If you are thinking of learning Chinese(Mandarin), you are headed to climb a big mountain. It will especially be hard if your mother tongue has an alphabet, and doesn’t use any characters. Some say that living in Spain or France, you’d be able to master the local language in 7 months, while living in China; you’d need at least 2 years. In this article I will give a few points on why it is a challenge, so then you can make that important decision if you are ready to invest your time in learning Chinese.
* Chinese uses characters instead of an alphabet. Characters are made up of radicals or small pictures. In the Oxford Chinese Dictionary, it shows that there are 186 radicals in the Chinese language. A number of radicals can make up a character, a Chinese word. For instance the radical for a woman and the radical for child together mean “good”. That is one character. Two or more specific characters together can also mean one word in English.
* At the beginning pronunciation is all memorization. You would have to memorize each character and the sound it makes. But as many Chinese children start out, they have a helper, a Romanization of the characters. An alphabet on top of the characters so that at least there is a system of being able to pronounce them. As you progress, with fluency, you would have to drop that system, just like a child stops using the training wheels on a bike, and never comes back to them again.
* Maybe you noticed Chinese people speaking, with their tone of voice going up and down. That’s part of the language. Specifically 4 tones. So a simple word as “Ma” literally can mean horse, mother or hemp, each according to their tone. People with a musical mind, might find it easier to master these.
With an investment, you need to wait a while before you can reap the rewards. Deciding to learn Mandarin Chinese is an investment of your time. But as with any investment, you could reap big rewards. And looking at the world situation today, Mandarin is looking more and more like a good investment.
Robert McLayton likes to recommend an awesome DISCOUNT OFFER for every SlowPitch Softball Bat on fastslowpitchsoftballbat.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Robert_McLayton
Related posts
2 Responses
Pingback by Children Learn Mandarin
December 8, 2009 at 11:00 am
[...] [...]
Comment by Sam Song
January 7, 2010 at 7:48 am
Dear Madam/Sir,
Learning Mandarin can be very easy and fun!
“It has been a 50 percent increase in the study of Chinese among American students for the past several years.”
I am a published author with five wonderful books, online http://www.amazon.com. I wish to help your people to learn Mandarin with lots of fun.
Below are two reviews about my books on http://www.Amazon.com:
The whole learning process is totally fascinating, November 19, 2009
By Daniel K. Stern (Glendale, WI USA)
I am an adult and like to learn independently. Lately my passion has been learning Mandarin Chinese.
At first I thought that I would focus only on listening and speaking (and using Pinyin), but friends advised me that my approach would only take me so far and that to truly advance in my studies, I’d have to learn to read the characters.
I bought this and Sam Song’s other book, The Fox and the Goat, on Amazon. The book and the download files that he makes available made learning a large number of characters relatively easy. It’s a nice jump start to learning Mandarin. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Really Easy and Fun, May 13, 2009
By Matt Mitchell
This is a great book it is really easy to learn to write Chinesse with this one I highly recromend
Below is a Poem about my books:
‘Sam has a way with word. To teach, he’s the best you have heard. The books that he writes are such marvelous sights learning Chinese each day word by word. Chinese words we can learn very fast. And when learned we cry Goodie, at last! For I must know the end. How that story doth wend and to know how it ends is a blast!’ – By Poet Carol Creed.
Two of my books are Learning Chinese The Easy
Way ISBN: 1419686119 and Learn Chinese Through Song!: The Popular Chinese Nursery Rhyme (Baby’s First Words in Chinese): Two Tigers* ISBN: 1439265062 available online http://www.amazon.com worldwide. The audio files for practicing pronunciation are available for downloading at our official site: http://www.discoverchinese.cn.
*Two Tigers is a small book for parents and kids to work together in learnig Chinese. Almost everyone knows the song Frère Jacques (Brother John). There are probably 50 versions of the song, in many languages and several dialects of French. However this song’s Chinese version could be the best, Two Tigers.)
If you are interested, I would like to email you an mini PDF eBook, which is as good as any best-selling books on Amazon.com though my printed books are even much better. (Please email me with a subject line “eBook,” if you are interested. So, I could reply with the mini PDF eBook.)
Wish You A Happy New Year of Tiger – 2010!
Sam Song
http://www.discoverchinese.cn
RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URI