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

General discussion about learning languages
lichtrausch
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby lichtrausch » Thu Apr 29, 2021 9:30 pm

One aspect I haven't seen mentioned yet is the weight of history. If you want to learn Chinese to the level of a well-educated speaker, you will have to come to terms with thousands of phrases and hundreds of quotes from Classical Chinese that are used in modern Mandarin unchanged except for the pronunciation. Japanese and Korean do this to a considerably lesser degree, perhaps partially because Japanese and Korean people don't feel as attached to East Asia's classical Chinese heritage as Chinese people do, understandably.

Also, I think Vlad was onto something important in his video when talking about how dense Chinese feels. There's all the very similar sounds, words being almost exclusively one or two syllables long, and widespread homophony not just at the word level, but at the morpheme level (the latter is also an issue in Japanese and Korean). It means that unless you have an exceptional ear, it's going to be a long time before you can parse the language well when spoken at full native speed.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby Mr Dastardly » Fri Apr 30, 2021 9:45 am

白田龍 wrote:All languages are easy when you have good resources and a solid learning strategy.

But everybody starts cluelessly trying random stuff.


Would love to learn more about your learning strategy!
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby Sumisu » Fri Apr 30, 2021 6:01 pm

einzelne wrote:
thevagrant88 wrote: Steve never lived with native mandarin speakers to the best of my knowledge. He learned Mandarin in Hong Kong where Cantonese dominates, far more so back in the 60’s.


Well, may be I confused his story about Mandarin with the one about Japanese. I don't remember, it was years ago.
At any rate, there are some objective factors which make Mandarin a particularly difficult language for Western learners. So I wouldn't trust those "Chinese is a piece of cake" claims.


He says he learned Mandarin first, in Hong Kong. However, he had several hours per day of one-on-one tutoring while there in addition to studying full-time, so he did get heavy exposure to at least one native speaker on a daily basis. Then he moved to Japan and learned Japanese there, which he claims was easier since he already knew the kanji from Chinese.

In theory, having learned both languages to a high level, Kaufmann would be a good person to weigh in on this. However, his experience is so unique that I don't think anyone could replicate it. It does demonstrate, though, that which of the languages you learn first is a big factor to consider.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby vonPeterhof » Sat May 01, 2021 9:33 am

I'm surprised that this blog post hasn't come up here yet. The actual graphs don't show up in the browser for me any more, but you can still find them with image search:
2609980715_8cba5eeed2_o.png

And for the record I have heard people express the opinion that Japanese grammar is "different [from most European languages], but not exactly hard".
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby lichtrausch » Sun May 02, 2021 8:37 pm

I just came across a good example of the sort of stuff that makes Mandarin so tricky at more advanced levels. In an episode of the light-hearted TV series 欢乐颂 (Ode to Joy), a young lady teases her female friend about how she's all dolled up today for a date. The friend responds "女人不一定为悦己者容", a slight alteration of the classical Chinese 女为悦己者容 (Women dress up for their beholders), a quote from the first millennium BC text 战国策 (Annals of the Warring States). Without a basic understanding of classical Chinese grammar and vocabulary, the line will go right over your head in spoken language (it's easier in written form thanks to the characters and having time to parse it). And remember, I didn't take this example from some sophisticated philosophical treatise. It's from a girl chat.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby bolaobo » Mon May 03, 2021 3:21 pm

lichtrausch wrote:I just came across a good example of the sort of stuff that makes Mandarin so tricky at more advanced levels. In an episode of the light-hearted TV series 欢乐颂 (Ode to Joy), a young lady teases her female friend about how she's all dolled up today for a date. The friend responds "女人不一定为悦己者容", a slight alteration of the classical Chinese 女为悦己者容 (Women dress up for their beholders), a quote from the first millennium BC text 战国策 (Annals of the Warring States). Without a basic understanding of classical Chinese grammar and vocabulary, the line will go right over your head in spoken language (it's easier in written form thanks to the characters and having time to parse it). And remember, I didn't take this example from some sophisticated philosophical treatise. It's from a girl chat.


To be fair, that's just a fixed expression that most Chinese people have memorized. You don't really have to understand Classical Chinese. But you're right, there's a lot of such expressions that have to be memorized.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby leosmith » Tue May 04, 2021 4:19 am

thevagrant88 wrote:I was asking about Chinese in comparison to Japanese so this post is moot.

The bottom of your OP, and the title, probably led him to answer with his “linguist vs. language learner” post, so it was not moot imo.

Last I checked, Luca’s level was not high, and Vlad’s was. Also, could you please cite where Steve says Mandarin is easy? Imo his book contradicts what you’ve stated.

I speak both Mandarin and Japanese pretty comfortably, although my true level is probably only B2-ish. They are my hardest languages, and imo this is mostly due to Chinese characters. For me, I suspect they are not only an obstacle to reading, but also to listening – maybe it’s because I have to work at picturing the words in my mind. That’s just a guess; I just know that, although listening to my partners isn’t bad, listening to movies and such is still hard for me.

They are pretty close to each other in overall difficulty imo. This is from the standpoint of a native English speaker.

Japanese grammar is highly inflected, but grammar points are mostly wide reaching and therefore often repeated. Mandarin grammar is very simple, but very fragmented once you get past the basic level, meaning less repetition.

There are about twice as many Chinese characters in common use in Mandarin than in Japanese, but many more multi-pronunciation characters in Japanese vocabulary than Mandarin.
Chinese pronunciation, and listening, is made much more difficult than Japanese due to tones, but this doesn’t take much time to overcome imo.

Three “alphabets” makes Japanese reading and writing more complicated, but this also doesn’t take much time to overcome.

Mandarin chengyu, 4-character idioms, are necessary to become advanced in the language, but they are merely vocabulary items.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby golyplot » Tue May 04, 2021 4:11 pm

leosmith wrote:They are my hardest languages, and imo this is mostly due to Chinese characters. For me, I suspect they are not only an obstacle to reading, but also to listening – maybe it’s because I have to work at picturing the words in my mind. That’s just a guess; I just know that, although listening to my partners isn’t bad, listening to movies and such is still hard for me.


Interesting. I can often recognize words in spoken Japanese despite having no idea what the kanji look like. I tend to mentally picture words as a sequence of hiragana sounds or as romanji. I just think "oh, that's "ki" as in to cut or "ki" as in to listen", etc. without thinking about the kanji at all.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby leosmith » Wed May 05, 2021 12:36 am

golyplot wrote:I tend to mentally picture words as a sequence of hiragana sounds or as romanji.
Sometimes I picture kana too. Maybe the reason listening is hard for me is kanji makes it harder for me to stay on top of the vocabulary in the first place. Who knows. I'm just glad conversation isn't hard. :lol:
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby outcast » Wed May 12, 2021 2:36 pm

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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