Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

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golyplot
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby golyplot » Thu May 13, 2021 12:40 am

I agree with the overall point, but I think "What's up?" is a bad example, since you'll have to learn that anew for any language, Western European or not.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby outcast » Thu May 13, 2021 3:34 am

golyplot wrote:I agree with the overall point, but I think "What's up?" is a bad example, since you'll have to learn that anew for any language, Western European or not.


Correct, and that is what I was trying to convey, the "learning anew" aspect. The ways to express ideas and situations is much more aligned in European languages compared to the so-called "Level 4" FSI languages. Of course you will have to learn new ways of saying things in any language, even the ones that are so closely related that they could be analyzed as dialects to your own native tongue. The point is that with the most culturally distant languages, this is much more universal. What this means in practical terms is you cannot get away with "word for word" translation nowhere near as much as with closer languages.

How about this example: If you didn't know how to say "leave me alone!" and you were learning other western European languages, and you had to come up with something to say quickly and without the time to research, most would and are tempted to go for the word-to-word route. This would yield, assuming you have a basic command of the grammar of the target language you are studying:

Leave / me / alone = (using a boy as the speaker)
ES: Vete me solo? ("ir" is not transitive, so it cannot be this "leave", which is really "go" but can mean "I'm leaving" too) / Deja me solo! (this one would work), as can "tranquilo/a", "en paz")
DE: Verlasse mich allein? ("verlassen" is to leave a place, for people it means to leave "for good", so it's common when dumping bf/gf / Lass mich allein! (can work, can also use "in Ruhe")
FR: Laisse-moi seul! (fine, "laisse-moi tout seul" seems equally as common to my ears)

ZH: leave = 离开 (to leave a place, probably not) 走 (more colloquial about people leaving a location, maybe?) / 我 = I / me / alone = 一个人
离开我一个人 / 走我一个人?? (走 is not transitive anyway)
(so... of course not colloquial or even acceptable)

KO: leave = 떠나다 (to leave mostly places, so probably no), otherwise 가다 "to go" is used as "to leave" from both a place and to take leave from a person) / I = 저 / alone = 혼자
저 혼자 ... 가 주세요???? / 떠나 주세요??
(again... [insert "wrong" buzzer sound here] )

For Chinese, they just use other ways like "Please don't pay attention/deal with me" or "let me have a little silence" (as you may note, far less direct ways than the above European counterparts, though there are of course very rude ways to express this as well). For Korean, they have a specific verb entirely that expresses the idea of "leave/go away so I can be alone", within the semantics (it's really a compound word "cast/throw away + place/put", my Korean is still too shaky to tell why these two combined create the meaning I've been discussing).

I would never really succeed in creating the intended meaning in Chinese or Korean by the word-for-word translation method. Now multiply this process by n phrases you will need to learn anew for acquiring general fluency.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby Dragon27 » Thu May 13, 2021 4:07 am

What you're essentially saying is that Chinese is a more distant (and, therefore, more different) language. People, who just start to learn a new language, intuitively assume that their target language is basically just their own language dressed in new clothes. With less distant languages (those of the same family or even the same branch of the family) this naïve attitude creates relatively less trouble and the learner can get away with not knowing the actual phrases in many cases (which may even be a problem as it reinforces the wrong attitude). But even with similar languages there's always a large amount of idiomatic "non-derivable" expressions and ways of expressing yourself that you just have to learn if you want to sound natural or even understandable at all. It only follows that the more distant the language is, the more pronounced this phenomenon becomes. Not to mention lack of lexical similarity in non-loaned vocabulary when your target language belongs to a different language family.
At the end of the day, any language has to be learned on its own terms, and if you want to learn to speak it well, you have to know how the natives speak from the actual phrases they use, not assume or derive the corresponding expressions by yourself using your native language as a model.
Last edited by Dragon27 on Thu May 13, 2021 7:07 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby lichtrausch » Thu May 13, 2021 4:51 am

As mattvsjapan has succinctly put it, language is highly specific in unpredictable ways.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby Sayonaroo » Fri May 14, 2021 12:01 am

outcast wrote:
golyplot wrote:I agree with the overall point, but I think "What's up?" is a bad example, since you'll have to learn that anew for any language, Western European or not.


Correct, and that is what I was trying to convey, the "learning anew" aspect. The ways to express ideas and situations is much more aligned in European languages compared to the so-called "Level 4" FSI languages. Of course you will have to learn new ways of saying things in any language, even the ones that are so closely related that they could be analyzed as dialects to your own native tongue. The point is that with the most culturally distant languages, this is much more universal. What this means in practical terms is you cannot get away with "word for word" translation nowhere near as much as with closer languages.

How about this example: If you didn't know how to say "leave me alone!" and you were learning other western European languages, and you had to come up with something to say quickly and without the time to research, most would and are tempted to go for the word-to-word route. This would yield, assuming you have a basic command of the grammar of the target language you are studying:

Leave / me / alone = (using a boy as the speaker)
ES: Vete me solo? ("ir" is not transitive, so it cannot be this "leave", which is really "go" but can mean "I'm leaving" too) / Deja me solo! (this one would work), as can "tranquilo/a", "en paz")
DE: Verlasse mich allein? ("verlassen" is to leave a place, for people it means to leave "for good", so it's common when dumping bf/gf / Lass mich allein! (can work, can also use "in Ruhe")
FR: Laisse-moi seul! (fine, "laisse-moi tout seul" seems equally as common to my ears)

ZH: leave = 离开 (to leave a place, probably not) 走 (more colloquial about people leaving a location, maybe?) / 我 = I / me / alone = 一个人
离开我一个人 / 走我一个人?? (走 is not transitive anyway)
(so... of course not colloquial or even acceptable)

KO: leave = 떠나다 (to leave mostly places, so probably no), otherwise 가다 "to go" is used as "to leave" from both a place and to take leave from a person) / I = 저 / alone = 혼자
저 혼자 ... 가 주세요???? / 떠나 주세요??
(again... [insert "wrong" buzzer sound here] )

For Chinese, they just use other ways like "Please don't pay attention/deal with me" or "let me have a little silence" (as you may note, far less direct ways than the above European counterparts, though there are of course very rude ways to express this as well). For Korean, they have a specific verb entirely that expresses the idea of "leave/go away so I can be alone", within the semantics (it's really a compound word "cast/throw away + place/put", my Korean is still too shaky to tell why these two combined create the meaning I've been discussing).

I would never really succeed in creating the intended meaning in Chinese or Korean by the word-for-word translation method. Now multiply this process by n phrases you will need to learn anew for acquiring general fluency.


Hey do you know the answer for korean? 내버려 둬 and 말시키지마 come to mind. Former translates to leave x alone and the latter translates to don’t make me talk. Still it would depend on the situation as to what’s the most appropriate way to express it in korean. Coincidentally I wrote a blog about this a long time ago

https://choronghi.wordpress.com/2012/02 ... ncy-means/
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby leosmith » Fri May 14, 2021 3:03 am

outcast wrote:Chinese (and Korean, Arabic, and Japanese), are hard for the western speaker because, ultimately, their cultural environment is quite divergent from your own.

It's hard for me to agree with this because there are so many exceptions. For example, the many African languages that are relatively easy for native English speakers to learn. Imo, the difference between African and western culture is bigger than the difference between Korean/Japanese/Taiwanese and western culture. And how do we even measure differences in culture to verify your statement? To me, it's less confusing to pin difficulty to differences in grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, text, etc than culture.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby willcouchman » Fri May 14, 2021 4:17 pm

This is an absolutely superb post.

I was very fortunate to learn a similar idea in a roundabout way, in that I studied spanish using Timothy Moser's excellent 'accelerated spanish' course - which is based on mnemonics and memory palaces - BUT the first thing the course does is have you create a spanish-speaking "character", whose strange syntax is part of the character. It was a very clever way of getting the student to think differently/culturally, and not like an english speaker translating into spanish.

So I have adapted that to my studies of korean and arabic - I have almost a different "persona" in both (a background in theatre helps!) and with korean for example I think of myself as Yoda. not only does that help with the grammar (korean word order is kind of how Yoda speaks), but it genuinely does help me internalise the cultural expressions and mores so I don't think like a western european.

I ran into the same thing as others on this thread. I'd learn or work out how to say something in Korean, and my friends would tell me it was correct, but not how they would say it - a LOT of korean is very idiomatic, and genuinely makes more sense when I slip into character to learn.

outcast wrote:I don't think it's really that mysterious.

Chinese (and Korean, Arabic, and Japanese), are hard for the western speaker because, ultimately, their cultural environment is quite divergent from your own. Which is why they specifically use this very word in the FSI chart. You can learn the grammar flawlessly and have the vocabulary level of a university level student, but you still will not know how to express the world around you in the colloquially appropriate manner. "What", "is", "up", you can learn all the possible meanings of these three words, memorize their dictionary entries in fact, and know all the possible grammatical ways to combine them, but none of that encyclopedic learning will give you even the slightest clue that "What's up?" means "How are you doing?".

In languages like Chinese, the phrases you have to learn like "What's up?", where the overall has a meaning not obvious from the sum of the parts, is orders of magnitude bigger than for Western European languages. This is what takes a very long time and unremitting effort. I can't begin to count the number of times I've been told that, while they totally understand what I said and that even the grammar and words are correct, it is not the way "we say this". They then proceed to tell me a very colloquial expression instead, one you would have had the same chances of putting together as having a winning lottery ticket.

I think that is where the dichotomy occurs. It is true, it is not THAT hard to say things like "I like fruits", "I need to buy a car", in Mandarin. In fact the order is the same and these are every day expressions that use very high frequency words, and very high frequency words tend to be very straight-forward across languages, so they are easy to use. So this kind of Mandarin is not so hard and doable in a year or so. To say something like "The new product was well-received by consumers and is experiencing brisk sales", well that you just have to learn how THEY express this. Both "well-received" and "brisk selling" use their own colloquial expressions which you can only learn with exposure. THAT Mandarin, will take you a big chunk of a lifetime.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby thevagrant88 » Tue Jul 13, 2021 12:10 am

Very interesting and insightful responses. But yeah, it seems that generally the claims of Chinese “ease” come from those who haven’t invested too much into the language. I also wanted to vent by saying it drives me up a wall when people think the only thing that makes grammar challenging is inflectional morphology. This is probably the most consistently easy thing about Japanese for me personally while learning all of the millions of different structures to express different thoughts is the real challenge.

Someone feel free to correct me, but in super general terms, it feels like pragmatics have a way, way bigger role in creating challenges when learning these distant languages. Arabic grammar, for example, feels veeeeerrryyy close to other indo-European languages I’ve dabbled in; it’s logic operates under many of the same principles, at least superficially. Getting beyond the basics though, you can quickly find yourself dealing with stuff that would be word-salad if translated directly in English, Spanish, French, etc.

Anecdotal of course, but it makes sense to me so figured I’d share.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby Saim » Tue Jul 13, 2021 1:04 am

thevagrant88 wrote:Someone feel free to correct me, but in super general terms, it feels like pragmatics have a way, way bigger role in creating challenges when learning these distant languages. Arabic grammar, for example, feels veeeeerrryyy close to other indo-European languages I’ve dabbled in; it’s logic operates under many of the same principles, at least superficially. Getting beyond the basics though, you can quickly find yourself dealing with stuff that would be word-salad if translated directly in English, Spanish, French, etc.

Anecdotal of course, but it makes sense to me so figured I’d share.


Hard agree. I've felt the same thing with Urdu as well, although there the basic syntax and to a certain extent morphology is quite different from European IE (more than Arabic at times!). Even the way things are expressed in the kind of Urdu that is full of lexical Anglicisms is (or has been, I'm starting to overcome this thankfully) quite unintuitive for me.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby thevagrant88 » Tue Jul 13, 2021 7:06 pm

Exactly. I would find it really difficult to believe that someone struggling with Korean would jump over to Hindi/Urdu or Albanian and think, “Wow, thank goodness I’m studying this Indo-European language now. What a breath of fresh air!”

Don’t work that way kid.
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