Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! ...or too early for that?😂 This was a topic I planned for later, but after the feedback from my last video, it seemed appropriate to make it now. Hope you like it! Edit: English is not a Romance language, sorry for the slip up! I was probably thinking about Spanish in my mind😭
When you read Chinese writing, you know the meaning but not the pronunciation. When you read any Western writing system, you know how to pronounce it but not the meaning. There are pros and cons to both systems of writing.
@@marcella.astrid English is an exception. If you learn German, Spanish & Polish orthographies then you can know how to pronounce every single word 90% of the time.
@@modmaker7617 I am currently learning French and German. Very beginner. Yeah, German, so far looks fine. French seems like another exception tho 😂 Talking about knowing how to pronounce, Korean hangeul is also good.
As a Japanese speaker I've been trying to explain this to people for ages. English literally makes learning concepts more difficult via unnecessary abstractions. It's one of the reasons I'm against the increased overuse of Katakana for loan words.
This is very interesting, I’m a native Italian and Spanish speaker, and have been studying English for 14 years, it’s only now, that i have started studying Japanese (and got more curious for Chinese too) that i hear a lot of people that consider English very difficult, I always tought it is the most spoken language because its easy, but I’m starting recognizing the fact that’s not really like that🤔
As a Chinese person learning Japanese, I really agree with you. Katakana is a great tool, but if all kanji are replaced by katakana, Japanese sentences are too difficult to understand.🙃
I used Memrise to learn all the words up till HSK3. Then, I didn't study Chinese for a year and began studying Japanese more seriously and also a bit of Korean. Now, 1.5 years after, I STILL remember Chinese characters and words better than Japanese and Korean, because Chinese words just make so much more sense and are so much easier to remember because every word and character is basically a little mini story and my visual associative memory kicks in lol.
i somehow learnt a bit of japanese watching anime, and now still remember quite a lot of daily words. then i was forced to learn chinese by my uni and on the opposite, they just make no sense for me. all this tones that i can't pull in my head as i can't pronounce them proprely compared to nice sonding japanese pronunciation rlly sucks. lucky u if u like chinese, but i hate it :__)
English is a Germanic language, like Norse / Icelandic / Dutch / Norwegian / Danish etc, Germanic languages being the most logical and the most organized and the easiest languages ever, and also the prettiest ever, and the Latin-based / French-based words were modified into an English word, plus Germanic languages come from Latin languages, anyway, so many of the Latin words have always been in the Germanic languages as they were ‘inherited’ from Latin, so not all of them are an actual loanword - a word from Latin automatically becomes an English word once the modifications are applied to the word, such as the specific English / Germanic word endings and letter combinations etc and especially the pronunciation rules, and none of the languages are pure, as all languages come from Proto European, either directly or indirectly, and all languages got influences from other languages, especially from languages that are the closest to them, as each dude that created a new language by modifying a previous language first analyzed the languages spoken in the areas that were closest to him, and this is also why many of the languages that are close to another language or other languages are very similar to that language or languages!
For people interested in the coal example...go read about the periodic table in Chinese...every element is one character, half of the character tells you the pronunciation, the other half denotes the category: all the metal elements have a radical meaning literally metal: 钅(铁 iron, 钠 sodium, 银 silver etc); all the room temperature gases have a radical meaning gas 气 (氧 oxygen, 氦 helium, 氮 nitrogen); and the water radical 氵/水 denoting elements that are in liquid form under room temp., (溴 bromine, 汞 mercury); So even if you've never heard about the element before just by looking at the character you can get a rough idea of what kind of element it is, One character/syllable per element also makes remembering the table extremely easy, it's like reading a poem, and depending on what's needed, students can recite it either horizontally (so every element recited have the same number of layers) or vertically (so the elements all have the same number of outer layer electrons). Give them a blank sheet of paper most high school students can reconstruct 60% of the periodic table just because the pattern is so organised and it's so easy to remember.
I understand how simple Chinese can be. And that's what makes it so hard. If you know enough characters, it's easy to infer the meaning of a word you don't know. But while listening, that's a completely different story. There are so many homophones - even when you do take the tones into consideration - that it makes it really hard to infer the meaning of words you don't know.
Context. That's how you know what word is meant. If it's ambiguous, and two different homophones make sense in te context, the speaker will often say it in a different way, or explicitly explain which word was meant. If they don't, you can ask. But the vast majority of the time, that's not necessary. Context is usually enough.
I actually thought this was going to be much more of a problem than it ended up being 多听多练and you’ll realize that very very few words are truly all that similar sounding especially when you take tones into account, so as “学习中文” said the context really clears up the overwhelming majority of things that aren’t clear
this is true, and also the case for japanese, which only has five distinct vowel sounds (compared to english which is WAY more) but, just others mentioned in replies, CONTEXT IS KEY! tones and pitch-accent can help to already differentiate homophone-type words, but you'll be hard pressed to find a commonly used sentence that includes the words "bridge" (jpn: ha-shi) and "chopsticks" (jpn: ha-shi). additionally! english also has a similar "problem" but is, in my opinion, worse, and that is words which have multiple meanings and sometimes different pronunciations but the SAME SPELLING! [i.e. read (present tense) pronounced "reed" and read (past tense) pronounced "red"]. or terms that are multiple words that don't really tell you what they mean (i.e. to throw up (throw something upwards) and to throw up (vomit) or to thrown down (throw something downwards) and to throw down (to fight)) anyway, 'nuff said!
Very interesting point about the Chinese language being clear and Chinese children potentially being able to better understand math as a result! I much rather that than the persistent (harmful) stereotype about "Asians just being smart." No group of people is somehow magically smarter than another just because they are a certain nationality/ethnicity. Everyone works hard. Math confuses us all, lol.
Haha yes! I read some interesting article about how IQ actually changes during childhood depending on their environment, so it's not all genetics either and can be "nurtured."
Tbh the pressure that exists in countries like China, eg. to do well on the 高考 is mostly unmatched in the western world. East Asian pupils also spend more time in school than their European or American counterparts from what I understand. So it's culture as well as language really
@@rawcopper604 There was actually a very popular Chinese drama this year called "The Big Exam" or something similar, which detailed the trials and tribulations of students and teachers preparing for those exams. While I suspect there are people who just don't buy into the whole college exam thing, they are definitely in the minority. Keep in mind that social advancement via education was a recurring and staple feature of Chinese culture for millennia.
Asian kids in general are better educated, I agree with this. There is a heavy focus on education in Asia. At the same time an argument that Asians are smarter or have better abilities in math is not really convincing. How many great Asian mathematicians world knows?
It has nothing to do with magic. It has to do with genetic evolutionary traits. Europeans and asians in general had to develop cloth making techniques as well as other skills such as making fire to survive in the cold climates they are from. For example, asians have the epicanthal fold on their eyes. Thats to protect them from the harsh cold winds that their ancestors had to deal with for thousands of years. Its been shown that people on the eqautor where its tropical and warm have more parasitic infections, drawing energy away from their minds to fight the infection so theres a higher incidence of lower IQ in those areas, naturally, since parasites thrive in those areas. You think that people have developed different outside physical characteristics but that genes dont effect a persons inside or their brain? Thats ludicrous. Genes effect everything from looks, to behavior ro learning ability, etc. If this wasnt the case then people wouldnt have been breeding horses and dogs and other animals for specific traits. You think a border collie is the same as a chihuahua genetically? They are both dogs and even share close to the same dna as wolves but theres no argument that these creatures are all the same intelligent level or have the same instincts. Some dogs instinctually point when they sense a prey to hunt. Some dogs herd sheeps instinctually. Some dogs are better runners. Some dogs have better language skills. People are the same in this regard. Its a fact. Your worldview that everyone is equal no matter where they are from, no matter what their genes are, is false. Every group of people have developed certain traits to adapt to their respective environments. Some have greater physical abilities, other mental. Despite our differences, we should respect eachother and treat eachother well. Its more harmful to deny these obvious facts then to pretend that everyone is exactly the same. Would you put an advanced student in a special ed class? You think that would be better for them? Or a special ed student in an advanced placement class? You actually think this would be the kinder thing to do? To ignore differences to cater to a false lie that everyone is the same? Yes, its possible for most people to succeed and do well with hard work also, no ones saying that but pretending differences dont exist among the various groups is silly.
I used to be an English teacher in China, and had gotten started developing an English course for electronics engineers, who were not uncommon among adult students. Here is some of the vocabulary list: voltage - 电压, electricity pressure current - 电流, electricity flow ammeter - 电流表, electricity flow indicator resistor - 电阻器, electricity resist device circuit - 电路, electricity path power supply - 电源, electricity source switch - 开关, open close short circuit - 短路, break path electric signal - 电信号, electricity letter number battery - 电池, electricity pool generator - 发电机, send electricity machine motor - 电动机, electricity move machine photoelectric - 光电, light electricity wireless transmission - 无线传送, without line pass-on deliver electrostatic - 静电, calm electricity electro-mechanical - 机电的, machine electricity of electromagnetic field - 电磁场, electricity magnet field
Portuguese is kinda similar in respect to your first example as voltage can be translated as either "voltagem" or "tensão [elétrica]" the later of which back translates as "[electric] tension"
I used to study Mandarin Chinese a little, because I was strongly inspired by work that chinese colleagues in my profession area do (I am an information security specialist), and because chinese part of the internet contains a lot of unique knowledge about it, that would be much less available and meaningful for me as an English or Russian speaker. So when I started to learn it I started to understand why chinese people are so good in technical areas. I had a feeling that the language itself was made by an engineer. Strict, short, laconic and yet poetic in many ways in this shortness. I absolutely loved the idea of chinese characters, but the hardest part for me personally is the pronunciation - tones are not an easy concept if your native language doesn’t have them :) Thanks for an interesting video!
Thank you for saying that, and actually plz don't be discouraged by not being able to pronounce the tones right because we native Chinese CAN understand you even if you totally messed up the tones. Just practice and say it more and you'll grasp it.
As a western English native speaker, the most difficult parts of Chinese for us is the "shortness" of the pronunciation. For example, 人（ren）is pronounced very short and softly by native speakers. A common mistake for us is to pronounce is "RRRREn", strongly pronouncing the R. For me, the tones aren't even the hardest part, it's more this "shortness" of pronunciation. I think using your mouth muscles less helps, and just let the pronunciation flow without such strong pronunciation. Beautiful language, I'm loving it so far.
@@youziyi oh yes, that is an interesting feature of Chinese I also noted :) Russian for example is even more verbose than English and sometimes 2 chinese characters can replace 2 word phrase in Russian, 8-10 letters each. Great way to compress the information btw :)
You're actually the reason I started learning Chinese, written and spoken. Your video truly demystified a language that-while you'll have to put in hours if you want to learn to write and read-has so many amazing benefits and uses highly sensible morphemes to make up words. Thank you for starting my journey and making the whole process new and exciting :)
I started learning mandarin by my own self because I am fascinated with the characters, rich historical culture, and the language itself but never been consistent with my learning, this video is my great motivation now. Thank you so much dear creator ( sorry don't know your name yet).
@@n420j Can you recommend two useful English learning apps for me? 🙏I am a Chinese and want to learn English in depth. Of course, if you have any questions about Chinese, you can always ask me!
Chinese is a logical language, while Japanese is ad-hoc. A Japanese linguist once wrote that, and having studied both languages, I completely agree. I had a lot of fun to learn Mandarin and always recommend to other people. Its a really cool and fascinating language.
@@GroomsmanBuilder some words in any language sound like some words of another, it really does not mean that the language will be easier hahaha Japanese and english are about as far removed from each other as two languages can be
Currently studying Mandarin, and I find the language much easier to learn and understand than English (my native language). English has so many different, complicated things within the language that makes it far too difficult. I find that English has too many words for some things, and not enough for other things. I'm thankful that I have decided to learn Mandarin because it has opened my mind quite a lot.
I am a native Madarin speaker and a fluent English speaker. Chinese can condense so much information in a few characters, but on the other hand, English (or Latin languages) conveys precise and nuance meanings better. It is actually much easier to write a technical paper in English than Chinese, IMO. Both languages are beautiful and elegant. Each has its pros and cons. The best is to learn both, and many other languages, Greek, Latin, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, the list goes on…
@@Void-tp4yv I think there might be a misunderstanding/ I think you are wrong depending on things are defined. I think the way the language is written is interesting and have long appreciated the chinese meme culture. The way they piece together words, and take interest n their problems. It's almost like reading a dystopia novel. That being said... The part of Chinese culture I hate is poor pseudo communist/capitalist dystopia with scammers, grab hags, gutter oil, corrupt police, 1984 esque cameras everywhere yada yada That's what I meant by the part of their culture I hate. I think that isn't going to necessarily effect the learning of the language. Or do a degree, but not enough to hate it
Misconception on Culture vs. Government Policies: First, it is of absolute importance to differentiate between the acts of a government and a culture of the people. Chinese culture is very rich and diverse with a history extending over thousands of years. It includes big contributors in the field of philosophy, art, literature, and science. Equating government policies or social issues with the whole of Chinese culture means missing this richness and diversity. Misunderstanding of the Economic System: The fact that the country has been referred to as being in a "poor pseudo communist/capitalist dystopia" is shallow and does not accurately reflect the nature of the economic system in China. In fact, since the close of the 20th century, the Chinese economy has been steadily growing, and today, China ranks as one of the most rapidly developing countries in the world. "Dystopia" may connote a uniqueness in the word and its combination of socialist and capitalist elements, but it denies its economic progression and its standard of living improvements to so many of its citizens. Scammers and Gutter Oil: Some problems of food safety (for example, "gutter oil") and scams could be noticed, though they should not mark Chinese culture. At any rate, many countries can be considered to have lots of problems with fraud and food safety. It's unfair to characterize an entire culture based on negative aspects that can be found globally. Corruption and Surveillance Issues of corruption and surveillance are difficult ones. They are issues worthy of criticism. However, many countries contain them in varying shades, and these are points of policy, rather than portions of culture. Many Chinese, too, are critical of corruption and in support of reforms. Cultural Appreciation and Learning: It shouldn't be that one critiques Chinese government policies or its social ills stand in the way of appreciation and learning of the country's culture. The culture is more than the negatives-it encompasses traditions, values, and innovations of great importance for humankind's civilization. Valid, but then it should be done in a constructive way and not by stereotypes or racism. Thus, it is unfair and nonconstructive to write off an entire culture based on bad or governmental aspects. It's important to approach cultural critique with nuance and respect for the people and their history. Learning and dialogues, open-mindedness is also very much required, keeping the diversity and complexity embedded within any culture. Knowledge about Chinese culture or any other culture, for that matter, is required to see beyond the stereotypes, able to realize the depth of its contribution towards the world.@@thedog5k
This video has blown my mind🤯I’ve never heard anyone explain how Chinese works. I thought Chinese was purely memorization, but you’ve taught me that Chinese grammar follows a logical pattern. Thank you for this extremely informative video. I think I’m too old to try to learn it now. You’re a great teacher to make something so complicated understandable 👏🏾
Try Google and search for the simplified Chinese periodic table of elements. You will find that Chinese words are very logical, so the metal element starts with the character "钅". Therefore, gas elements all have the character "气". All the elements in stones have the word "石". The remaining components of these characters are their pronunciations. Even if this is your first time looking at the periodic table (as you are a native speaker), you will have a rough idea of its chemical properties and pronunciation.
I started to learn Mandarin Chinese some years ago in a Confucio instituto but my brother past away and it has been difficult to retake it but with your video I feel motivated to retake it. Thanks 👍 😎
This is a really good point on how making the words easier to understand through their meaning makes more room to learn more easier! I think I heard somewhere that Mandarin is the only real pictographic language, and I think that's really cool that all words are made of concepts expressed through pictures. Happy new year!
I am a Greek speaker and I can say that the same advantage of Chinese can also be found in Greek. That is to say that they are both very logical languages with a minimum amount of foreign vocabulary and have long history. A few "English" words from Greek origin, who may puzzle English speakers, but make sense in Greek: Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, Otorhinolaryngology, Democracy, Anarchy, Theatre, Tragedy, Comedy, Mathematics, History, Physics, Philosophy, Geography, Photograph, Telephone and of course ... Arachnophobia. The Greek grammar is quite complicated, so I will give a point to Chinese here, but the Greek writing system is very simple. Finally, I say that the Chinese language is an equally logical language with Greek, so if you want to make a comparison of Chinese with a Western language, I think it would be more appropriate to compare it with Greek, not with English.
I was thinking about greek... since portuguese is my native language, I remember as a kid that after getting most common greek and latin prefixes/suffixes, words were easy to get the meaning, and anything science was kind of self explanatory.
radiate in English means to emit energy of some sort such as light or heat, so we can pretty much get the idea of what a radiator does without needing a chinese translation. But this was a very good example.
Great video. I've been learning for 3 months now, and I really think the language is beautiful phonetically. People often say it's the most difficult language, and where that's true, it's really not so bad once you grasp some core fundamentals. Subscribed!
You make a very valid point. I remember how I struggled in school with science especially because we always had to memorize scientific names and often you need a basic understanding of latin to understand why it is named whatever it is named. If we could spend less time memorizing names and more time understanding scientific concepts, that would be much better. And of course that can be applied to any area of study. I find Chinese relaxing so I study for enjoyment and to hopefully keep my brain sharp.
I've held back from learning Chinese as I find many aspects intimidating. However this is the first time I've ever heard someone showcase what aspects make it easier. Looks like there is some hope after all. Just subscribed and look forward to viewing your other content!
如果你真的想学中文，其实你可以向任何你可以确定他是中国人的ID提问，他们大概率都会很愿意回答你任何普通话方面的问题的。不一定非要找一个固定的老师。If you really want to learn Mandarin, you can actually ask questions to any ID that you can confirm is Chinese, and they will most likely be willing to answer any questions you have about Mandarin. You don't necessarily have to find a fixed teacher.
Great video. I actually find it quite funny how this aspect is reflected in some other languages including my native one: german. For example plane is "Flugzeug" as in "fly thing" or more closely "flying equipment". I mean germans just stringing words together to create new ones is a common joke. So seeing wild compound words and expressions in chinese was a welcome surprise. Just now, I thought "lignite is just Braunkohle, right?" (actually the term for lignite in german) and you followed it up with the one-to-one translation :) I found there are more examples of this commonality and it's pretty amusing. Even some stuff like 再见 translates one-to-one to "Wiedersehen".
german is great! even if it doesn't use ideographs, the concept of stringing concepts to make things easily understandable maintains its use! thanks for sharing :)
Yeah, but in that sense, "airplane" was probably not the best comparison for proving a point, since the English word is also quite logical: "air" + "plane," as opposed to "hydro" + "plane" for example. That said, I agree with the general point of the video. If everything is a matter of degree, that logic is just more pronounced in Chinese than in English. There have been times when I did not know a word in Chinese but have correctly guessed it just based on the meaning in English. Not so easy in the opposite direction.
5:50 I agree with you. I’m French, but if I had not been born and raised in this language, I might never have bothered learning it. Tried Spanish in school (and let’s not discuss here the impact of inefficient teaching methods….) but despite its clear similarity with French in terms of grammar and the shared Latin roots, it never stuck with me. Conversely, I never understand when my peers say that English is hard. The grammar is so much simpler, and the language itself is a lot more playful and flexible than French. Adapting to another phonetic system and learning new vocabulary is daunting for sure, but the skeleton is so much simpler that I believe it’s much easier to hit the ground running when learning English than when learning French. I’ve also learned Japanese and Korean, which may be very different in structure from both English and French, both also feel pretty intuitive to me as agglutination tongues (unsure about terminology here?) with simple, efficient writing systems. Despite their simplicity, they can generate some very sophisticated language, and indeed gorgeous poetry for example. So I agree with the sentiment that (as SOMEONE said) “Any idiot can make things complicated. It takes genius to make things simple.” and that “Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to remove.”
Such a good point! especially about the fact that hard languages are detrimental to their native speakers. As a linguist, i've seen it time and time again. Icelandic grammar is so difficult and convoluted that native speakers struggle with it to the point where they sometimes literally switch to english or don't understand their own language (which is tragic). Danish pronunciation is so completely different from their spelling that children have a hard time learning how to write danish (properly) etc. These are all mental and temporal resources people need to spend, on the daily basis, when they are struggling with their own language. English spelling is there as well. My native language went through a reform a couple of centuries back and the new principle became "read as you write and write as you read" and that makes things so much simpler for us.
@rickyanthonyI understand why you'd think so, but the experience from China and people from the Chinese diaspora who speaks Mandarin (or another Chinese dialect) as first language from toddlers' age suggests otherwise. It turns out the build-up of "stock of characters" for a school age kid over the first few years of schooling almost always lead the need for them in the learning of other subjects. For example, most Chinese kids already know sufficient characters (and their meaning), if not by writing then definitely by the spoken words, for first grade mathematics and science by the time they enter elementary school. This is especially true in the modern era where semi-formal education from age of 3 to 4 is ubiquitous. So there isn't really any lag in understanding of non-lingual subject matters due to insufficient lingual skills - things pretty much run in parallel, and more often than not the learning of lingual prerequisite far outpace the other subjects (for e.g., I would say a 6th grader in China's stock of characters in their brain already covers over 90% of what they will encounter in the learning of high school physics and chemistry (except those special ones for chemical elements).
In Finnish, ”Aeroplane” is also: ”fly machine”; _”Lentokone”,_ literally: ”Flight Machine”; ”Computer”, in Finnish, is: _”Tietokone”,_ literally: ”Knowledge Machine”; while, in Hawaiian, it’s: _”Lolouila”,_ literally: ”Lightning Brain”; so, quite a few similarities, overall. In German, an ”Aeroplane” is: _”Flugzeug”,_ literally: ”Flying Object”; so, in the ballpark.
Lol, I love your opening part about the radiator. As a romance language speaker I find Mandarin very difficult however I can't help but agree with your point that the language is smart when by breaking down every thing into understandable components
In my opinion the only positive thing about the Chinese writing system, is the fact that it can convey a lot of information in very few characters, and that it’s more compact and a person fluent in Chinese is able to grasp the meaning of a text or sentence way faster than if it were in English or any other similar language.
I studied Japanese many years ago and a couple of weeks ago I came across Chinese videos I got really admired with. Chinese is a perfect language for mathematicians! No unnecessary additions, looks like lego bricks - you just put them together and you've got the opportunity to communicate! I got hooked and now I'm learning it with so much pleasure! Thank you for your video - you've mentioned so many concepts I got attracted to in Chinese!
I'm native Dutch and started learning Mandarin because the Dutch television is terrible. I love watching Chinese films and drama, but I hate having to depend on english subtitles. Hundreds of years ago, at school, I learned French, English, German, Latin and ancient Greek. I hated learning languages: my math was always a straight A. Learning Chinese is a different story: The language is so logical, no strange conjugations; the way sentences and words are structured is very similar to Dutch (more than to English). I simply love it. Learning Mandarin is fun. The pronounciation is still difficult (Speaking with a pencil between my teeth helps 😉), reading and writing is also difficult, but after a few months I started to understand a lot.
Integration is the inverse of derivation if you start with the integral then you can get the original function by derivation which gets you the function for the change of the function at a certain point.
Saying that learning new languages is always for fun and not necessary is such an anglophone thing to do 😂 For us non native English speakers learning a second language is almost a must. Otherwise, great video though! Very informative :)
It's also a very upper-middle-class first-world mummy's-boy-who-never-had-to-support-himself thing today. LIke, this baby-faced fella cannot even fathom a single situation where an adult might feel a pressing need to learn another language. Time to grow up little one. So cute though.
I absolutely LOVE Chinese numbers. It took me a while to understand bigger numbers like 100,000 or 1,000,000. But everyday numbers like 11, 46, or 100 are a lot easier to comprehend than other languages. Especially the "teen" numbers. Chinese handles these so much better than any other language I've studied.
For your next videos, you should cover chengyu, and also the app Immersive Chinese. Chengyu are just an interesting topic in general, and I think Immersive Chinese is underrated since it gives you some pretty complex sentences appropriate for your level from the very beginning. But I’d understand if you end up not covering it, since it’s pretty dry visually, at least compared to HelloChinese and Lingodeer 圣诞节快乐！🎄
I love immersive chinese. Thankfully it was one of the first apps I used when I started and made the process of learning such a scary language like chinese so easy. I thank everyday to whoever created that app
I've become enamored of mandarin and am working on immersion. This was a very well thought out video and it was nicely conveyed. From the perspective of a person of European descent, you hit the mark of where my focus should be, Ty.
I'm happy this video popped up on my main page!!! I came back to studying Mandarin after nearly a year of break. It's such a fun and interesting language to learn, I can't wait to explore more of this youtube channel
I am Turkish, but first learnt English then learnt Chinese, now in the process of learning Spanish. I have to admit Chinese grammar is extremely easy compare to English. However, Chinese is a tonal language, there are four basic tones that you need to master before you indulge yourself in learning Chinese. The word " ma " could mean very different things depending on which tone you use to say it. If you say 媽 (ma ) with the first tone it means mother, but if you say 碼 (ma) with the third tone it means horse but if you say 罵 (ma) it means to curse..Now you have it..The difficulty in Chinese lies on getting the right pronunciation right and this is the reason why people who are either good at singing or play a musical instrument learn Chinese much more easily.. Cheers 😊😊
You have many good points. Understanding the concept of your own language helps. That's why in German we teach English and French from early on. It really helped me to remember and understand latin scientific words.. if your language is easy access from the beginning you can dive into these concepts easier and earlier
Good video ! I was just thinking about this earlier today. One thing though, I don't think English numbers are really more complex than Chinese numbers. "ty" in English functions just like "shi" in Chinese. Examples: Er-shi-yi Twen-ty-one Ba-shi-san Eight-ty-three and for 13-19 Shi-san Thir-teen Shi-si Four-teen The only exceptions would be the numbers 11 and 12.
that's fair xD but in chinese it makes more sense kinda? 'ty' and 'shi' isnt super similar. The reason it's er shi yi for 21 is because twenty is literally two ten (二十 er shi) and one is yi, thus er shi yi (二十一). And this 'combo' works for all numbers for example, eighteen, it would be shi-ba (十八), meaning ten eight literally. But then again english numbers are also quite simple, i just find chinese numbers to be more literal, since in eng for numbers like thirty or twenty, thir and twen dont really mean anything. (also yea, eleven and twelve dont really fit in either when in chinese its just ten one (十一 shi yi) and ten two (十二 shi er) :DD
@@EHMM I don't like Handschuh : a glove is not a shoe for the hands. I would rather call it a handsock or handslip since both are generally made of fabric or very delicate, tight-fitting leather that slips instantly.
Its the same thing with most language. Arabic, japanese, turkish, Latin, greek, aryan languages, even the german. Except for some modern western languages. They just borrow words from Latin and greek.
I totally agree bruh 👌🏼👌🏼 Chinese comes so easy to me and i always wondered why but its just so practical. And i can usually guess the meaning of a new word that i don’t know. Like 小心 which means to be careful. Idk it just clicked for me even if i didnt know the word before. I could guess the meaning
I have been studying Chinese for a year and a half by now. Chinese structure is generally super simple (though a bit rigid) in my view it has three elementsthat makes it much harder than English. 1. Tones 2. Lack of many sounds because of tones 3. Chinese characters. What Any person from any other culture may take with their own writing no more than a month a Chinese person may take years.
German is very orthogonal too : Flug-zeug = airplane (fly-device). Schreibzeug (write-device) means any kind of pen of pencil that is used for writing.
I am Italian, I lived abroad and learned English and Japanese. As Japanese also have many Chinese characters, I can tell you my realization. The Chinese language is a visual language, in fact, for example, when I see the character for woman, 女、I see a woman exactly like this 🚺. With 中文, you get an instant feeling and that's why, everywhere in the world, to facilitate immediate understanding, pictures are used instead of words though sometimes you have both. If you think about emergency exit doors, not smoking signs, fire extinguisher, red Cross, etc., there are images to represent them rather than words. Words all look the same but they don't transfer strong feelings like a visual language does. I tried learning other languages such as Thai and Khmer, but these languages too are sound based. Of course, learning the basic characters is easy and fun but getting to the complex one is a completely different matter. Unfortunately, both Chinese and Japanese are languages that needs constant practice for life otherwise, as a foreigner, you will forget how to write them. The a to z alphabet, once learned, it's impossible to forget and even if you can't remember or don't know a word, you can still attempt to write it based on the sound (definitely in Italian and Russian though English is more difficult).
I am Chinese, and I haven't written a single characters other than my signature for 3 months. In this era when we all use keyboard to type instad of hand-writing, not knowing how to write characters dosen't matter at all, as long as you can read and type them. It is the same as people in mainland China cannot write traditional Chinese but they can read them with no problem. And learning how to write characters precisely is a total waste of time for non-natives in my opinion.
I would argue that the simplicity of the Chinese language is a result of the “difficulty” of the Chinese script. Chinese writing tolerates more homophones (especially for mandarin) due to its non-phonetic feature. There are texts like the 施氏食狮史 which is only enabled by Chinese characters
Mandarin Chinese grammar may be "simple", but it's not easy. I like your voice, the energy and pacing of your video, and the main etymology topic, but I don't like that people keep spreading the idea that Mandarin has no grammar or it's super easy because it isn't true. If it were easy, non-native speakers would form natural sentences, use 了, verb results and verb complements correctly with ease; heck, even word order gets super tricky when you have a subordinate clause. Mandarin is only easy if you create super short sentences, like literally four-word sentences, and even then, you then realize word choice or overall structure is not native because natives tend to synthesize a lot or choose other words, complements, particles or position the words differently to emphasize A or B. Another problem: when one language lacks what your mother tongue has, you don't simply embrace it, you spend months or years trying to fit the things you're used to using in the new system, even when it won't work. I'm a native Spanish speaker. Spanish pronunciation is consistent and we just have 5 vowel sounds, pure a, e, i, o, u. One could think native English speakers just have to simplify theirs, but the vast majority won't adapt soon and they'll keep trying to fit their many more hybrid vowel sounds in Spanish, causing something that should be simple to be a headache. The same applies to Chinese; we try to create English, Spanish, [insert language] sentences and transfer our system to Chinese and it's just a mess. And it's not a "you're using the wrong mindset" issue, it's natural brain inertia. We've got to accept there will be MANY mistakes before we use the language comfortably. I just say this because I guess there will be more people like me who had their sentences fully reworded or filled with red annotations by natives in language exchange apps, by language tutors, etc. and if the Internet consistently repeats the mantra that it should be easy, then you think your brain has a problem.
Counterproductively, i'm trying to learn to read Chinese without knowing any of the pronunciations. It's the only writing system in the world for which that's remotely possible, and i think that's so cool
I guess it really depends on what language you know. I speak Filipino and English as my native and second language respectively, I learned Spanish a few years ago and found it really easy to learn. Now, I am learning Mandarin and I do see how simple it is but there are times when I am confused as hell with the grammar. The first time I studied the use of 和 I messed it up over and over. And until now, I still forget what the combination of 是 and 的 does.
I started to learn Mandarin writing on my own, as I lived in a Chinese neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. The writing actually makes sense. I need to learn the proper pronunciation, as in any language. How difficult can it be if 25% of the world's population speaks Mandarin? I learned the symbol for "woman", then discovered that a word with two "woman" symbols means "gossip". My aunts and Mom are Asian, and that made perfect sense. No wonder the Chinese civilization has lasted over 5,000 years! Excellent video and a great help from a fellow ABC!
It's actually pretty difficult even for that 18% of the world population (China doesn't have 25% of the world population, or 2 billion). Written Chinese is difficult for even Chinese people to remember and write (and for Japanese people, for that matter, with their Chinese-derived kanji characters). It's spoken Chinese that is relatively easy to pick up if you, as a foreigner, have a good ear for tones. It's the tones that a lot Western students have such a difficult time with. But if you're born and raised in China tones will come easily to you, as almost all spoken aspects of a language tend to be easier to learn if that's all you hear day in and day out as a child. It's the writing that really makes these East Asian languages more difficult than they need to be. Here's a sample of that: ruclips.net/video/zxHskrqMqII/видео.html and ruclips.net/video/sJNxPRBvRQg/видео.html
as someone who's been learning mandarin , the fact that numbers are so easy to grasp are definitely a pro ! as a dutch person , when we count over 15 we pronounce our numbers like "5-10" and the system of just saying "1 10 , 5" albeit confusing to start with makes it so much less confusing how numbers sound and where to place them . also i've discussed it w classmates before , but i do genuinely believe that if in your language system numbers are already organised in their respective groups "1 hundred 5 tens 2" being 152 , it makes concepts like basic math wayyy easier to grasp for children .
"It's lost some of its identity", I disagree strongly. English comes from a place that for generations was invaded by one culture or another. So the language was shaped by those invasions, by others coming in and forcing their languages on them. Which made it a VERY adaptable language that can accept any word into it. Which I think is the key identity of English. You can have extremely disparate dialects and still understand some of what each person is saying. Also, as much as I love Chinese and have worked on learning it, the biggest problem I've run into is no native speaker is willing to speak with me. "Why would you want to learn that?" is the biggest response I've gotten followed by "let's just speak English". So, I think the greatest advantage of English is simply that there are more people that are actively willing to help others practice, because the most important thing is being able to understand, not necessarily getting things right.
The simplicity of grammar depends on how you see the languange itself. I have a degree in English philology (being a Russian native speaker) and it's been really hard for me not to just learn the phrases, words and patterns in Mandarin but to understand the rules of grammar that are not usually explained in courses. I always feel that I don't have enough theory to make my own sentences, lol. Maybe the people who just learn it as it is meet less difficulties.
Yes! This is so me! I'm doing okay picking up meaning contextually and learning words/morphemes, but I still feel quite apprehensive about sentence creation. I'm deathly afraid to use an adjective unless it's in a two- or three-word sentence like 他很帅 ... lol ...
@@sosoableI don't disagree with what you say, but do note that at the end of the day, language is just a medium for communication - if spoken language is more efficient than written, it'll evolve more quickly and eventually replace the written component. Think about how many Chinese words there used to be, and how many are still commonly used nowadays! Our ancestors would shudder at our abysmal literacy skills but honestly, it's just how any natural language evolves over time.
chinese characters holds the biggest advantage of all. People with different spoken languages often could not understand each other but by writing in chinese characters it able to bridge the gap of communication with eased as these character form already standardized universally towards their respective language.
As someone fluent in Spanish and who has been studying Chinese on and off for 15 years now, I will tell you one HUGE advantage of Chinese over the major European languages--no verb conjugations. God damn, is that a godsend. Spanish has 36 forms of verb conjugation, the most of any Romance language, and way more than English. Even though I am fluent in Spanish, there are some forms of verb conjugation that are "poetic" and are just weird on the very rare occasions that you hear/read them. Chinese is blissfully free of all this nonsense. :D
Just do what a fellow I encountered in Belize did: He used verbs only in the infinitive form. It startled me at first, but it turned out to be no problem. We spoke for nearly an hour, until I had to catch a bus.
My family and I think anyone I tell it to doesn't really want to believe me how easy I find it to learn Chinese. Yes, the characters will be difficult to learn, but I've already seen videos explained by other Chinese people how there's a way around that. And seeing that I don't live in China/don't need Chinese for a job, it's not a big deal if I won't know each and every character (besides, once I know enough to interact online, I will learn automatically anyway). Aside from the characters though, Chinese is I think the easiest language that I have ever learned. I'm Hungarian, I speak fluent English and German, and in school I had to learn Spanish too (which I can't speak at all...). And even so, I think Chinese is the easiest. I mean, just compare it to Hungarian, and you will be glad you aren't born Hungarian...I'm literally 21 years old right now, and I still make mistakes speaking, even though I speak Hungarian every day at home/among other Hungarians. The way the language structures sentences is a nightmare though. I mean, I cannot explain because I was only in school until 4th grade in Hungary so I don't have any more knowledge than that, but just look up on Wikipedia how the verbs in Hungarian change depending on the situation, how many people you're talking to (depending on the word though), past, present or future, if it happened, might happen, or will happen, what you want to say with it etc. When I first saw that, my jaw dropped. I obviously know those because I've been taught all these through talking but if you learn it, be prepared. But aside from that, I find Chinese also easier because there are similarities. Like "to rain" in Chinese is 下雨(xiá yu), which is "falling rain" so instead of like using another verb for rain, like in English, they say it falls. In Hungarian, it's the same. We don't say it's raining, we say "it's falling rain" (esik az eső). Then we also have tones so another easier thing to learn. And our sentences are often structured the same as in Chinese. These obviously give me advantages but still I cannot say that Chinese is difficult, when even as I'm living in Germany, I still don't know when to use der/die/das for which noun. I always guess. I think the fact that Chinese is so hard is mostly seen from an English speaking perspective, which I don't really get because a lot of words can be translated clearly into English (and the English language is confusing too. I mean, "through and threw" being pronounced the same and "pony and bologna " rhyming??? (Which who even said that's how bologna is spelled?)
0:22 "English and many of the OTHER Romance languages" Wait, are you claiming English to be a Romance language? I mean, it's vocabulary is almost entirely Romance, but technically it's a Germanic language.
In class this week, I learned what those old vehicles that are everywhere here in the countryside, the old Chinese 'workhorses'... 拖拉机 which is 'drag pull machine'... tractor in English! Love it!
Unless when it comes to dishes, then they decided to come up with the most poetic names for some reason. Btw, many people also have to learn a second language because it has a significance in their daily lives but I'm sure you're aware of that as well
The poetic dish name thing is a long story, simply put, in old days many dishes were created by the royal chefs in the royal kitchen to serve the emperor and royal families, if anyone of them makes mistakes like chosing wrong ingredients, seasonings or even just picking an unlucky/unpleasant name for the dish, he will highly be executed along with his WHOLE family depending on the emperor's mood at the time, so the chefs in the royal kitchen have no choice but to create fancy dishes and give them poetic names to please the emperor and royal families, that's the only way they could survive. later on it became a tradition passed down to later generations. Nowadays restaurant owners use poetic names to impress the customers and attract them to order the dish.
@@robezy0 Not at all, I edited the original comment to fix grammar problem and add more details, hope you can fully understand :), btw, Merry Christmas~
Yeah but what does it radiate? Is it a concept or an object? In a vacuum 'radiator' could have a lot of ambiguities, but 'disperse heat device' tells you what kind of thing it is and what it radiates. There's also the fact that a car's radiator actually uses convection rather than radiation to transfer most of the heat, so the name is actually misleading as to the principle it operates on. Other English words are more completely descriptive, but radiator isn't one of them.
@@atomic_wait It's really all you need, in fact many words in both (actually all) languages are abstract and several levels removed from straightforward. (E.g., 消息 - breath, disappearance? News???) In English it just happens that we didn't care "what" or "how" something is being radiated, and the word "radiator" is abstract from those details, and we're forced to understand it from that perspective. As a learner it would take very little imagination to see why the word means what it means. Indeed the connection with physical concepts like radiation or convection is even more confusing, which is an area in which I agree with you - scientists like to appropriate words with a very basic and flexible meaning and proclaim that they mean something very specific, e.g. they'll complain about it if you call your mass (in kg) your "weight", etc. But the end effect of a radiator is that heat radiates (is felt/transported) all around the room, which is easy to make sense of.
I keep telling people that Mandarin is way easier than English and French, it’s just the pronunciation that is complicated because of the four different tones
I agree that Chinese characters make learning many new concepts (like science) way easier than in English. But as a Canadian, I had to also study French from a young age, so I could often guess at the meaning of scientific words because the Latin was close to French. I think English is actually unique (ish) in deciding to use roots/morphemes from a different language for their scientific terms. Pretty sure other European languages used roots/morphemes that actually are from their own language, so this isn't exactly a characters versus alphabet issue, it's specifically an English issue.
I met a French guy, we can only communicate with each other in English because I'm Chinese. He kept saying English is not a true Language but a suck mixture of Languages😂
Small correction: not all Chinese characters equal one morpheme. There are a couple of morphemes consisting of two syllables (and thus two characters), mostly loanwords, like 葡萄，佛陀，玻璃，骆驼，咖啡. The Chinese writing system just makes it look like they are compounds, but as the individual parts don't have any meaning on their own, they're really not.
Cuz some of them are not originally Chinese but foreign words translated in ancient times (some characters were even created only for this one word), and they now look like some native words but actually not. However 璃 should mean something, for example 琉璃
@@song9028 yes, as I said, they're mostly loanwords, though of some them are so old that people don't notice anymore. There are a very few originally Chinese words with more than one morpheme, though, I think 蝴蝶 is one
I'm only a language enthusiast and not a linguist so I may be wrong about this, but in the video a 'morpheme' is defined as the smallest unit of idea that can either stand alone or pair with other characters to form a 'word' that has a concrete meaning, so I don't necessarily think it's wrong to say each character is one morpheme as a 'morpheme' may merely represent an idea and does not have to hold a concrete meaning (e.g. '葡' or '萄' separately), but rather it's 'word' that needs to carry a specific meaning like '葡萄' which means 'grapes'. Perhaps the disagreement is the definition of 'morpheme' from the video?
Also as a native speaker of Mandarin I had no idea 葡萄 佛陀 玻璃 and 骆驼 are loanwords from other languages. They always localize them to the point that neither pronunciation or writing have any resemblance of the original word 😅well 咖啡 (kafei) is an easy one to tell though...
When I started learning Mandarin, I remember being so frustrated by the number system. I learned the individual words easy enough, but it felt like it took my brain an extra step to interpret. If someone said san bai wu shi er, my brain would go, "okay, 3 100 5 10 2, that's 300, 50, 2. So 352." It was like constantly doing math just to interpret the number. I'm guessing that's not how native speakers feel when they just learn it that way, but when you still think in English, it was a mental exercise for sure.
@@sosoable not quite. English has separate words for things like 50. Whereas in Mandarin you say 5 10. Which, when you're used to English, your brain then has to calculate that to translate it to 50.
@@sosoable that's why I said it's probably not how native speakers feel, but when your primary language is English, Chinese numbers feel like a mental exercise
@@sosoable no it's not the same. English speakers don't go around saying 4 10. 5 10. I'm not quite sure why you're arguing about this. I shared my experience. I even acknowledged that it's probably not a problem for native speakers, it's just difficult when you're learning Mandarin as an English speaker. It's just how I felt when I was first learning Mandarin numbers.
Well, as a Mandarin speaker myself, I agree with you on how simple scientific concepts can be. For English and other languages, I have to memorise their names without knowing what they are but in Chinese, it's self-explanatory. With regards the difficult writing system, the way I look at it is that while the Chinese language has invested so much time with the writing system, it has no more energy for complex grammar and hard-to-understand concepts, plus phonemes make it possible to create new words without being too long, while western languages pride themselves with simple writing systems but invest a lot on of time and energy on complex grammar and also word creation methods, which are less versatile, mostly from Greek or Latin. In the end of the day, it's a give and take situation, we just can't have it all easy, that would make a language boring. Chinese having such mindless grammar seems boring, but it prides itself in its beautiful and complex writing system, while western languages have chosen the other aspect to make their languages interesting.
@@Queezbo I know right... 😂😅 have you noticed that English, being known to have a simplified grammar compared to other European languages, has an illogical and confusing spelling rules instead? It's almost close to memorisation. I remember learning English as a kid, memorising the spelling of each word as I would memorising each Chinese character. I know it might not make sense to a native English speaker but since I grew up with English, it's kind of like my second native language.
Just like the construction of Chinese words, Chinese writing is also modular. Characters are made up of radicals that either convey meaning or pronunciation and there aren't that many of them, so pretty soon you can easily guess the meaning and pronunciation of new characters. So in my opinion Chinese writing is not hard. Could it be further simplified? Maybe, but there is balance to be struck between simplicity versus significant difference for easy recognition (you can read much faster in Chinese)
The last part you mentioned about the complexity of the Chinese writing system was avoided by the Koreans. They had a king named Sejong who thought exactly the way you did and churned out an entirely new writing system based on mouth positions. It will go on to be called as Hanguel. And to be honest, I would say it is the most efficient writing system in the world.
Hanguel does not like Chinese character at all, it just LOOKS LIKE Chinese. It is essentially a spelling language just like most other languages, but in a cubic shape.
For the most part Hangul is sufficient for everyday use, but in legal and technical contexts they still need Chinese characters for disambiguation, due to the prominence of Chinese loan words.
Korean likes to brag about their language in film and television dramas, don't believe itIn fact, Hanguel is equal to Chinese pinyin, which is just something similar to English phonetic symbols.Japanese syllabary.
@@你看我美吗 Yes, it's like pinyin but for Korean, since Korean is a completely different language to Chinese Mandarin. This is like saying pinyin is like jyutping, it is, but still different languages.
The problem with pinyin (and possibly hangeul as well) is you lose all of the fidelity of written Chinese: Most non-Chinese speakers don't know Beijing means 北 (northern) 京 (capital) - that information is lost with pinyin! Likewise it's unlikely that someone who just saw "yānméi" would have a good idea of what it means, or at least, less than someone who saw "煙煤". (Look it even comes with fire radicals!) Does "yeogcheongtan" have the same effect? Hope any speakers of Korean here could give their insight!
Ok loved the video but I can't get over the fact that your first example was "radiator", which is a word with a pretty obvious meaning as "something that radiates" which is quite descriptive, there had to be better examples haha
I like your video series and I'm looking forward to watching more. One thing that surprised me in my six trips to Southern China is how many people I met who have a hard time reading Chinese. I brought Google Translate with me just to get blank stares in return often. Frank
Watching your videos for the first time. You are knowledgeable and methodical so I would like to share some thoughts about using the word Mandarin. It was a 17th Century Portuguese word turned English, much like the word Manchuria, both do not officially exist in China. In the US high schools classes are called Mandarin but university classes are mostly called Chinese. On Wikipedia the official language for both China and Taiwan are Chinese but for Taiwan they added a thing called national language which is Mandarin. I have no knowledge how Madam Soong Meiling decided to follow the US to call their language Mandarin but it’s a kind of disgrace, isn’t it? Not only Americans but many Chinese are just as confused, but in a different way. There are tens of millions of overseas Chinese whose left China a few generations ago for work, as hired labor, business and marriage-Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, as well as Europe and Americas. The majority of them were from Canton and Fujian. Before China opened and prospered those people spoke strictly only in their own dialects. Almost the entire Chinese population in Hong Kong speak only Cantonese whereas in Singapore they speak Cantonese, Hokkian, Kejia, and (Mandarin). The Chinese movies of the 60s and 70s were half (Mandarin) 国语 and half Cantonese 粤语 because there were still many newer immigrants who arrived from China not long ago. Hong Kong was a British colony and Singapore’s official language was English. In that context overseas Chinese followed the western norm of calling spoken Chinese Mandarin. It was also different in Chinese words, Chinese is 中文，but during those times it was Mandarin 国语. Apparently it carried political weight of Taiwan vs China of the old days. Therefore overseas Chinese are used to view the language that they were not taught to speak, which was Chinese spoken in China, as just another dialect that carry the same status as their Cantonese or Hokkian. As the Chinese economy grew to become big, things have changed. It is now mandatory for schools of both Hong Kong and Singapore to teach spoken Chinese. The class is called 中国语文，the written is 中文， the spoken is 普通话，same system used in China. For foreigners there is only one official Chinese language which is Chinese, not Mandarin. For local Chinese people, Putonghua is used to distinguish their dialects from the official language.
It’s funny how Chinese was able to remain mostly pure but Japanese didn’t. I was watching a video in which they interviewed several Japanese people and they weren’t able to not use English words to express themselves, like they didn’t have Japanese words for the words they borrowed from English. It was mind blowing to me . If anybody is interested in the video it’s from the channel Asian boss.
Only 33% of the modern Japanese language has Japanese origin. Due to many loan words from the Chinese, it is even more difficult for the Japanese to abandon Chinese Characters than the Chinese. BTW Asian Boss is a racist channel with many misleading contents and translations, so it is much better to read some papers or watch more professional documentaries instead.
@@somno6878 IMHO, Asian Boss is a much better source than many so-called documentaries that are in fact propaganda. They are biased just like any other media, but at least they can show you footage of genuine street interview. I'm not saying all documentaries are carefully fabricated lies; it's just hard for an average uninformed audience to tell.
@@somno6878 in chinese internet some people also say ASIAN BOSS is a biased media but pretend to be neutral and objective, I'm suprised other people apart from china think it sa well.
Radiator can be broken down too though. Looking at the word youd come to the conclusion that its something that radiates. And the most logical thing it would radiate would be heat. Essentially the same word as the chinese word. A lot of english words are like this
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! ...or too early for that?😂 This was a topic I planned for later, but after the feedback from my last video, it seemed appropriate to make it now. Hope you like it!
Edit: English is not a Romance language, sorry for the slip up! I was probably thinking about Spanish in my mind😭
圣诞快乐，新年快乐，春节快乐
merry christmas
Fascinating and well done. Hope your new year is full of success and happiness.
Merry Christmas! ⛄🎄
Back at you! Your videos are my Christmas gift from me to myself. 👍🥰👩🏻🎨♥️
When you read Chinese writing, you know the meaning but not the pronunciation.
When you read any Western writing system, you know how to pronounce it but not the meaning.
There are pros and cons to both systems of writing.
But sometimes I also don't know how to pronounce an English word.
@@marcella.astrid
English is an exception. If you learn German, Spanish & Polish orthographies then you can know how to pronounce every single word 90% of the time.
@@modmaker7617 I am currently learning French and German. Very beginner. Yeah, German, so far looks fine. French seems like another exception tho 😂
Talking about knowing how to pronounce, Korean hangeul is also good.
@@modmaker7617 With Spanish, it's 100% of the time. Also, with Chinese, you can often make pretty good guesses.
@@xuexizhongwen With polish it is also 100% of the time (except a small amount of words from other languages that we use like menu or smartphone).
As a Japanese speaker I've been trying to explain this to people for ages. English literally makes learning concepts more difficult via unnecessary abstractions. It's one of the reasons I'm against the increased overuse of Katakana for loan words.
This is very interesting, I’m a native Italian and Spanish speaker, and have been studying English for 14 years, it’s only now, that i have started studying Japanese (and got more curious for Chinese too) that i hear a lot of people that consider English very difficult, I always tought it is the most spoken language because its easy, but I’m starting recognizing the fact that’s not really like that🤔
@@Marsonlae It's the most spoken because of the legacy of colonialism.
@张Rd ???
@@shin-ishikiri-no Yeah ☹️
As a Chinese person learning Japanese, I really agree with you. Katakana is a great tool, but if all kanji are replaced by katakana, Japanese sentences are too difficult to understand.🙃
My favourite example of this is for doughnuts, 甜甜圈, where the literal translation into English kinda means, "sweet sweet circle".
We repeat words(like speak to a baby...) , becasuse will make it cute when speek...(good for business...)
There are many such words in Chinese, and we usually refer to them as reduplicated words😊
我在给你举个例子，这就是中国文化伟大的地方，中国人遇到一个新词和一个新的概念，会用已知的问题解释和表达出来这个新的概念的意思。就好像中国5000年的历史一样，一直在吸收，进步。比如国家的名字：UK（England），英国（ying guo），我们用了已经有的汉字去谐音这个国家名字。就非常容易理解。而不是直接从英文直译。
@@peterwang5272 對！ 我覺得美國也一樣的。中文是漂亮的語言！
@@peterwang5272 是再*
I fell in love with this language when I discovered that the word for popcorn is "exploded grain flower" 😅😊
I used Memrise to learn all the words up till HSK3. Then, I didn't study Chinese for a year and began studying Japanese more seriously and also a bit of Korean. Now, 1.5 years after, I STILL remember Chinese characters and words better than Japanese and Korean, because Chinese words just make so much more sense and are so much easier to remember because every word and character is basically a little mini story and my visual associative memory kicks in lol.
The same i tried to learn Japanese but I feel I remember Chinese better.
i somehow learnt a bit of japanese watching anime, and now still remember quite a lot of daily words. then i was forced to learn chinese by my uni and on the opposite, they just make no sense for me. all this tones that i can't pull in my head as i can't pronounce them proprely compared to nice sonding japanese pronunciation rlly sucks. lucky u if u like chinese, but i hate it :__)
reading a chinese essay is a pain. it is so crazy bro@@aprappl
Because Japanese uses a lot of English pronunciation, many elderly Japanese people cannot understand it@@aprappl
English is a Germanic language, like Norse / Icelandic / Dutch / Norwegian / Danish etc, Germanic languages being the most logical and the most organized and the easiest languages ever, and also the prettiest ever, and the Latin-based / French-based words were modified into an English word, plus Germanic languages come from Latin languages, anyway, so many of the Latin words have always been in the Germanic languages as they were ‘inherited’ from Latin, so not all of them are an actual loanword - a word from Latin automatically becomes an English word once the modifications are applied to the word, such as the specific English / Germanic word endings and letter combinations etc and especially the pronunciation rules, and none of the languages are pure, as all languages come from Proto European, either directly or indirectly, and all languages got influences from other languages, especially from languages that are the closest to them, as each dude that created a new language by modifying a previous language first analyzed the languages spoken in the areas that were closest to him, and this is also why many of the languages that are close to another language or other languages are very similar to that language or languages!
For people interested in the coal example...go read about the periodic table in Chinese...every element is one character, half of the character tells you the pronunciation, the other half denotes the category:
all the metal elements have a radical meaning literally metal: 钅(铁 iron, 钠 sodium, 银 silver etc);
all the room temperature gases have a radical meaning gas 气 (氧 oxygen, 氦 helium, 氮 nitrogen);
and the water radical 氵/水 denoting elements that are in liquid form under room temp., (溴 bromine, 汞 mercury);
So even if you've never heard about the element before just by looking at the character you can get a rough idea of what kind of element it is,
One character/syllable per element also makes remembering the table extremely easy, it's like reading a poem, and depending on what's needed, students can recite it either horizontally (so every element recited have the same number of layers) or vertically (so the elements all have the same number of outer layer electrons). Give them a blank sheet of paper most high school students can reconstruct 60% of the periodic table just because the pattern is so organised and it's so easy to remember.
I'm currently learning Chinese and I didn't know this. I'm going to look for a Chinese element table right now.
@@Irvin700 It's called 元素周期表 in chinese, a well orginzed version can be found in wikipedia.
Wow thanks for this, super interesting!! I really struggle with remember the periodic table, this just made it so much easier
This is really helpful, thank you Kuri!
cool!
I understand how simple Chinese can be. And that's what makes it so hard.
If you know enough characters, it's easy to infer the meaning of a word you don't know. But while listening, that's a completely different story. There are so many homophones - even when you do take the tones into consideration - that it makes it really hard to infer the meaning of words you don't know.
Context. That's how you know what word is meant. If it's ambiguous, and two different homophones make sense in te context, the speaker will often say it in a different way, or explicitly explain which word was meant. If they don't, you can ask. But the vast majority of the time, that's not necessary. Context is usually enough.
I actually thought this was going to be much more of a problem than it ended up being
多听多练and you’ll realize that very very few words are truly all that similar sounding especially when you take tones into account, so as “学习中文” said the context really clears up the overwhelming majority of things that aren’t clear
this is true, and also the case for japanese, which only has five distinct vowel sounds (compared to english which is WAY more) but, just others mentioned in replies, CONTEXT IS KEY! tones and pitch-accent can help to already differentiate homophone-type words, but you'll be hard pressed to find a commonly used sentence that includes the words "bridge" (jpn: ha-shi) and "chopsticks" (jpn: ha-shi). additionally! english also has a similar "problem" but is, in my opinion, worse, and that is words which have multiple meanings and sometimes different pronunciations but the SAME SPELLING! [i.e. read (present tense) pronounced "reed" and read (past tense) pronounced "red"]. or terms that are multiple words that don't really tell you what they mean (i.e. to throw up (throw something upwards) and to throw up (vomit) or to thrown down (throw something downwards) and to throw down (to fight)) anyway, 'nuff said!
Proficient or native speakers will take advantage of this feature by making puns and metaphors. So as to achieve a subtle expression.
相声, as a street performance similar to a talk show, often uses such language skills to amuse the audience.
Very interesting point about the Chinese language being clear and Chinese children potentially being able to better understand math as a result! I much rather that than the persistent (harmful) stereotype about "Asians just being smart." No group of people is somehow magically smarter than another just because they are a certain nationality/ethnicity. Everyone works hard. Math confuses us all, lol.
Haha yes! I read some interesting article about how IQ actually changes during childhood depending on their environment, so it's not all genetics either and can be "nurtured."
Tbh the pressure that exists in countries like China, eg. to do well on the 高考 is mostly unmatched in the western world. East Asian pupils also spend more time in school than their European or American counterparts from what I understand. So it's culture as well as language really
@@rawcopper604 There was actually a very popular Chinese drama this year called "The Big Exam" or something similar, which detailed the trials and tribulations of students and teachers preparing for those exams. While I suspect there are people who just don't buy into the whole college exam thing, they are definitely in the minority. Keep in mind that social advancement via education was a recurring and staple feature of Chinese culture for millennia.
Asian kids in general are better educated, I agree with this. There is a heavy focus on education in Asia. At the same time an argument that Asians are smarter or have better abilities in math is not really convincing. How many great Asian mathematicians world knows?
It has nothing to do with magic. It has to do with genetic evolutionary traits. Europeans and asians in general had to develop cloth making techniques as well as other skills such as making fire to survive in the cold climates they are from. For example, asians have the epicanthal fold on their eyes. Thats to protect them from the harsh cold winds that their ancestors had to deal with for thousands of years. Its been shown that people on the eqautor where its tropical and warm have more parasitic infections, drawing energy away from their minds to fight the infection so theres a higher incidence of lower IQ in those areas, naturally, since parasites thrive in those areas. You think that people have developed different outside physical characteristics but that genes dont effect a persons inside or their brain? Thats ludicrous. Genes effect everything from looks, to behavior ro learning ability, etc.
If this wasnt the case then people wouldnt have been breeding horses and dogs and other animals for specific traits. You think a border collie is the same as a chihuahua genetically? They are both dogs and even share close to the same dna as wolves but theres no argument that these creatures are all the same intelligent level or have the same instincts. Some dogs instinctually point when they sense a prey to hunt. Some dogs herd sheeps instinctually. Some dogs are better runners. Some dogs have better language skills.
People are the same in this regard. Its a fact. Your worldview that everyone is equal no matter where they are from, no matter what their genes are, is false. Every group of people have developed certain traits to adapt to their respective environments. Some have greater physical abilities, other mental. Despite our differences, we should respect eachother and treat eachother well. Its more harmful to deny these obvious facts then to pretend that everyone is exactly the same. Would you put an advanced student in a special ed class? You think that would be better for them? Or a special ed student in an advanced placement class? You actually think this would be the kinder thing to do? To ignore differences to cater to a false lie that everyone is the same? Yes, its possible for most people to succeed and do well with hard work also, no ones saying that but pretending differences dont exist among the various groups is silly.
I used to be an English teacher in China, and had gotten started developing an English course for electronics engineers, who were not uncommon among adult students. Here is some of the vocabulary list:
voltage - 电压, electricity pressure
current - 电流, electricity flow
ammeter - 电流表, electricity flow indicator
resistor - 电阻器, electricity resist device
circuit - 电路, electricity path
power supply - 电源, electricity source
switch - 开关, open close
short circuit - 短路, break path
electric signal - 电信号, electricity letter number
battery - 电池, electricity pool
generator - 发电机, send electricity machine
motor - 电动机, electricity move machine
photoelectric - 光电, light electricity
wireless transmission - 无线传送, without line pass-on deliver
electrostatic - 静电, calm electricity
electro-mechanical - 机电的, machine electricity of
electromagnetic field - 电磁场, electricity magnet field
Portuguese is kinda similar in respect to your first example as voltage can be translated as either "voltagem" or "tensão [elétrica]" the later of which back translates as "[electric] tension"
idk why but the direct translation of generator and motor from Cn to En cracks me up despite me knowing chinese xD
@@BenziLZK Are you Chinese, or did you spend time in China?
@@jimzorn3853 I'm a chinese but doesn't born in China
@@BenziLZK We would say "I wasn't born in China". Where were you born and where are you now? Have you spent time in China or Taiwan?
I used to study Mandarin Chinese a little, because I was strongly inspired by work that chinese colleagues in my profession area do (I am an information security specialist), and because chinese part of the internet contains a lot of unique knowledge about it, that would be much less available and meaningful for me as an English or Russian speaker.
So when I started to learn it I started to understand why chinese people are so good in technical areas. I had a feeling that the language itself was made by an engineer. Strict, short, laconic and yet poetic in many ways in this shortness.
I absolutely loved the idea of chinese characters, but the hardest part for me personally is the pronunciation - tones are not an easy concept if your native language doesn’t have them :)
Thanks for an interesting video!
Thank you for saying that, and actually plz don't be discouraged by not being able to pronounce the tones right because we native Chinese CAN understand you even if you totally messed up the tones. Just practice and say it more and you'll grasp it.
As a western English native speaker, the most difficult parts of Chinese for us is the "shortness" of the pronunciation.
For example, 人（ren）is pronounced very short and softly by native speakers. A common mistake for us is to pronounce is "RRRREn", strongly pronouncing the R.
For me, the tones aren't even the hardest part, it's more this "shortness" of pronunciation. I think using your mouth muscles less helps, and just let the pronunciation flow without such strong pronunciation.
Beautiful language, I'm loving it so far.
@@youziyi oh yes, that is an interesting feature of Chinese I also noted :) Russian for example is even more verbose than English and sometimes 2 chinese characters can replace 2 word phrase in Russian, 8-10 letters each. Great way to compress the information btw :)
One study was done that claims all languages convey information at approximately the sane rate.
My mother's tongue is a tonal language. It's a bit similar to chinese language except it doesn’t use characters but letters.
You're actually the reason I started learning Chinese, written and spoken. Your video truly demystified a language that-while you'll have to put in hours if you want to learn to write and read-has so many amazing benefits and uses highly sensible morphemes to make up words. Thank you for starting my journey and making the whole process new and exciting :)
Awww thank you so much for your comment! 加油～
Even as a native Mandarin Chinese speaker, this is the first time I truly understood the efficiency of the language! Very informative, keep it up!
I started learning mandarin by my own self because I am fascinated with the characters, rich historical culture, and the language itself but never been consistent with my learning, this video is my great motivation now. Thank you so much dear creator ( sorry don't know your name yet).
I also teach myself Mandarin, HelloChinese and DuChinese (reading app) are my favorites, plus all the great RUclips teachers 😊
I also use hello Chinese 😃
You need a lot of comprehensible input
I think so too
@@n420j Can you recommend two useful English learning apps for me? 🙏I am a Chinese and want to learn English in depth. Of course, if you have any questions about Chinese, you can always ask me!
Chinese is a logical language, while Japanese is ad-hoc. A Japanese linguist once wrote that, and having studied both languages, I completely agree. I had a lot of fun to learn Mandarin and always recommend to other people. Its a really cool and fascinating language.
Japanese is not a really language it is a notation of English.
@@peterwang5272WRONG
@normalbirid79 he is right. Japanese some words sounds like English words. Very east to learn Japanese if you know English.
@@GroomsmanBuilder some words in any language sound like some words of another, it really does not mean that the language will be easier hahaha
Japanese and english are about as far removed from each other as two languages can be
路人，刷到你的视频听到你的发音感觉很有亲切感。因为我每次默读课文时脑中冒出的声音很像你这样的讲话😂😂
Currently studying Mandarin, and I find the language much easier to learn and understand than English (my native language). English has so many different, complicated things within the language that makes it far too difficult. I find that English has too many words for some things, and not enough for other things. I'm thankful that I have decided to learn Mandarin because it has opened my mind quite a lot.
中文的句法确实是比较简洁的。但由于足够灵活，对于初学者不太友好。不过中文的信息密度比英语高多了。
I am a native Madarin speaker and a fluent English speaker. Chinese can condense so much information in a few characters, but on the other hand, English (or Latin languages) conveys precise and nuance meanings better. It is actually much easier to write a technical paper in English than Chinese, IMO. Both languages are beautiful and elegant. Each has its pros and cons. The best is to learn both, and many other languages, Greek, Latin, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, the list goes on…
不仅是元素周期表，物理，生物，化学，我们中文都会用已有的中文经过理解，有逻辑的造出新的科学概念，所以会让中国人很快理解并传递科学知识
@@svchwsvchw Chinese also conveys precise and nuance meanings when it's not colloquial, read a math book you'll find them everywhere.
Learning Chinese is really satisfying for how practical it is. Reminds me of a really good programming language
Chinse is like a "Python"
I can't stand the Chinese government and culture, but man the language is interesting, and the etymology/what not.
language is the one of the most important aspects of a culture bro. if you can't stand chinese culture, you won't stand the langauge.@@thedog5k
@@Void-tp4yv I think there might be a misunderstanding/ I think you are wrong depending on things are defined.
I think the way the language is written is interesting and have long appreciated the chinese meme culture. The way they piece together words, and take interest n their problems. It's almost like reading a dystopia novel.
That being said...
The part of Chinese culture I hate is poor pseudo communist/capitalist dystopia with scammers, grab hags, gutter oil, corrupt police, 1984 esque cameras everywhere yada yada
That's what I meant by the part of their culture I hate. I think that isn't going to necessarily effect the learning of the language. Or do a degree, but not enough to hate it
Misconception on Culture vs. Government Policies: First, it is of absolute importance to differentiate between the acts of a government and a culture of the people. Chinese culture is very rich and diverse with a history extending over thousands of years. It includes big contributors in the field of philosophy, art, literature, and science. Equating government policies or social issues with the whole of Chinese culture means missing this richness and diversity.
Misunderstanding of the Economic System: The fact that the country has been referred to as being in a "poor pseudo communist/capitalist dystopia" is shallow and does not accurately reflect the nature of the economic system in China. In fact, since the close of the 20th century, the Chinese economy has been steadily growing, and today, China ranks as one of the most rapidly developing countries in the world. "Dystopia" may connote a uniqueness in the word and its combination of socialist and capitalist elements, but it denies its economic progression and its standard of living improvements to so many of its citizens.
Scammers and Gutter Oil: Some problems of food safety (for example, "gutter oil") and scams could be noticed, though they should not mark Chinese culture. At any rate, many countries can be considered to have lots of problems with fraud and food safety. It's unfair to characterize an entire culture based on negative aspects that can be found globally.
Corruption and Surveillance
Issues of corruption and surveillance are difficult ones. They are issues worthy of criticism. However, many countries contain them in varying shades, and these are points of policy, rather than portions of culture. Many Chinese, too, are critical of corruption and in support of reforms.
Cultural Appreciation and Learning: It shouldn't be that one critiques Chinese government policies or its social ills stand in the way of appreciation and learning of the country's culture. The culture is more than the negatives-it encompasses traditions, values, and innovations of great importance for humankind's civilization.
Valid, but then it should be done in a constructive way and not by stereotypes or racism. Thus, it is unfair and nonconstructive to write off an entire culture based on bad or governmental aspects. It's important to approach cultural critique with nuance and respect for the people and their history.
Learning and dialogues, open-mindedness is also very much required, keeping the diversity and complexity embedded within any culture. Knowledge about Chinese culture or any other culture, for that matter, is required to see beyond the stereotypes, able to realize the depth of its contribution towards the world.@@thedog5k
This video has blown my mind🤯I’ve never heard anyone explain how Chinese works. I thought Chinese was purely memorization, but you’ve taught me that Chinese grammar follows a logical pattern. Thank you for this extremely informative video. I think I’m too old to try to learn it now. You’re a great teacher to make something so complicated understandable 👏🏾
Try Google and search for the simplified Chinese periodic table of elements. You will find that Chinese words are very logical, so the metal element starts with the character "钅". Therefore, gas elements all have the character "气". All the elements in stones have the word "石". The remaining components of these characters are their pronunciations.
Even if this is your first time looking at the periodic table (as you are a native speaker), you will have a rough idea of its chemical properties and pronunciation.
I started to learn Mandarin Chinese some years ago in a Confucio instituto but my brother past away and it has been difficult to retake it but with your video I feel motivated to retake it. Thanks 👍 😎
This is a really good point on how making the words easier to understand through their meaning makes more room to learn more easier! I think I heard somewhere that Mandarin is the only real pictographic language, and I think that's really cool that all words are made of concepts expressed through pictures. Happy new year!
I am a Greek speaker and I can say that the same advantage of Chinese can also be found in Greek. That is to say that they are both very logical languages with a minimum amount of foreign vocabulary and have long history.
A few "English" words from Greek origin, who may puzzle English speakers, but make sense in Greek:
Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, Otorhinolaryngology, Democracy, Anarchy, Theatre, Tragedy, Comedy, Mathematics, History, Physics, Philosophy, Geography, Photograph, Telephone and of course ... Arachnophobia.
The Greek grammar is quite complicated, so I will give a point to Chinese here, but the Greek writing system is very simple.
Finally, I say that the Chinese language is an equally logical language with Greek, so if you want to make a comparison of Chinese with a Western language, I think it would be more appropriate to compare it with Greek, not with English.
I was thinking about greek... since portuguese is my native language, I remember as a kid that after getting most common greek and latin prefixes/suffixes, words were easy to get the meaning, and anything science was kind of self explanatory.
Chinese often reminds me of Greek too. They are both sensible and organized, less liquid than Latin-based languages.
ancient chinese is cantonese. they're different faction. LOLs.
Exactly. They make sense in their Latin and Greek roots, because those words are not English words.
Esperanto is more logical than either Chinese or Greek.
radiate in English means to emit energy of some sort such as light or heat, so we can pretty much get the idea of what a radiator does without needing a chinese translation. But this was a very good example.
Great video. I've been learning for 3 months now, and I really think the language is beautiful phonetically. People often say it's the most difficult language, and where that's true, it's really not so bad once you grasp some core fundamentals.
Subscribed!
You make a very valid point. I remember how I struggled in school with science especially because we always had to memorize scientific names and often you need a basic understanding of latin to understand why it is named whatever it is named. If we could spend less time memorizing names and more time understanding scientific concepts, that would be much better. And of course that can be applied to any area of study. I find Chinese relaxing so I study for enjoyment and to hopefully keep my brain sharp.
I've held back from learning Chinese as I find many aspects intimidating. However this is the first time I've ever heard someone showcase what aspects make it easier. Looks like there is some hope after all. Just subscribed and look forward to viewing your other content!
如果你真的想学中文，其实你可以向任何你可以确定他是中国人的ID提问，他们大概率都会很愿意回答你任何普通话方面的问题的。不一定非要找一个固定的老师。If you really want to learn Mandarin, you can actually ask questions to any ID that you can confirm is Chinese, and they will most likely be willing to answer any questions you have about Mandarin. You don't necessarily have to find a fixed teacher.
Great video. I actually find it quite funny how this aspect is reflected in some other languages including my native one: german. For example plane is "Flugzeug" as in "fly thing" or more closely "flying equipment". I mean germans just stringing words together to create new ones is a common joke. So seeing wild compound words and expressions in chinese was a welcome surprise. Just now, I thought "lignite is just Braunkohle, right?" (actually the term for lignite in german) and you followed it up with the one-to-one translation :)
I found there are more examples of this commonality and it's pretty amusing. Even some stuff like 再见 translates one-to-one to "Wiedersehen".
oh woww just realized that
English, as pointed out is not a Pure Language like German.
german is great! even if it doesn't use ideographs, the concept of stringing concepts to make things easily understandable maintains its use! thanks for sharing :)
The purest Germanic language still in use is Icelandic, and they have also created a new translation for the computer instead of pure transliteration.
Yeah, but in that sense, "airplane" was probably not the best comparison for proving a point, since the English word is also quite logical: "air" + "plane," as opposed to "hydro" + "plane" for example. That said, I agree with the general point of the video. If everything is a matter of degree, that logic is just more pronounced in Chinese than in English. There have been times when I did not know a word in Chinese but have correctly guessed it just based on the meaning in English. Not so easy in the opposite direction.
5:50 I agree with you. I’m French, but if I had not been born and raised in this language, I might never have bothered learning it. Tried Spanish in school (and let’s not discuss here the impact of inefficient teaching methods….) but despite its clear similarity with French in terms of grammar and the shared Latin roots, it never stuck with me.
Conversely, I never understand when my peers say that English is hard. The grammar is so much simpler, and the language itself is a lot more playful and flexible than French. Adapting to another phonetic system and learning new vocabulary is daunting for sure, but the skeleton is so much simpler that I believe it’s much easier to hit the ground running when learning English than when learning French. I’ve also learned Japanese and Korean, which may be very different in structure from both English and French, both also feel pretty intuitive to me as agglutination tongues (unsure about terminology here?) with simple, efficient writing systems. Despite their simplicity, they can generate some very sophisticated language, and indeed gorgeous poetry for example.
So I agree with the sentiment that (as SOMEONE said) “Any idiot can make things complicated. It takes genius to make things simple.” and that “Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to remove.”
Such a good point! especially about the fact that hard languages are detrimental to their native speakers. As a linguist, i've seen it time and time again. Icelandic grammar is so difficult and convoluted that native speakers struggle with it to the point where they sometimes literally switch to english or don't understand their own language (which is tragic). Danish pronunciation is so completely different from their spelling that children have a hard time learning how to write danish (properly) etc. These are all mental and temporal resources people need to spend, on the daily basis, when they are struggling with their own language. English spelling is there as well.
My native language went through a reform a couple of centuries back and the new principle became "read as you write and write as you read" and that makes things so much simpler for us.
let me guess.... Korean?
serbian?
Swedish? Norwegian?
@rickyanthony Sounds like you don't understand much.
@rickyanthonyI understand why you'd think so, but the experience from China and people from the Chinese diaspora who speaks Mandarin (or another Chinese dialect) as first language from toddlers' age suggests otherwise. It turns out the build-up of "stock of characters" for a school age kid over the first few years of schooling almost always lead the need for them in the learning of other subjects. For example, most Chinese kids already know sufficient characters (and their meaning), if not by writing then definitely by the spoken words, for first grade mathematics and science by the time they enter elementary school. This is especially true in the modern era where semi-formal education from age of 3 to 4 is ubiquitous. So there isn't really any lag in understanding of non-lingual subject matters due to insufficient lingual skills - things pretty much run in parallel, and more often than not the learning of lingual prerequisite far outpace the other subjects (for e.g., I would say a 6th grader in China's stock of characters in their brain already covers over 90% of what they will encounter in the learning of high school physics and chemistry (except those special ones for chemical elements).
I just found this in my feed, very well spoken, very informative. You have a new follower, thank you!
In Finnish, ”Aeroplane” is also: ”fly machine”; _”Lentokone”,_ literally: ”Flight Machine”; ”Computer”, in Finnish, is: _”Tietokone”,_ literally: ”Knowledge Machine”; while, in Hawaiian, it’s: _”Lolouila”,_ literally: ”Lightning Brain”; so, quite a few similarities, overall. In German, an ”Aeroplane” is: _”Flugzeug”,_ literally: ”Flying Object”; so, in the ballpark.
Lol, I love your opening part about the radiator. As a romance language speaker I find Mandarin very difficult however I can't help but agree with your point that the language is smart when by breaking down every thing into understandable components
In my opinion the only positive thing about the Chinese writing system, is the fact that it can convey a lot of information in very few characters, and that it’s more compact and a person fluent in Chinese is able to grasp the meaning of a text or sentence way faster than if it were in English or any other similar language.
I studied Japanese many years ago and a couple of weeks ago I came across Chinese videos I got really admired with. Chinese is a perfect language for mathematicians! No unnecessary additions, looks like lego bricks - you just put them together and you've got the opportunity to communicate! I got hooked and now I'm learning it with so much pleasure! Thank you for your video - you've mentioned so many concepts I got attracted to in Chinese!
So, THATS why they're great in STEMs😋
However Japanese borrows a lot from english, in katakana
I'm native Dutch and started learning Mandarin because the Dutch television is terrible. I love watching Chinese films and drama, but I hate having to depend on english subtitles. Hundreds of years ago, at school, I learned French, English, German, Latin and ancient Greek. I hated learning languages: my math was always a straight A. Learning Chinese is a different story: The language is so logical, no strange conjugations; the way sentences and words are structured is very similar to Dutch (more than to English). I simply love it. Learning Mandarin is fun. The pronounciation is still difficult (Speaking with a pencil between my teeth helps 😉), reading and writing is also difficult, but after a few months I started to understand a lot.
你知道bilibili吗？中文互联网是世界上最好玩的，作为中国人我强烈推荐你去那边，看看中国年轻人的真实想法
Ok, why does integration give u the area under a curve?
"Hundreds of years ago" how old are you?
Integration is the inverse of derivation if you start with the integral then you can get the original function by derivation which gets you the function for the change of the function at a certain point.
Just stumbled across this video and it has convinced me to start learning mandarin chinese. Wonderful personality from the creator too.
Saying that learning new languages is always for fun and not necessary is such an anglophone thing to do 😂 For us non native English speakers learning a second language is almost a must.
Otherwise, great video though! Very informative :)
Good level of your native language is still a must for everyone...
true, specially the english itself lol
It's also a very upper-middle-class first-world mummy's-boy-who-never-had-to-support-himself thing today. LIke, this baby-faced fella cannot even fathom a single situation where an adult might feel a pressing need to learn another language. Time to grow up little one. So cute though.
@danidejaneiro8378
elitist cringe
@@technic1285 - exactly, so cringey when rich kids say something so oblivious.
I absolutely LOVE Chinese numbers. It took me a while to understand bigger numbers like 100,000 or 1,000,000. But everyday numbers like 11, 46, or 100 are a lot easier to comprehend than other languages. Especially the "teen" numbers. Chinese handles these so much better than any other language I've studied.
中国人对数学的理解是10进制的，我不明白为什么英语对数字的理解是1000的倍数🤣🤣
@@peterwang5272 英语还算好理解，法语数字奇葩到邻国比利时瑞士法语数字都是简化过的😂
92 in french, 4*20+12😂😂
It seems at the beginning of civilization, french people count with all 20 fingers and toes😂
@@peterwang5272 这个没什么本质区别吧？中文里大数不是也以万（四个 0）和亿（八个 0）作为一个级别吗，比如 5000000 就叫五百万
For your next videos, you should cover chengyu, and also the app Immersive Chinese. Chengyu are just an interesting topic in general, and I think Immersive Chinese is underrated since it gives you some pretty complex sentences appropriate for your level from the very beginning. But I’d understand if you end up not covering it, since it’s pretty dry visually, at least compared to HelloChinese and Lingodeer
圣诞节快乐！🎄
I love immersive chinese. Thankfully it was one of the first apps I used when I started and made the process of learning such a scary language like chinese so easy. I thank everyday to whoever created that app
I've become enamored of mandarin and am working on immersion. This was a very well thought out video and it was nicely conveyed. From the perspective of a person of European descent, you hit the mark of where my focus should be, Ty.
you kinda changed the way i view Chinese the moment you mentioned morphemes.. and yesss it makes so much sense !!!!!
I'm happy this video popped up on my main page!!! I came back to studying Mandarin after nearly a year of break. It's such a fun and interesting language to learn, I can't wait to explore more of this youtube channel
I am Turkish, but first learnt English then learnt Chinese, now in the process of learning Spanish. I have to admit Chinese grammar is extremely easy compare to English. However, Chinese is a tonal language, there are four basic tones that you need to master before you indulge yourself in learning Chinese. The word " ma " could mean very different things depending on which tone you use to say it. If you say 媽 (ma ) with the first tone it means mother, but if you say 碼 (ma) with the third tone it means horse but if you say 罵 (ma) it means to curse..Now you have it..The difficulty in Chinese lies on getting the right pronunciation right and this is the reason why people who are either good at singing or play a musical instrument learn Chinese much more easily.. Cheers 😊😊
You have many good points. Understanding the concept of your own language helps. That's why in German we teach English and French from early on. It really helped me to remember and understand latin scientific words.. if your language is easy access from the beginning you can dive into these concepts easier and earlier
YESS!! I've been loving studying Chinese. The basic grammar is sooo straight forward and logical
I just found your channel and I really like the way you explain things. Also your sense of humor is on par with mine.
Good video ! I was just thinking about this earlier today. One thing though, I don't think English numbers are really more complex than Chinese numbers. "ty" in English functions just like "shi" in Chinese. Examples:
Er-shi-yi
Twen-ty-one
Ba-shi-san
Eight-ty-three
and for 13-19
Shi-san
Thir-teen
Shi-si
Four-teen
The only exceptions would be the numbers 11 and 12.
that's fair xD but in chinese it makes more sense kinda? 'ty' and 'shi' isnt super similar.
The reason it's er shi yi for 21 is because twenty is literally two ten (二十 er shi) and one is yi, thus er shi yi (二十一).
And this 'combo' works for all numbers for example, eighteen, it would be shi-ba (十八), meaning ten eight literally.
But then again english numbers are also quite simple, i just find chinese numbers to be more literal, since in eng for numbers like thirty or twenty, thir and twen dont really mean anything. (also yea, eleven and twelve dont really fit in either when in chinese its just ten one (十一 shi yi) and ten two (十二 shi er) :DD
My language, Swedish, is also very straightforward sometimes. Examples:
Vegetable = "green thing" (grönsak)
Turtle = "shielded toad" (sköldpadda)
Glove = "hand shoe" (handske)
HANDSHOE
@@EHMM I don't like Handschuh : a glove is not a shoe for the hands. I would rather call it a handsock or handslip since both are generally made of fabric or very delicate, tight-fitting leather that slips instantly.
A shielded toad wearing hand shoes lmao
@@MrMirville by comparison, in chinese Glove=手套，which means hand wrap/wraper
Its the same thing with most language. Arabic, japanese, turkish, Latin, greek, aryan languages, even the german. Except for some modern western languages. They just borrow words from Latin and greek.
He looked so happy when he said "Typhoons from chinese!" 2:23
Your explanation is as simple and logical as the language itself. Well done.. you may have just persuaded me to learn Mandarin!
I totally agree bruh 👌🏼👌🏼 Chinese comes so easy to me and i always wondered why but its just so practical. And i can usually guess the meaning of a new word that i don’t know. Like 小心 which means to be careful. Idk it just clicked for me even if i didnt know the word before. I could guess the meaning
I have been studying Chinese for a year and a half by now. Chinese structure is generally super simple (though a bit rigid) in my view it has three elementsthat makes it much harder than English. 1. Tones 2. Lack of many sounds because of tones 3. Chinese characters. What Any person from any other culture may take with their own writing no more than a month a Chinese person may take years.
我是台灣人 母語是中文 我也在學英文
However, intonation can increase the cost of learning, making it very difficult to learn, and it can also make language communication less efficient
0:17 English is a Germanic language
Technically yes, but the french influenced it too much. German is so different now that it takes 750 hours for an english speaker to learn it.
German is very orthogonal too : Flug-zeug = airplane (fly-device). Schreibzeug (write-device) means any kind of pen of pencil that is used for writing.
Great video. I feel confident I can learn Mandarin now with enough time to learn
I am Italian, I lived abroad and learned English and Japanese. As Japanese also have many Chinese characters, I can tell you my realization. The Chinese language is a visual language, in fact, for example, when I see the character for woman, 女、I see a woman exactly like this 🚺. With 中文, you get an instant feeling and that's why, everywhere in the world, to facilitate immediate understanding, pictures are used instead of words though sometimes you have both. If you think about emergency exit doors, not smoking signs, fire extinguisher, red Cross, etc., there are images to represent them rather than words. Words all look the same but they don't transfer strong feelings like a visual language does. I tried learning other languages such as Thai and Khmer, but these languages too are sound based.
Of course, learning the basic characters is easy and fun but getting to the complex one is a completely different matter. Unfortunately, both Chinese and Japanese are languages that needs constant practice for life otherwise, as a foreigner, you will forget how to write them. The a to z alphabet, once learned, it's impossible to forget and even if you can't remember or don't know a word, you can still attempt to write it based on the sound (definitely in Italian and Russian though English is more difficult).
I am Chinese, and I haven't written a single characters other than my signature for 3 months. In this era when we all use keyboard to type instad of hand-writing, not knowing how to write characters dosen't matter at all, as long as you can read and type them. It is the same as people in mainland China cannot write traditional Chinese but they can read them with no problem. And learning how to write characters precisely is a total waste of time for non-natives in my opinion.
you know the language is old when it's literally drawings
I would argue that the simplicity of the Chinese language is a result of the “difficulty” of the Chinese script. Chinese writing tolerates more homophones (especially for mandarin) due to its non-phonetic feature. There are texts like the 施氏食狮史 which is only enabled by Chinese characters
Mandarin Chinese grammar may be "simple", but it's not easy. I like your voice, the energy and pacing of your video, and the main etymology topic, but I don't like that people keep spreading the idea that Mandarin has no grammar or it's super easy because it isn't true.
If it were easy, non-native speakers would form natural sentences, use 了, verb results and verb complements correctly with ease; heck, even word order gets super tricky when you have a subordinate clause.
Mandarin is only easy if you create super short sentences, like literally four-word sentences, and even then, you then realize word choice or overall structure is not native because natives tend to synthesize a lot or choose other words, complements, particles or position the words differently to emphasize A or B.
Another problem: when one language lacks what your mother tongue has, you don't simply embrace it, you spend months or years trying to fit the things you're used to using in the new system, even when it won't work. I'm a native Spanish speaker. Spanish pronunciation is consistent and we just have 5 vowel sounds, pure a, e, i, o, u. One could think native English speakers just have to simplify theirs, but the vast majority won't adapt soon and they'll keep trying to fit their many more hybrid vowel sounds in Spanish, causing something that should be simple to be a headache.
The same applies to Chinese; we try to create English, Spanish, [insert language] sentences and transfer our system to Chinese and it's just a mess. And it's not a "you're using the wrong mindset" issue, it's natural brain inertia. We've got to accept there will be MANY mistakes before we use the language comfortably.
I just say this because I guess there will be more people like me who had their sentences fully reworded or filled with red annotations by natives in language exchange apps, by language tutors, etc. and if the Internet consistently repeats the mantra that it should be easy, then you think your brain has a problem.
that's true, the only difficulty of a new language is how much different from your native language.
I can feel you.I struggled a lot with classifiers and word order in longer sentences in Chinese.
@@deacudaniel1635 classifiers hahaha, even hell for native Chinese sometimes
Love this realistic logic you are eloquently showing
I must to congratulate you 'cause your English it's really perfect. You have a real nice & clear pronunciation, pal. Hugs and regards from MX!
Counterproductively, i'm trying to learn to read Chinese without knowing any of the pronunciations. It's the only writing system in the world for which that's remotely possible, and i think that's so cool
I guess it really depends on what language you know. I speak Filipino and English as my native and second language respectively, I learned Spanish a few years ago and found it really easy to learn. Now, I am learning Mandarin and I do see how simple it is but there are times when I am confused as hell with the grammar. The first time I studied the use of 和 I messed it up over and over. And until now, I still forget what the combination of 是 and 的 does.
Damn homie you’re gonna be able to speak to like 70% of the world lol
The 是...的 pattern indicates you are asking what happened in the past
I started to learn Mandarin writing on my own, as I lived in a Chinese neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. The writing actually makes sense. I need to learn the proper pronunciation, as in any language. How difficult can it be if 25% of the world's population speaks Mandarin?
I learned the symbol for "woman", then discovered that a word with two "woman" symbols means "gossip". My aunts and Mom are Asian, and that made perfect sense. No wonder the Chinese civilization has lasted over 5,000 years! Excellent video and a great help from a fellow ABC!
It's actually pretty difficult even for that 18% of the world population (China doesn't have 25% of the world population, or 2 billion). Written Chinese is difficult for even Chinese people to remember and write (and for Japanese people, for that matter, with their Chinese-derived kanji characters). It's spoken Chinese that is relatively easy to pick up if you, as a foreigner, have a good ear for tones. It's the tones that a lot Western students have such a difficult time with. But if you're born and raised in China tones will come easily to you, as almost all spoken aspects of a language tend to be easier to learn if that's all you hear day in and day out as a child. It's the writing that really makes these East Asian languages more difficult than they need to be. Here's a sample of that: ruclips.net/video/zxHskrqMqII/видео.html and ruclips.net/video/sJNxPRBvRQg/видео.html
I am curious what is the word you mentioned as a Chinese😂
Can't recall any word with 2 女
㚣@@Dordord
as someone who's been learning mandarin , the fact that numbers are so easy to grasp are definitely a pro ! as a dutch person , when we count over 15 we pronounce our numbers like "5-10" and the system of just saying "1 10 , 5" albeit confusing to start with makes it so much less confusing how numbers sound and where to place them .
also i've discussed it w classmates before , but i do genuinely believe that if in your language system numbers are already organised in their respective groups "1 hundred 5 tens 2" being 152 , it makes concepts like basic math wayyy easier to grasp for children .
已经在中国5年了，普通话真的越来越容易的 就是好像 ancient 希腊语 - 火山 fire mountain - volcano 完全一样的翻译。very logical. very straight forward.
"It's lost some of its identity", I disagree strongly. English comes from a place that for generations was invaded by one culture or another. So the language was shaped by those invasions, by others coming in and forcing their languages on them. Which made it a VERY adaptable language that can accept any word into it. Which I think is the key identity of English. You can have extremely disparate dialects and still understand some of what each person is saying.
Also, as much as I love Chinese and have worked on learning it, the biggest problem I've run into is no native speaker is willing to speak with me. "Why would you want to learn that?" is the biggest response I've gotten followed by "let's just speak English". So, I think the greatest advantage of English is simply that there are more people that are actively willing to help others practice, because the most important thing is being able to understand, not necessarily getting things right.
The simplicity of grammar depends on how you see the languange itself. I have a degree in English philology (being a Russian native speaker) and it's been really hard for me not to just learn the phrases, words and patterns in Mandarin but to understand the rules of grammar that are not usually explained in courses. I always feel that I don't have enough theory to make my own sentences, lol. Maybe the people who just learn it as it is meet less difficulties.
Yes! This is so me! I'm doing okay picking up meaning contextually and learning words/morphemes, but I still feel quite apprehensive about sentence creation. I'm deathly afraid to use an adjective unless it's in a two- or three-word sentence like 他很帅 ... lol ...
@@sosoableI don't disagree with what you say, but do note that at the end of the day, language is just a medium for communication - if spoken language is more efficient than written, it'll evolve more quickly and eventually replace the written component. Think about how many Chinese words there used to be, and how many are still commonly used nowadays! Our ancestors would shudder at our abysmal literacy skills but honestly, it's just how any natural language evolves over time.
@@sosoable 其实吧，没有必要用方言写书面语，比如我是武汉人，“到你家去”，按照武汉方言写就是，“到你屋滴克”，但是，这样没有意义，除了一看就知道你是武汉人以外，真的没有什么意义，反而更麻烦，粤语在这条路上走的更远一些，甚至造了一些汉字来代替粤语方言，你所说的“方言会对语言有干扰”，我不知道你说的“语言”的定义是什么，我觉得吧，如果说，大多数情况下，方言不会干扰到书面语，这个应该是没什么争议的
@@sosoable 网络语言不是书面语，谢谢
chinese characters holds the biggest advantage of all. People with different spoken languages often could not understand each other but by writing in chinese characters it able to bridge the gap of communication with eased as these character form already standardized universally towards their respective language.
Good video. Sent it to my Chinese wife who is learning English and has the toughest time with English numbering systems.
I will try my best to learn some Chinese. This video had encouraged me a lot. Thank you Master.
Hello, I'm Chinese, I want to learn English, can you teach me? In exchange, I will teach you Chinese
As someone fluent in Spanish and who has been studying Chinese on and off for 15 years now, I will tell you one HUGE advantage of Chinese over the major European languages--no verb conjugations. God damn, is that a godsend. Spanish has 36 forms of verb conjugation, the most of any Romance language, and way more than English. Even though I am fluent in Spanish, there are some forms of verb conjugation that are "poetic" and are just weird on the very rare occasions that you hear/read them. Chinese is blissfully free of all this nonsense. :D
Just do what a fellow I encountered in Belize did: He used verbs only in the infinitive form. It startled me at first, but it turned out to be no problem. We spoke for nearly an hour, until I had to catch a bus.
My family and I think anyone I tell it to doesn't really want to believe me how easy I find it to learn Chinese. Yes, the characters will be difficult to learn, but I've already seen videos explained by other Chinese people how there's a way around that. And seeing that I don't live in China/don't need Chinese for a job, it's not a big deal if I won't know each and every character (besides, once I know enough to interact online, I will learn automatically anyway).
Aside from the characters though, Chinese is I think the easiest language that I have ever learned. I'm Hungarian, I speak fluent English and German, and in school I had to learn Spanish too (which I can't speak at all...). And even so, I think Chinese is the easiest. I mean, just compare it to Hungarian, and you will be glad you aren't born Hungarian...I'm literally 21 years old right now, and I still make mistakes speaking, even though I speak Hungarian every day at home/among other Hungarians. The way the language structures sentences is a nightmare though. I mean, I cannot explain because I was only in school until 4th grade in Hungary so I don't have any more knowledge than that, but just look up on Wikipedia how the verbs in Hungarian change depending on the situation, how many people you're talking to (depending on the word though), past, present or future, if it happened, might happen, or will happen, what you want to say with it etc. When I first saw that, my jaw dropped. I obviously know those because I've been taught all these through talking but if you learn it, be prepared. But aside from that, I find Chinese also easier because there are similarities. Like "to rain" in Chinese is 下雨(xiá yu), which is "falling rain" so instead of like using another verb for rain, like in English, they say it falls. In Hungarian, it's the same. We don't say it's raining, we say "it's falling rain" (esik az eső). Then we also have tones so another easier thing to learn. And our sentences are often structured the same as in Chinese.
These obviously give me advantages but still I cannot say that Chinese is difficult, when even as I'm living in Germany, I still don't know when to use der/die/das for which noun. I always guess. I think the fact that Chinese is so hard is mostly seen from an English speaking perspective, which I don't really get because a lot of words can be translated clearly into English (and the English language is confusing too. I mean, "through and threw" being pronounced the same and "pony and bologna " rhyming??? (Which who even said that's how bologna is spelled?)
0:22 "English and many of the OTHER Romance languages" Wait, are you claiming English to be a Romance language? I mean, it's vocabulary is almost entirely Romance, but technically it's a Germanic language.
Thank you very much. You renew my impetuous to keep learning Mandarin. I hope that soon we will get a simplified writing system.
In class this week, I learned what those old vehicles that are everywhere here in the countryside, the old Chinese 'workhorses'... 拖拉机 which is 'drag pull machine'... tractor in English! Love it!
I love your channel
Unless when it comes to dishes, then they decided to come up with the most poetic names for some reason.
Btw, many people also have to learn a second language because it has a significance in their daily lives but I'm sure you're aware of that as well
The poetic dish name thing is a long story, simply put, in old days many dishes were created by the royal chefs in the royal kitchen to serve the emperor and royal families, if anyone of them makes mistakes like chosing wrong ingredients, seasonings or even just picking an unlucky/unpleasant name for the dish, he will highly be executed along with his WHOLE family depending on the emperor's mood at the time, so the chefs in the royal kitchen have no choice but to create fancy dishes and give them poetic names to please the emperor and royal families, that's the only way they could survive. later on it became a tradition passed down to later generations. Nowadays restaurant owners use poetic names to impress the customers and attract them to order the dish.
@@jznn8218 thanks for the info :)
@@robezy0 Not at all, I edited the original comment to fix grammar problem and add more details, hope you can fully understand :), btw, Merry Christmas~
What does a radiator do? It radiates. This was one of the examples in English where the term is completely self-explanatory, lol.
Yeah but what does it radiate? Is it a concept or an object? In a vacuum 'radiator' could have a lot of ambiguities, but 'disperse heat device' tells you what kind of thing it is and what it radiates. There's also the fact that a car's radiator actually uses convection rather than radiation to transfer most of the heat, so the name is actually misleading as to the principle it operates on.
Other English words are more completely descriptive, but radiator isn't one of them.
@@atomic_wait It's really all you need, in fact many words in both (actually all) languages are abstract and several levels removed from straightforward. (E.g., 消息 - breath, disappearance? News???) In English it just happens that we didn't care "what" or "how" something is being radiated, and the word "radiator" is abstract from those details, and we're forced to understand it from that perspective. As a learner it would take very little imagination to see why the word means what it means.
Indeed the connection with physical concepts like radiation or convection is even more confusing, which is an area in which I agree with you - scientists like to appropriate words with a very basic and flexible meaning and proclaim that they mean something very specific, e.g. they'll complain about it if you call your mass (in kg) your "weight", etc. But the end effect of a radiator is that heat radiates (is felt/transported) all around the room, which is easy to make sense of.
Wow, this is one of the most helpful videos I have seen on RUclips.
Your ideas make learning Chinese fun!
I keep telling people that Mandarin is way easier than English and French, it’s just the pronunciation that is complicated because of the four different tones
I agree that Chinese characters make learning many new concepts (like science) way easier than in English. But as a Canadian, I had to also study French from a young age, so I could often guess at the meaning of scientific words because the Latin was close to French. I think English is actually unique (ish) in deciding to use roots/morphemes from a different language for their scientific terms. Pretty sure other European languages used roots/morphemes that actually are from their own language, so this isn't exactly a characters versus alphabet issue, it's specifically an English issue.
我再给你举个例子，为什么中文那么伟大，中文汉字每一个字都是象形文字，每一个字都是“一幅画”，二维的画面。所以每一个字的信息量非常大，偏旁部首都有它的意义。尤其是繁字体。每一个结构都有它的意义。而英文单词是一维的。所以表达同样意思的段落，往往中文更短，英文的篇幅更长
I met a French guy, we can only communicate with each other in English because I'm Chinese.
He kept saying English is not a true Language but a suck mixture of Languages😂
Small correction: not all Chinese characters equal one morpheme. There are a couple of morphemes consisting of two syllables (and thus two characters), mostly loanwords, like 葡萄，佛陀，玻璃，骆驼，咖啡. The Chinese writing system just makes it look like they are compounds, but as the individual parts don't have any meaning on their own, they're really not.
Cuz some of them are not originally Chinese but foreign words translated in ancient times (some characters were even created only for this one word), and they now look like some native words but actually not. However 璃 should mean something, for example 琉璃
And 佛 陀
@@song9028 yes, as I said, they're mostly loanwords, though of some them are so old that people don't notice anymore. There are a very few originally Chinese words with more than one morpheme, though, I think 蝴蝶 is one
I'm only a language enthusiast and not a linguist so I may be wrong about this, but in the video a 'morpheme' is defined as the smallest unit of idea that can either stand alone or pair with other characters to form a 'word' that has a concrete meaning, so I don't necessarily think it's wrong to say each character is one morpheme as a 'morpheme' may merely represent an idea and does not have to hold a concrete meaning (e.g. '葡' or '萄' separately), but rather it's 'word' that needs to carry a specific meaning like '葡萄' which means 'grapes'. Perhaps the disagreement is the definition of 'morpheme' from the video?
Also as a native speaker of Mandarin I had no idea 葡萄 佛陀 玻璃 and 骆驼 are loanwords from other languages. They always localize them to the point that neither pronunciation or writing have any resemblance of the original word 😅well 咖啡 (kafei) is an easy one to tell though...
A radiator radiates the heat away, like going out of the center of the circle through many radius(s).
As for the example at 1:05, 微笑 means smile not grin, where 微 mean slightly. 笑 is much broader and more general.
When I started learning Mandarin, I remember being so frustrated by the number system. I learned the individual words easy enough, but it felt like it took my brain an extra step to interpret. If someone said san bai wu shi er, my brain would go, "okay, 3 100 5 10 2, that's 300, 50, 2. So 352." It was like constantly doing math just to interpret the number. I'm guessing that's not how native speakers feel when they just learn it that way, but when you still think in English, it was a mental exercise for sure.
@@sosoable not quite. English has separate words for things like 50. Whereas in Mandarin you say 5 10. Which, when you're used to English, your brain then has to calculate that to translate it to 50.
@@sosoable that's why I said it's probably not how native speakers feel, but when your primary language is English, Chinese numbers feel like a mental exercise
@@sosoable no it's not the same. English speakers don't go around saying 4 10. 5 10.
I'm not quite sure why you're arguing about this. I shared my experience. I even acknowledged that it's probably not a problem for native speakers, it's just difficult when you're learning Mandarin as an English speaker. It's just how I felt when I was first learning Mandarin numbers.
as a native Chinese speaker , i just ignore bai shi .. etc
@@道-m3j oh wow, I never even thought of that. That makes a lot of sense!
Well, as a Mandarin speaker myself, I agree with you on how simple scientific concepts can be. For English and other languages, I have to memorise their names without knowing what they are but in Chinese, it's self-explanatory.
With regards the difficult writing system, the way I look at it is that while the Chinese language has invested so much time with the writing system, it has no more energy for complex grammar and hard-to-understand concepts, plus phonemes make it possible to create new words without being too long, while western languages pride themselves with simple writing systems but invest a lot on of time and energy on complex grammar and also word creation methods, which are less versatile, mostly from Greek or Latin.
In the end of the day, it's a give and take situation, we just can't have it all easy, that would make a language boring. Chinese having such mindless grammar seems boring, but it prides itself in its beautiful and complex writing system, while western languages have chosen the other aspect to make their languages interesting.
What a great analysis! I had never run across that idea before. It describes the situation exactly.
@@Queezbo
I know right... 😂😅
have you noticed that English, being known to have a simplified grammar compared to other European languages, has an illogical and confusing spelling rules instead? It's almost close to memorisation. I remember learning English as a kid, memorising the spelling of each word as I would memorising each Chinese character. I know it might not make sense to a native English speaker but since I grew up with English, it's kind of like my second native language.
Just like the construction of Chinese words, Chinese writing is also modular. Characters are made up of radicals that either convey meaning or pronunciation and there aren't that many of them, so pretty soon you can easily guess the meaning and pronunciation of new characters. So in my opinion Chinese writing is not hard. Could it be further simplified? Maybe, but there is balance to be struck between simplicity versus significant difference for easy recognition (you can read much faster in Chinese)
This is motivating me so much to learn Chinese
So glad you popped up in my recommendations! 🤗
The last part you mentioned about the complexity of the Chinese writing system was avoided by the Koreans. They had a king named Sejong who thought exactly the way you did and churned out an entirely new writing system based on mouth positions. It will go on to be called as Hanguel. And to be honest, I would say it is the most efficient writing system in the world.
Hanguel does not like Chinese character at all, it just LOOKS LIKE Chinese. It is essentially a spelling language just like most other languages, but in a cubic shape.
For the most part Hangul is sufficient for everyday use, but in legal and technical contexts they still need Chinese characters for disambiguation, due to the prominence of Chinese loan words.
Korean likes to brag about their language in film and television dramas, don't believe itIn fact, Hanguel is equal to Chinese pinyin, which is just something similar to English phonetic symbols.Japanese syllabary.
@@你看我美吗 Yes, it's like pinyin but for Korean, since Korean is a completely different language to Chinese Mandarin. This is like saying pinyin is like jyutping, it is, but still different languages.
The problem with pinyin (and possibly hangeul as well) is you lose all of the fidelity of written Chinese:
Most non-Chinese speakers don't know Beijing means 北 (northern) 京 (capital) - that information is lost with pinyin! Likewise it's unlikely that someone who just saw "yānméi" would have a good idea of what it means, or at least, less than someone who saw "煙煤". (Look it even comes with fire radicals!)
Does "yeogcheongtan" have the same effect? Hope any speakers of Korean here could give their insight!
Ok loved the video but I can't get over the fact that your first example was "radiator", which is a word with a pretty obvious meaning as "something that radiates" which is quite descriptive, there had to be better examples haha
And yet "disperse heat device" is more obvious.
0:19 Uhhhhh what?
I get what you mean but
Isn't English a Germanic language?
My bad, I actually didn’t know English was classified as a Germanic language!
yea. english is a germanic language but it is a germanic language with the most latin derived loanwords. almost 60% of the vocabs are latin derived.
@@ABChinese but know you do😎👍
I like your video series and I'm looking forward to watching more. One thing that surprised me in my six trips to Southern China is how many people I met who have a hard time reading Chinese. I brought Google Translate with me just to get blank stares in return often. Frank
你好，I’m learning Chinese and this is really cool to me. It really helped me understand word roots also. 😁
Watching your videos for the first time. You are knowledgeable and methodical so I would like to share some thoughts about using the word Mandarin. It was a 17th Century Portuguese word turned English, much like the word Manchuria, both do not officially exist in China. In the US high schools classes are called Mandarin but university classes are mostly called Chinese. On Wikipedia the official language for both China and Taiwan are Chinese but for Taiwan they added a thing called national language which is Mandarin. I have no knowledge how Madam Soong Meiling decided to follow the US to call their language Mandarin but it’s a kind of disgrace, isn’t it? Not only Americans but many Chinese are just as confused, but in a different way. There are tens of millions of overseas Chinese whose left China a few generations ago for work, as hired labor, business and marriage-Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, as well as Europe and Americas. The majority of them were from Canton and Fujian. Before China opened and prospered those people spoke strictly only in their own dialects. Almost the entire Chinese population in Hong Kong speak only Cantonese whereas in Singapore they speak Cantonese, Hokkian, Kejia, and (Mandarin). The Chinese movies of the 60s and 70s were half (Mandarin) 国语 and half Cantonese 粤语 because there were still many newer immigrants who arrived from China not long ago. Hong Kong was a British colony and Singapore’s official language was English. In that context overseas Chinese followed the western norm of calling spoken Chinese Mandarin. It was also different in Chinese words, Chinese is 中文，but during those times it was Mandarin 国语. Apparently it carried political weight of Taiwan vs China of the old days. Therefore overseas Chinese are used to view the language that they were not taught to speak, which was Chinese spoken in China, as just another dialect that carry the same status as their Cantonese or Hokkian. As the Chinese economy grew to become big, things have changed. It is now mandatory for schools of both Hong Kong and Singapore to teach spoken Chinese. The class is called 中国语文，the written is 中文， the spoken is 普通话，same system used in China. For foreigners there is only one official Chinese language which is Chinese, not Mandarin. For local Chinese people, Putonghua is used to distinguish their dialects from the official language.
Mandarin就是辱华的翻译，我不建议你们西方人使用，就叫Chinese "中文" or putonghua(普通话 gerneral language)
Mandarin=官员，Mandarin Chinese=官话（官方语言）。只解释造词逻辑。
It’s funny how Chinese was able to remain mostly pure but Japanese didn’t. I was watching a video in which they interviewed several Japanese people and they weren’t able to not use English words to express themselves, like they didn’t have Japanese words for the words they borrowed from English. It was mind blowing to me . If anybody is interested in the video it’s from the channel Asian boss.
Only 33% of the modern Japanese language has Japanese origin. Due to many loan words from the Chinese, it is even more difficult for the Japanese to abandon Chinese Characters than the Chinese. BTW Asian Boss is a racist channel with many misleading contents and translations, so it is much better to read some papers or watch more professional documentaries instead.
@@somno6878 IMHO, Asian Boss is a much better source than many so-called documentaries that are in fact propaganda. They are biased just like any other media, but at least they can show you footage of genuine street interview. I'm not saying all documentaries are carefully fabricated lies; it's just hard for an average uninformed audience to tell.
@@somno6878 in chinese internet some people also say ASIAN BOSS is a biased media but pretend to be neutral and objective, I'm suprised other people apart from china think it sa well.
@@骑着熊猫去打酱油 tbh all media is biased
Radiator can be broken down too though. Looking at the word youd come to the conclusion that its something that radiates. And the most logical thing it would radiate would be heat. Essentially the same word as the chinese word. A lot of english words are like this
he addressed this argumentation in the video.
This video was actually really, really interesting and insightful