Comments on: How hard is it to learn chinese?

By: Kebab Chef

Kebab Chef — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:23:27 +0000

Your English is ok. Mandarin Chinese is becoming more and more popular by the day, and has for many years been the language spoken by most people on earth because of the chinese population size. Learning to read and write Chinese characters can be very challenging, and may take years to even begin to master. The majority of people that study Chinese only learn how to speak it, and compared to English or any romance language, it’s much easier. Linguists, and people with vast experience in learning languages will almost always agree on the fact that most language learning methods out there are 50-70 percent fluff! If you don’t have the time to learn a language properly, and you’re after something quick and easy, then you’re probably headed towards dissapointment and frustration. ALL, yes, all language courses out there, with the exception of maybe taking a 4-6 year college program or something to that extent, give you nothing but a head-start and head-start alone towards going to a foreign country and being immersed in another language and making it a bit easier to pick up a few things here and there. The best method to getting as far as you can get in the shortest period of time involves 3 steps. 1st step is to complete a FULL Pimsleur(MUST BE PIMSLEUR) course. Listen to each lesson at least 2 times, taking notes the first time with new vocabulary and studying before listening the second time. The 2nd step is to form a list of the 3,000 most commonly used words/vocabulary in English, to also include the eight parts of speech(verbs, nouns, pronouns, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections), which you can search the web for. Once you’ve formed the list, you need to find accurate generic-translations, which you can apply to most common case scenarios of that language(definatley the most challenging part of all this). Once that’s done, make flash cards or whichever method works best for you in memorizing vocabulary, but try to include each word in a sentence, in addition to just the new word and it’s meaning. After you’ve memorized all that, the 3rd step is to locate 4 movies that are preferably some kind of Disney movie, or anything of a slower pace. Childrens movies seem to work best for this. Watch the movie in the language you’re trying to learn with good, quality English subtitles. Watch ONLY these same 4 movies continously as much as possible, to the point where you know what’s going to be said next. Try to plan completing these 3 steps in a time-frame of about 6-8 months. You’ll thank me when you’re done!

By: verygoodjokes

verygoodjokes — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:22:02 +0000

Your English is good.

Chinese is hard mostly for 2 reasons:
1) it is a tonal language
2) its written script consists of thousand of characters that you need to memorize.

get a taste of tonal chinese by listening to the tones:

http://www.sayjack.com/learn/chinese/pinyin/

and see how you can learn Chinese characters more easily by breaking the characters into smaller radical components:

http://www.zhongwen.com

hope it helps~
p.s. I don’t know Arabic, so no comments on that…

By: heinK

heinK — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:49:45 +0000

Hey,

Some people say Chinese is going to be the business language in the next few years with China growing fast as it is!

I have learnt some Chinese in the past and tried many books (spending $$$ away because of the poor experience)

However, I stumbled upon this new online learning course that you can go through at your own speed.

The link is: http://www.online-language-learning.com/go/chinese

It is cheaper than most other courses yet as good (if not better!)

Hopefully, I will have helped you

By: Hongjing L

Hongjing L — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:07:03 +0000

China’s increasingly powerful stature and more business opportunities relating to the Chinese language means it has become one of the world’s most important business tools. So Chinese is worth studying.Moreover, It is not hard to learn Chinese if you like studying it and put your heart into it. The basic and most important thing is to learn Chinese tones and Chinese strokes, learning Chinese is as easy as ABC if you learn Chinese tones and strokes well. And learning Chinese tones and strokes are interesting.

So find a professional teacher to help you! eChineseLearning is a good choice!
You can first take a free trial and enjoy learning Chinese!

By: Camm

Camm — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 05:49:27 +0000

Well, Chinese (and its different languages, each with their own dialects: Mandarin, Jin, Hakka, Gan, Xiang, Hui, Wu, Min, Cantonese, and Ping) is a tonal language, meaning that depending on what tone you pronounce a word, it can totally change its meaning.

By: Nicole k

Nicole k — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 04:49:45 +0000

I take Japanese, and those characters have a certain difficulty to them. Kanji are Chinese characters that the Japanese use in their everyday language, and the most they have is 2000…..which is the minimum you need to know to read a regular newspaper! The rest of the Japanese characters consist of hirgana and katakana, which are not Chinese. However, the Chinese use ALL kanji in their writing, which is quiet a lot. I would imagine the characters alone would be very hard to learn and take many years to master just that.

By: baydestrian_x3

baydestrian_x3 — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 03:51:08 +0000

yes it is- learning characters/symbols and getting the pronuciation right and also writing chinese words in the right way. i think its better then arabic tho because mandarin (chinese dialec) is starting to be one of those common languages used in the bussiness world

By: D-Mon3y

D-Mon3y — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 03:17:45 +0000

Very