>Wordiness is no big deal. It’s the completely unorganized appearance of your posts that kills other posters.</p>
<p>your abrupt comments nearly killed me.</p>
<p>I apologize for not giving you the specific name, but I recall Oberlin students had produced an excellent mandarin learning program for free…if you search on their website I think you’ll find it. :)</p>
<p>Mandarin is “difficult” first of all because of its grammar, the words not translating well word-for-word, and the fact that it’s all pictographs and not words you can sound out. Additionally, you’ll learn about the 4 tones. Using each tone for the word “ma,” for example, would produce:</p>
<p>mom
horse
hemp
anger/rant at/curse (the last tone has variable definitions, another issue with learning new vocab)</p>
<p>Also, if you say “ma” with no tone at all, it can also signify a question mark. Like, “Did you see that movie ma”</p>
<p>I’m a Chinese major and I can say that really, you just have to be prepared to work a lot. You’ll have to accept things that seem counterintuitive or just plain crazy, such as when one character has several completely unrelated meanings and pronunciations in different contexts. Chinese grammar isn’t so bad, except maybe for the random particles like 了 and 得. The real killer in Chinese is characters. Make a LOT of flashcards, that’s all I can say. Speaking is pretty bad too—it takes a while to get used to tones—but with enough practice it starts to feel more natural and you don’t have to think about it as much. Good luck!</p>
<p>OK. I’m a native speaker. The reason you think it’s so difficult may be we ,east Asians ,have a total different system of languages. As we chinese think Japanese is very easy, usually Japanese think Chinese is easy.<br>
If you want to be prepared. The good idea may be to learn something about the 拼音(pinyin). PINYIN is something like the phonetic symbols of English. Learning pinyin is anyway, if my memory works correctly, my first step to learn Mandarin. If you know it well, at least you can use PRC’s Chinese dictionaries, pronounce all words or characters of Mandarin if someone offer you the pinyin associated, read the books for PRC’s elementary schools’ students, and chat with civilians of PRC…etc.
As I estimate, it may takes your around 3 weeks to study pinyin. Anyway, it’s worth.</p>
<p>Study PINYIN hard and build up the foundation for your future studies.</p>
<p>Woah, Chinese folks, comma goes after the word and space after commas and periods. You’re writing English here, not Chinese. The spacebar is here for a reason.</p>
<p>Why is Mandarin so difficult? Well, it’s an ideogram-based language instead of an alphabet-based language, and that’s a pretty big fundamental difference when compared to any western language. Also, the absence of tones in English makes pronunciation a pain. Also, the Chinese concept of a “word” differs from English. Every character is bound to a concept, but a great majority of the time the concept isn’t a complete “word” while in English, a word is a word. So you end up spending a lot of time learning characters that look radically different, sound virtually the same, and don’t represent whole words. Grammatically Chinese is actually simpler than English - no conjugation, for example - but you have to remember a host of articles and particles amongst other things to make up for that. Add that to the Chinese propensity to employ puns and wordplay and you have a whole mess on your hands.</p>
<p>Learning Mandarin is pretty much employing the same idea as learning English as a second language - immersion and practice, with a bit of luck. Speaking it without an accent after the age of 10 is immensely difficult, but that’s also why FOBs in America keep their heavy accents despite coming over in middle school or maybe even earlier. Some have the talent to lose their accent, some don’t. Chinese, because of the tones, have a smaller margin for error because getting the tone wrong means you are getting the entire concept and in turn the entire word wrong, which is very problematic and frustrating. The Chinese language is virtually made for rote memorization, but rote memorization is universally known to be a terrible way to learn pretty much anything and everything else. </p>
<p>Of course, the problem of most Chinese don’t speak perfect Mandarin also comes into play. Mandarin is an artificial language. My first language, for example, is Suzhou hua, of the Wu dialect (Shanghainese shameless stole about 70% of their pronunciation and vocabulary from us since 1840), and it’s completely unintelligible with any of the northern dialects or any of the southern dialects, not to mention Mandarin. Outside of CCTV, even Chinese teachers in school don’t speak perfect Mandarin. The younger generation who grew up with TV is beginning to get it right, but the fact that no Chinese leader have ever spoken anything close to good Mandarin is a sign that Mandarin is hard even for the Chinese. It’s like imagine if David Cameron was sporting his ancestral Scots accent in Parliament or if the President of the United States came from Pittsburgh.</p>
<p>A lot of learning a language is learning the natural rhythm and flow of the language. Why are sezrenei’s posts so awkward and jarring? Because no native English speaker would structure his sentences that way. In the same vein, the urge to translate what you want to say in English over to Chinese verbatim would only serve to create really awkward sentences that’ll get you a lot of puzzled looks on the streets, even if you didn’t have an accent, and everyone has an accent.</p>
<p>This isn’t to say that you should give up on learning it. Look on the bright side - even the Chinese can’t get their own language right, so you have a pretty good margin of error to live by. Being a foreigner, you’ll always stand out in China - the country is far too homogeneous - but that also allows you a break and you can make more mistakes and get away with it. Americans expect everyone to speak perfect English. The Chinese expect nobody to speak perfect Chinese. You’re off the hook there. Meanwhile, get your vocabulary up, practice your tones with a native speaker who can actually differentiate z and zh, c and ch, etc (and hope that they’re not too hung up on the n/ng endings because I’m a native speaker who can’t tell the difference there) and you should be fine. Everyone is in the same ****ty boat as you. Happy sailing.</p>
<p>Just search teh net and you will find many places available for you to learn Mandarin</p>
<p>My daughter has mostly taught herself to speak Mandarin. She says she found it much much easier to learn than French. Not sure why that is, but she insists that if one is motivated, Mandarin is not as difficult to learn as it first appears.</p>
<p>the tones are killler</p>
<p>learning Chinese is like MATH, not rote memorization. i’m a native speaker from Wuhan. don’t listen to DeadWhiteGuys, he’s a white wannabe that has no idea what he’s talking about and didn’t give constructive help.</p>
<p>if you want to learn chinese, start learning how to look for patterns.</p>
<p>登 (deng1) means climb
凳 (deng4) looks similar doesn’t it? it means CHAIR. they are connected by similar sounds as well as similar writing. the 几 at the bottom looks like a chair doesn’t it?
瞪 (deng1) means stare. it looks similar to the first (deng1) climb but has 目(eye) next to 登, so the root sound is 登 while the 目 modifies the meaning.
求，球，救，what do they have in common? 求 (qiu2) is the root; it means request. add a 王 to the side (qiu2) and it becomes ball. add a 文 to the right side makes (jiu4) which means rescue.</p>
<p>i can make many more examples; Chinese is highly logical, almost like a form of mathematics. It’s just different from what you are used to. the characters are just part of it though; the important part is knowing how to organize your thoughts in essays and reports. Just like you don’t know english if you only know 1000 words of vocabulary, you don’t know Chinese if you only know characters.</p>
<p>If you are a logical thinker, you’ll find Chinese much easier than Japanese or even English. Your first year will consist of understanding the basic characters, grammar and logic of Chinese, much as you start math by learning numbers, fractions, and operators. Then as you get more advanced, it becomes easy just like scientists and engineers view calculus as routine while high schoolers think it’s like climbing everest.</p>
<p>The tones were the hardest part for me. That and the characters. Learning the 200 or so most common was fairly easy and got me very far as far as reading signage and menus was concerned, but beyond that it got REALLY difficult. The good news is that if you’re a foreigner, most Chinese won’t expect you to be fluent, and will be highly impressed if you can speak even a little. </p>
<p>If your goal is to work for an international company in China, learning Mandarin is pivotal for getting in the door, even though you’ll probably rarely use it once you get started at work.</p>
<p>while teaching my oral english teacher, an australia man, some mandarin, i noticed that only learn pinyin is not enough. tones are the most difficult part for a learner. so i suggest you to pay more attention to the tones as you began learning madarin…it’s really imp to let someone understand what you are trying to talk about.</p>
<p>HAHa``AS A CHINESE , I WILL TELL YOU THAT IT ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO LEARN MADARIDN FOR A FOREGINER~~~</p>
<p>^How do you know that?? Can you back up your s.h.i.t.??</p>
<p>I think the best way to learn a language is to go to that country.</p>
<p>I met a friend in Beijing. She is an American undergraduate in Duke University. When she came to China, she could say a complete sentece. But After one year ( She did some volunteer jobs in China), she can even send Chinese text messages with me :)</p>