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If a Chinese toddler could speak the language reasonably well by the age of 3, how difficult can it be? Albert Einstein couldn't speak proper German by the age of 3. Isn't that more than sufficient proof that German is much harder to learn?
Wow!!! Amazing!!! As a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese and a teacher of Chinese as a foreign language, I have to say that your Mandarin fluency is soooo impressive!!! Accurate tones, excellent expressions, great collocations, amazing grammar & usage, without an accent!!! A truly inspiring video!!! Thank you so much for sharing!!!
I would expect no less from someone who started learning it half a century ago and has used it professionally while living in the country where it's spoken. What would really impress me if someone were to speak like that with only 3 months into the language from scratch. Still an accomplishment though! What really impresses me is that he's still studying new languages.
@@bhutchin1996that is simply not possible to speak like that within three months of learning Chinese from scratch (including his this level of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary usage, not to mention learning of characters) It just doesn’t exist such kind of phenomenon So your expectations don’t go with reality Maybe you just have no idea of what the real process of learning Chinese language is
It would be great if you can have a series of "Is XXX Difficult?", i.e, "Is French Difficult?", "Is Arabic Difficult?", "Is Russian Difficult"?", "Is Korean Difficult?", etc - though certainly, as a well known polyglot, we already know NONE of them is difficult for you at all :), it is good to hear any particular hints or aspects or comment in learning these 20 languages you know....(perhaps you have touched on them though in other videos I believe :). The other aspect I think we want to hear from you is how can you MAINTAIN these languages as once you haven't used them for awhile (and you keep learning new ones), it is easy to forget.....how can you refresh and maintain them? Thanks.
I understand 6 foreign languages : English, German, French, Arabic, Russian, and Mandarin with different levels of abilities. I'm a 53 year-old Indonesian.. I speak German pretty well, and been to Munich to learn German. It was long time ago that I reached B2 level, nearly C1. But it seems that my German deteriorates. I also learned French and Russian, but I don't speak those languages very well like my German, and of course, my fluent English. Now I'm learning Mandarin, and I believe my Mandarin reached A2 or B1 level, because I got Hsk-3 in October 2019. The problem is maintaining the ability. Once you get the B level, you start to be fed up with the language you have learned, unless you have a very high motivation and specific purpose to learn the language. And after that the next question is whether you can maintain the level that has been attained. I reached B2 or even almost C1 in German long time ago, but now it seems that I can only answer relatively correct the B1 level. My German deteriorates...!! as for mr. Steve Kaufmann, not all of his 20 languages are B or C levels. He admitted once that he forgot Rumanian, one of his 20 languages of his list, but if he wants to refresh it, it's easier. now he's busy learning Arabic and Persian as his 19th and 20th languages.. that's also my French. I don't use French anymore, but once in my life I learned it long time ago, and had some opportunities to speak French and also Russian with native speakers. I had more opportunities to speak German, because most Dutch who came to Indonesia spoke German, and I often spoke German with them in the past, some 20 - 30 years ago.. language is a matter of habits and habituation ...
I am Chinese Australian. To be honest, Chinese is an easy language to me compared to the other languages that I learn e.g. Japanese, German, Korean etc. It has simple grammar and no conjugation stuff. You should really try learning Chinese and explore the culture. And the Chinese people are generally friendly and supportive to foreign language learners.
Exactly! Chinese doesn’t have conjugation and grammar is straightforward. As a professor of linguistics and Chinese, I keep telling everyone to encourage them to take Chinese. I hope more students will take my classes as now after Covid I decide offer all my university courses to anyone anywhere.
When i learned Chinese in Nanjing, i would take local taxis rides all around the city just to learn from the locals how to speak 😂 it was a cheap, fun and challenging way to learn the language 🚕 🇨🇳 😮
I don't understand the Nanjing accent 😂, especially when the local Nanjing people speak Nankinese. I feel it is really different from Mandarin 😂 BTW. I'm a Beijinger in the North of China. Beijing accent is very close to Mandarin. In other words, the only Chinese I can understand is Mandarin😂
@@alanlin4940 Nanjinese is also technically considered Mandarin, just a different flavor of Mandarin. As opposed to Shanghainese, which is usually considered Wu Chinese instead of Mandarin.
@@hrtz9796 I see. I just checked it on Wikipedia. Literally, Nanjinese is also named Lower Yangtze Mandarin. So maybe that's why you think it is one type of Mandarin. But if you ask Chinese people if 淮语 (南京方言 or Nanjinese) is 普通话 (Mandarin), how will they answer? LOL
As a Chinese, I can guarantee Chinese people think Mandarin is based on the northern dialect, in fact mostly based on Chende, Hebei.
Besides, on Wikipedia: The Nanjing dialect, also known as Nankinese, or Nanjing Mandarin, is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Nanjing, China. It is part of the Jianghuai group of Chinese varieties.
@@hrtz9796 Also, you said, Nanjinese is just a different flavor of Mandarin. You're kidding, right? I don't know if you know Chinese. Honestly, some dialects of China are really hard to understand for other Chinese people who don't live there.
I am learning Chinese right now and I have to say, passion is the key. I spend a lot of hours every day practicing the characters. I figured that if I don't know the words then I don't know the language. So I focus on learning the characters and listening to audio clips online. Listening to you speak - I feel so motivated! I want to be able to speak like you one day.
Good job. Maybe at the beginning you can accumulate certain everyday phrases so you feel like you can use Chinese. And there is a systematic strategy to teach and learn Chinese characters rather than pure repetition of copying characters. I use Kungfu and zoomba methods to teach Chinese characters because emphasizing 11 basic stoke orders and repetitive components are critical in effective character teaching.
I'm native English speaker but am Chinese. Iast few years I started to relearn the language as I find I could barely speak it. Now I feel I am pretty good and have no problems understanding. It's possible with intense passion.
Hi Steve, I'm from China and I think your pronunciation is pretty good and accurate. I feel a bit surprised because most of the western people(no offence, what I mean is non-native speaker) might have some problem of pronunciation when speaking in Chinese but you don't have at all. It's a really good talk. Hope everything goes well with you.
"At all" 代表毫无错误。。。His tones were wrong for many words though.. Still really impressive and much much better than other Mandarin learners. And his content was great as well
Steve's put in a lot of hours into Mandarin, but as he's no longer using it professionally or living in China, and he's also studying new languages, I would imagine his Mandarin to not be perfect. Still, it's very impressive!
Any language difficulty level can be considered in many different parameters: 1. Grammar 2. Pronunciation 3. Syntax 4. Lexicon 5. Proficiency level It is difficult to say if a language is easy or not. It also depends from one’s own way to feel a given language. In any case Hungarian or Finnish are the most difficult
Native Finn who learns Chinese here. Yes Chinese is hard when you learn it but after that there isn't anything hard anymore. Speaking Finnish as a non native is a everyday struggle because it's almost impossible to never make case mistakes, and YES they have to be correct to be understood.
For the record, i am a chinese. I grew up speaking and hearing Mandarin Chinese. Steve's Mandarin Chinese is good. He is the real deal. If you never saw his face, you would have mistaken him for a chinese person. Thanks Steve!
Quite encouraging,, after 2 and half years of learning Mandarin, even not being so young anymore and having so many distractions in French and English, I can now understand ～95% of this with help of Chinese subtitles. 🥳
Nice talk but there’s a tiny problem in the subtitles: 文法 should correspond to “grammar/grammatical(ly)”, instead of to “culture/cultural(ly)”. Thanks for your efforts, Steve.
Your Chinese mandarin is great. The Chinese grammar is not complicated, no verb conjugations. My personal advice is to talk passionately to your Chinese friends or partners, don't worry too much about grammar. Finally your Chinese level is getting higher.
Yes, when we talk, we don't care about grammar either. Languages are just tools of communication, and when you practice frequently, you will get used to it quickly:)
Hah, I was led into a false sense of security. They told me there was no gender, and then they introduced measure words, which effectively act like just about a hundred genders.
Summary 1st part: 世上無難事 只怕有心人 2nd part: 因性施學 聚沙成塔 3rd part: 字繁如海 浪音如磬 津色如花 4th part: 識得煙如海 退卻難似天 BTW 9:27 and 9:51 What Mr Kaufmann said was 文法--grammar, instead of 文化--culture which is indeed not easy at all and you can clearly read this mistake in the context. Please check and correct the subtitle mistakes.
I think the subjective factor in learning Chinese can be greatly improved when you have already *self-taught* one or two other foreign languages. You not only have the tools to language learning and understanding how your brain processes and memorizes most effectively, but perhaps most importantly you get that basic confidence in yourself that you can in fact learn and speak another language at a high level that is highly motivating and encouraging, especially when the objective factors are so intimidating.
nice pronunciation. i am a chinese, but he speaks more standard putonghua than i do as i was born and live in southern china. chinese is difficult to learn if the learner is not in a chinese-speaking environment. now chinese uses western linguistic grammar, but i think that is not what chinese is made. if some day we find out its real grammar, it would be easier for foreigners to learn it. it's best for anybody to learn a foreign language in its environment. but, about half a billion chinese people are leaning english in China. 非常好，发音清楚，标准。语调上有点外国口音。在中国学汉语肯定会容易一点。他说的内容，适合学任何语言的人。
As someone more or drifting away from an attempt at Japanese, the importance in intensity is spot on. As David Moser put it: "Now imagine that you, a learner of Chinese, have just the previous day encountered the Chinese word for "president" (总统 zǒngtǒng ) and want to write it. What processes do you go through in retrieving the word? Well, very often you just totally forget, with a forgetting that is both absolute and perfect in a way few things in this life are." Intensity helps combat the forgetting that is absolute and perfect. In the beginning stages especially, breaks are absolutely lethal to the ability to read sinographs.
I'm sure we all will be able to speak another language if we put enough effort to it 🔥 We just need 3 things: practice, practice, and more practice 😁 In my case, for getting more speaking practice, I've created my own English-speaking channel here 🙂😄 Thank you Steve for being the inspiration for me! 😌👍
Steve, you should make more videos in different languages to promote your belief. I am a language enthusiast myself. I understand the difficulties people now are facing while learning a new language. ... It's the thing that many teachers .... , especially native speakers who dun speak any other languages..... , have to look into ....
"xiansheng" actually is a Japanese word for “teacher”，and in Chinese we also have word “xiansheng” in same Chinese characters with Japanese word “xiansheng” but it is not used to indicate “teacher”. Instead, the word "laoshi" is for "teacher"
作为一个中文英文两个都懂的人来说我觉得中文最难的是要明白的字太多，直到现在我还在学。而英文则是文法，因为我是先学华文的，所以英文文法对我来说就是地狱 as a person who knows both chinese and english i think the hardest in chinese is that you need to know too many words, even now im still learning my chinese. and english i think the hardest is grammar, because i learn chinese earlier than english, grammar is just hell for me.
要写中文就要有办法认识字。现在也不需要写了，写是要记得到。Eg For those people don't like to write Using tooth- pick sticks to form 人‘ after that add a small stick 一 to 人 became 大 Add 二 to 人 became天 . Add two small sticks to 大 became头....买卖 灾火🔥火灭灾火土 太犬 头. From 人 ，move two sticks apart became 八入 then bend two sticks became 儿, add a small piece together to form 又叉 又 write using two u, u and add l, 出 凹 巾帼 离 山 巨 叵 匠 臣 尺层.using handphone software, as long write
Going to beihai china at the end of the year. My cousin stayed there for 2 years. She said no one spoke English in the area she lived in and she only seen English speakers twice. She came back to Atlanta different with a accent. Lol. She was forced to learn to survive lol. She teaches in China now.
Great stream Steve!... Please invest in the Outlier system, to boost what you know already in Chinese language it will help you make better connections. kind regards WF Robinson
You're so amazing and talented at speaking multiple languages, especially tricky languages such as Chinese which is obviously the world's hardest one to learn. To be honest, I'm not interested in learning Chinese because learning it or mastering it was never my conviction because I don't like Chinese or any Asian language such as Japanese or Korean which are tough as well. Apparently learning Asian languages is a big hurdle because it's so challenging and represents an unwanted headache at the way how we see it. The Chinese language whether it is Mandarin or Cantonese has tones which are quite complicated to handle when it comes to speak that language unless you know well why you're learning it. It couldn't miss its famous characters of course, they're difficult drawings to make and it requires lots of concentration, time and motivation to do so, otherwise it would be impossible to do that. I don't think its grammar is pretty easy, but anyway I have no idea about it. I've always been setting realistic goals such as learning western languages such as English, French or Italian which are easy to pick up through so many language learning materials on the internet, so I don't have any intention to choose Asian languages like those I mentioned above because they'll never be useful to me for the rest of my life I think. Perhaps one day I could change my opinion or so-called misconception I have about the non-western languages but I guess that will never happen.
I am a native Chinese who want to go abroad to English speaking countries for bachelor degree,If there is anyone wants to learn mandarin chinese,leave a message to become friends,make progress together.
Characters and tones are difficult part, grammar is much easy, if your goal is to speak it and understand it when people talking, things get easier, once saw a man on Chinese TV understand the language but not including characters, got shaked at that moment.
The hardest part about Chinese is listening comprehension, by far. With German, in a little over a year of diligent study I could casually listen to news and interviews with pretty good comprehension, with Japanese it took about two years, and Chinese still isn't quite there after eight years. Every language glosses over or flat out omits syllables all the time when spoken, but when many conjunctions and verbs are only one syllable, syllables that can sound very similar to other words nonetheless (think of that "shi" poem 施氏食獅史 for example), in order to understand a Chinese sentence it's almost a necessity to have already heard and studied the sentence previously- it will be challenging to flat out frustrating to understand a sentence on the first listen because your ear will not be used to knowing how the sounds will change in that specific sentence structure, even if you're used to the sounds of the language overall. Then there are also what I call the "three friends" (三个朋友）whose meaning you'll have to catch as a group, being almost impossible to infer meaning from individually. They're used much more in spoken/colloquial Chinese, for example: 犯不着 说不着 吃不上 吃不消 怪不得 不对劲 弄不清 I'd wager that if one understands any of those, it's because they've already encountered and studied them. The ROI of Chinese listening is closer to 1:1 than any other language, I think. I love it, but learning sentence A means you've learned sentence A, and most likely won't have much carry over to sentence B. Other languages allow for far more inductive reasoning and extrapolation based upon previous knowledge, in my experience anyways.
I feel like people don’t talk about this. Between my experience with Arabic, Korean, Chinese and Spanish. Chinese has the hardest listening comprehension by far and it’s not even close
I'm Chinese by heritage and I can't speak the language! I can understand bits of it; mandarin and to a lesser extend Cantonese and hokkien. The struggle is real lol
@@Thelinguist you're exactly right! Every time when I attempt to speak the language, I can feel I'm causing native speakers to bleed through their ears. Lol! Mandarin is definitely in the checklist for me to acquire
As a Chinese who was born in Beijing I can confirm with you guys, this mr speaks really legit Chinese with the nearly 0 "foreign accent", it is really incredible to see such a fluent foreign Chinese speaker.
To learn Chinese with Pinyin would be much easier, once you learn Pinyin you can type Chinese characters easily by practice. Learning how to handwrite Chinese characters is too time-consuming and thus unnecessarily at all. Moreover, with Pinyin, you could learn the Chinese pronunciations quickly and improve your oral-aural communication with Chinese too. As soon as you learned how to roughly understand Chinese orally, learning Chinese reading would be much easier through your Pinyin typing practice. In terms of learning the headache 4 different tones, there is no shortcut at all but daily practice and copy of local Chinese talking. The good thing is that even if you often speak Chinese with the wrong tones, people could still understand in most cases since you are anyway an expat in the Chinese eyes.
@Reece Selby It's 汉字 not 汉子 which means a man actually. That's why I said learning reading is more critical for a foreigner to learn Chinese quickly, as you may learn Chinese more efficiently through reading instead of writing. With a computer, you may easily type Chinese characters by spelling, while it would cost you much much more time to learn how to correctly handwrite Chinese characters.
I had a difficult time learning Spanish. much harder than I was expecting, and it took longer (2 years). Chinese is going to be one ass kicker if I ever decide to learn it
I've lived in Spain for 10 years and my Spanish is still crap in comparison to my Chinese, Japanese and Russian simply because I love those languages but really don't like Spanish. It really is a motivation thing
For every character, there are three pieces of information to learn: The character itself, the meaning and the sound. In languages with a phonetic alphabet, you get the sound more or less for free when you read it (depending on how cosistent the pronunciation is).
I think why Chinese character hard to learn for the westerners is because the (Alphabet) of Chinese is so different from linear one dimension writing system like english or spanish.First Chinese writing system is not linear one.English writing system is like building one line of one layer houses.Chinese writing system is like building houses from 2 different spaces.thats why Westerners cant get used to it.
But you don't really, though. Firstly, most Chinese characters are pictophonetic anyway, which means that half the character tells you approximately how it's pronounced. But only approximately. However, although English has you write out the sounds, most of the time the way it is written is somewhat inaccurate to what it actually sounds like due to a whole slew of historical spellings and other influences. Like the example just above me. Dice does not at all resemble dais, and dais has a globbal stop so it's more like da'is, and the a in dice is different to the a in dais as well. Or things like cycle where the first c is pronounced s and the second one as k, and the infamous hidden a is here, too (saikle), and you just have to know this. Chinese seems to have been far more an exporter of words than an importer of them and that makes a huge difference.
Native Chinese writers spend at least 9 years on writing and recognizing characters. I think the foreigners could be more relaxed when learning the characters. Most of them learn faster than the native children. 中文母語人士學寫字認字也學了好幾年，應該入學第十年開始才會沒有「生字」，所以外國人覺得寫字很難很沮喪其實是沒有必要的，大部分外國人都學得比本國人快。
Chinese kids alread speak Chinese (they know many word and much grammar) by the time they start school, just like American kids know spoken English. It is harder to learn a written character if you don't already know the word's sound and meaning. American kids study writing in school, and already know most of the words when spoken.
If you are interested in 5,000 years of civilization, you will be interested in Chinese. If you want to understand the confucian classics, historical records, philosophical writings and miscellaneous works, if you don’t know Chinese and just read the translation, you won’t be able to fully appreciate everything expressed in the text. Connotation, if it is a skill, such as traditional Chinese medicine, it is impossible to learn if you do not know Chinese. This is why in Korea and Japan, they have conducted in-depth research on traditional Chinese medicine, but they have not produced a traditional Chinese medicine doctor. is an interesting question. 如果您对5千年的文明有兴趣，就会对中文有兴趣，如果您想了解经、史、子、集，这些如果不会中文只看翻译，就不能完全领略到文字里表达的全部内涵，如果是一门技能，比如中医，不会中文是学不会的，这是为什么在韩国，在日本，他们对中医有很深入的研究，但却没有产生一名中医医生的原因，这是一个很有趣的问题。
作為一個中國人，我只懂大約500個漢字，但我讀書時毫無問題，中文文法很簡單，幾乎不用思考 AS A CHINESE, I JUST KNOW ABOUT 500 CHINESE CHARACTERS. BUT THAT IS ENOUGH FOR READING BOOKS. THE CHINESE GRAMMAR IS SO EASY AND SO I DO NOT THINK TOO MUCH ABOUT THE CHINESE GRAMMAR
I've gotten through about 5-10 lessons in Pimsleur for Mandarin. On Duolingo I'm on level 15 (out of 25 total levels). I have two versions of the Assimil Chinese course. Objectively, I find the 3 main difficulties of learning Mandarin have to do with 1) the thousands of characters one must learn (as you mentioned), 2) the lexical distance from English, and 3) the tones (but Cantonese has more tones than the four Mandarin has). Side by side, Russian is harder than Mandarin. While the Cyrillic alphabet is easy to learn, it's the grammar (noun and adjective declensions) and verb prefixes which make Russian hard. Right now I'm concentrating on German. After a while I may go back to Mandarin or start learning Japanese, Arabic, or Turkish.
作為一個中國人，我沒有刻意學習中文的聲調，只要多聽多講，中文聲調自然學會 AS A CHINESE, I DO NOT LEARN THE TONES OF CHINESE LANGUAGE DELIBERATELY. I JUST "MORE LISTENING AND MORE TALKING", THAN YOU CAN LEARN THE TONES OF CHINESE LANGUAGE AUTOMATICALLY
By the way, I saw you used '激動‘ while the English caption shows ’passionate‘ (3:23)，I think you were supposed to say '熱情’？ "Have a passion in a language" is "對一門語言有熱情" but not "對一門語言有激動" - we don't use '激動' in this context :)
I really wanted to say 主动 take initiative. But since I rarely use Chinese, and the brain is a little woolier than it used to be perhaps, I kind of grasped at the wrong word.
Bonjour et merci pour votre vidéo, je souhaitais savoir si selon vous apprendre la langue chinoise par le biais des BD ( Manhua ) est une bonne chose ?
A Chinese coworker (we were Sanskritists) once recommended to me that I should learn Chinese, but I should either decide to learn the spoken language or the written language, and then the process would be very easy. He said that everyone he knows who made rapid strides in Chinese decided to only learn one or the other, and then they might fill the other side, but they would do so separately. I know there are well-respected others who go by this method, if in condensed form (that is the recommended tactic behind the "Remembering Hanzi" series, after all). It may just be my natural curiosity and wanting dense interconnected networks of information, but I always found the reasoning behind that kind of rigid compartmentalization a little extreme.
I started with the "Remembering the Hanzi" book, but after a few hundred it got silly. I was learning a little story for each character (IN ENGLISH) but I wasn't learning Chinese. The language is sentences, not just words. I switched to a typical course (online) which worked well for me.
Hello Steve! As a beginner I wonder if it is normal to get tired when practicing speaking mandarin ?😪 I get physically tired of speaking after 2,3 sentences. I try so hard to say all tones correctly that Im out of breath 😅. Is it something that gets easier with time? I am scared I will never speak Chinese fluently.
Hello as a fellow beginner in chinese I had this problem too, now I can talk for 1h max before becoming too tired so don’t give up it’s totally normal because the muscles of your mouth and your tongue aren’t used to the chinese pronunciation yet, but with time it will become easier and easier 😄
I had this with English in the beginning too, it was super exhausting making all unfamiliar sounds but like going to the gym you get better and better over time. :)
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Thank you!
If a Chinese toddler could speak the language reasonably well by the age of 3, how difficult can it be? Albert Einstein couldn't speak proper German by the age of 3. Isn't that more than sufficient proof that German is much harder to learn?
sou mocambicano, quero aprender mandarim , mas e muito dificil aqui... temos poucas pessoas que dao essa lingua ca.
Verdade kkkkkkkkkkkkkk as dificuldade são as pessoas que colocam 🎉🎉🎉
我靠中文发音说得真溜！The Chinese mandarin pronunciation is really fluent and natural like a native speaker! respect!
Wow!!! Amazing!!! As a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese and a teacher of Chinese as a foreign language, I have to say that your Mandarin fluency is soooo impressive!!! Accurate tones, excellent expressions, great collocations, amazing grammar & usage, without an accent!!! A truly inspiring video!!! Thank you so much for sharing!!!
我也觉得，说得太好了😀
@@ChinesewithDrStella 嗯嗯！如果是学生的话，那A+没问题的啦！
I would expect no less from someone who started learning it half a century ago and has used it professionally while living in the country where it's spoken. What would really impress me if someone were to speak like that with only 3 months into the language from scratch. Still an accomplishment though! What really impresses me is that he's still studying new languages.
@@bhutchin1996 That's true! Exactly!
@@bhutchin1996that is simply not possible to speak like that within three months of learning Chinese from scratch (including his this level of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary usage, not to mention learning of characters) It just doesn’t exist such kind of phenomenon
So your expectations don’t go with reality
Maybe you just have no idea of what the real process of learning Chinese language is
You can speak Mandarin so fluently. It is so impressive. I have shared your video with my child. Hopefully he will learn something from you.
It would be great if you can have a series of "Is XXX Difficult?", i.e, "Is French Difficult?", "Is Arabic Difficult?", "Is Russian Difficult"?", "Is Korean Difficult?", etc - though certainly, as a well known polyglot, we already know NONE of them is difficult for you at all :), it is good to hear any particular hints or aspects or comment in learning these 20 languages you know....(perhaps you have touched on them though in other videos I believe :). The other aspect I think we want to hear from you is how can you MAINTAIN these languages as once you haven't used them for awhile (and you keep learning new ones), it is easy to forget.....how can you refresh and maintain them? Thanks.
It is the same difficulty for everyone, all that matters is your EFFORT
I understand 6 foreign languages : English, German, French, Arabic, Russian, and Mandarin with different levels of abilities.
I'm a 53 year-old Indonesian..
I speak German pretty well, and been to Munich to learn German.
It was long time ago that I reached B2 level, nearly C1.
But it seems that my German deteriorates.
I also learned French and Russian, but I don't speak those languages very well like my German, and of course, my fluent English.
Now I'm learning Mandarin, and I believe my Mandarin reached A2 or B1 level, because I got Hsk-3 in October 2019.
The problem is maintaining the ability.
Once you get the B level, you start to be fed up with the language you have learned, unless you have a very high motivation and specific purpose to learn the language.
And after that the next question is whether you can maintain the level that has been attained.
I reached B2 or even almost C1 in German long time ago, but now it seems that I can only answer relatively correct the B1 level.
My German deteriorates...!!
as for mr. Steve Kaufmann, not all of his 20 languages are B or C levels.
He admitted once that he forgot Rumanian, one of his 20 languages of his list, but if he wants to refresh it, it's easier.
now he's busy learning Arabic and Persian as his 19th and 20th languages..
that's also my French.
I don't use French anymore, but once in my life I learned it long time ago, and had some opportunities to speak French and also Russian with native speakers.
I had more opportunities to speak German, because most Dutch who came to Indonesia spoke German, and I often spoke German with them in the past, some 20 - 30 years ago..
language is a matter of habits and habituation ...
@@ayi3455 О, Вы достойны восхищения! Так много знаете языков.
@@Юлияи-е6э
da...
izvinyite, ya nye download Cyrillic alphabet...
@@ayi3455 Ничего страшного! ))))
大家好！我在学汉语，我是墨西哥人， 新年快乐！🎉🎆🐯
(｡･∀･)ﾉﾞ
你的中文真棒，我最近也在学习西班牙语，但说的比你差远了😄
加油，我是中国人，努力你就会掌握中文，你的中文很棒，我现在也想学英文😅
你好，我是湖南人，加油！
@@xiaozhi. 哥，我是山西的，你多会开始自学？
I am Chinese Australian. To be honest, Chinese is an easy language to me compared to the other languages that I learn e.g. Japanese, German, Korean etc. It has simple grammar and no conjugation stuff. You should really try learning Chinese and explore the culture. And the Chinese people are generally friendly and supportive to foreign language learners.
那是因为你习惯中文，你换成英国人土生土长完全没有中文环境，你看他会不会和你有一样的想法
Exactly! Chinese doesn’t have conjugation and grammar is straightforward. As a professor of linguistics and Chinese, I keep telling everyone to encourage them to take Chinese. I hope more students will take my classes as now after Covid I decide offer all my university courses to anyone anywhere.
@@tommyma941 我不是个中国人, 我母语是英文. 小时候没有什么中文经历. 我19岁才开始学中文. 学中文之我已经学过了西班牙语和法语. 对我来说那俩都比中文难多了!
@@multishowtimer i agree with you,i am chinese
@@multishowtimer 仔细审题，我没说你是中国人。
When i learned Chinese in Nanjing, i would take local taxis rides all around the city just to learn from the locals how to speak 😂 it was a cheap, fun and challenging way to learn the language 🚕 🇨🇳 😮
I don't understand the Nanjing accent 😂, especially when the local Nanjing people speak Nankinese. I feel it is really different from Mandarin 😂
BTW. I'm a Beijinger in the North of China. Beijing accent is very close to Mandarin. In other words, the only Chinese I can understand is Mandarin😂
take taxis rides all around the city? no, it wasn't cheap!🤔
@@alanlin4940 Nanjinese is also technically considered Mandarin, just a different flavor of Mandarin. As opposed to Shanghainese, which is usually considered Wu Chinese instead of Mandarin.
@@hrtz9796 I see. I just checked it on Wikipedia. Literally, Nanjinese is also named Lower Yangtze Mandarin. So maybe that's why you think it is one type of Mandarin. But if you ask Chinese people if 淮语 (南京方言 or Nanjinese) is 普通话 (Mandarin), how will they answer? LOL
As a Chinese, I can guarantee Chinese people think Mandarin is based on the northern dialect, in fact mostly based on Chende, Hebei.
Besides, on Wikipedia:
The Nanjing dialect, also known as Nankinese, or Nanjing Mandarin, is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Nanjing, China. It is part of the Jianghuai group of Chinese varieties.
@@hrtz9796 Also, you said, Nanjinese is just a different flavor of Mandarin. You're kidding, right?
I don't know if you know Chinese. Honestly, some dialects of China are really hard to understand for other Chinese people who don't live there.
it's nice to hear how your voice changes in the different language
你的中文口音好好！！一开口我都惊呆了
I am learning Chinese right now and I have to say, passion is the key. I spend a lot of hours every day practicing the characters. I figured that if I don't know the words then I don't know the language. So I focus on learning the characters and listening to audio clips online. Listening to you speak - I feel so motivated! I want to be able to speak like you one day.
Good job. Maybe at the beginning you can accumulate certain everyday phrases so you feel like you can use Chinese. And there is a systematic strategy to teach and learn Chinese characters rather than pure repetition of copying characters. I use Kungfu and zoomba methods to teach Chinese characters because emphasizing 11 basic stoke orders and repetitive components are critical in effective character teaching.
I'm native English speaker but am Chinese. Iast few years I started to relearn the language as I find I could barely speak it. Now I feel I am pretty good and have no problems understanding. It's possible with intense passion.
i can teach you chinese for free
Hows going now with your chinense?
Hi Steve, I'm from China and I think your pronunciation is pretty good and accurate. I feel a bit surprised because most of the western people(no offence, what I mean is non-native speaker) might have some problem of pronunciation when speaking in Chinese but you don't have at all. It's a really good talk. Hope everything goes well with you.
谁让你翻墙的，来把你电话留一下
"At all" 代表毫无错误。。。His tones were wrong for many words though.. Still really impressive and much much better than other Mandarin learners. And his content was great as well
He still feels a bit off tone and you can tell his a foreigner if you listen carefully. But other than that he speaks well.
Steve's put in a lot of hours into Mandarin, but as he's no longer using it professionally or living in China, and he's also studying new languages, I would imagine his Mandarin to not be perfect. Still, it's very impressive!
@@bhutchin1996 ask him to study thai
Any language difficulty level can be considered in many different parameters:
1. Grammar
2. Pronunciation
3. Syntax
4. Lexicon
5. Proficiency level
It is difficult to say if a language is easy or not. It also depends from one’s own way to feel a given language.
In any case Hungarian or Finnish are the most difficult
I wouldn't agree with Hungarian and Finnish
Absolutely. Hungarians and Finnish created the hardest languages in the world so they could flex on everyone else who can't speak their language.
Native Finn who learns Chinese here. Yes Chinese is hard when you learn it but after that there isn't anything hard anymore. Speaking Finnish as a non native is a everyday struggle because it's almost impossible to never make case mistakes, and YES they have to be correct to be understood.
其实就是我感觉您的普通话发音很标准❤
I love it when mr Steve speaks Japanese and Chinese!
yes, his accent really talent and good.
我觉得学习中文最难的部分是写汉字因为中文有很多汉字。谢谢你， Steve。我很喜欢你的视频因为你所有的视频都很鼓励。加油。
It was also very difficult for me to get used to the fact that there are no spaces between words
您的汉字很不错。
可以使用给小孩子用的那种 “字帖”（淘宝上有卖） 来练习中文的书写，从 笔画（点横竖撇等等） 到偏旁（勹灬冫等等）然后到 汉字
你这中文写的也是顶呱呱呀
@@moranag209 actually there are no punctuation marks in ancient Chinese writings
For the record, i am a chinese. I grew up speaking and hearing Mandarin Chinese. Steve's Mandarin Chinese is good. He is the real deal. If you never saw his face, you would have mistaken him for a chinese person. Thanks Steve!
nah, he's good but his tones are wrong a fifth of the time
Oh my god, it's so inspiring! Your Chinese is so good!!
Quite encouraging,, after 2 and half years of learning Mandarin, even not being so young anymore and having so many distractions in French and English, I can now understand ～95% of this with help of Chinese subtitles. 🥳
Nice talk but there’s a tiny problem in the subtitles: 文法 should correspond to “grammar/grammatical(ly)”, instead of to “culture/cultural(ly)”. Thanks for your efforts, Steve.
문법 文法
Impressive video! I didnt know Steve spoke Chinese so well
wow, amazing, I happened to find this video, I just watched one of your English videos, and surprisingly to find that you speak really good Chinese!!
名詞不用分單數與複數，動詞不用管第幾人稱、現在式、過去式，代名詞不用分性別。
不错不错。我母语是中文，另外会英语和法语，非常喜欢语言，尤其花了很多时间研究语音。
這還只是識字，但寫文章的又是另外一種講究；詞句可組成一種想像情景，別忘了還有文言文、白話文、現代文區分。文法上也有基本的主謂賓量等構造，通體還是講究的多用，只要句子通順基本可看；現代中國人自己的文法都是顛三倒四的，只是通讀不美觀，意思還是能懂
您的中文非常非常流利，一定是下了苦功夫的，感谢您喜欢中文🇨🇳❤️
Your Chinese mandarin is great. The Chinese grammar is not complicated, no verb conjugations. My personal advice is to talk passionately to your Chinese friends or partners, don't worry too much about grammar. Finally your Chinese level is getting higher.
Yes, when we talk, we don't care about grammar either. Languages are just tools of communication, and when you practice frequently, you will get used to it quickly:)
Hah, I was led into a false sense of security. They told me there was no gender, and then they introduced measure words, which effectively act like just about a hundred genders.
老师您的中文讲得非常地道👍
Summary
1st part: 世上無難事 只怕有心人
2nd part: 因性施學 聚沙成塔
3rd part: 字繁如海 浪音如磬 津色如花
4th part: 識得煙如海 退卻難似天
BTW 9:27 and 9:51
What Mr Kaufmann said was 文法--grammar, instead of 文化--culture which is indeed not easy at all and you can clearly read this mistake in the context. Please check and correct the subtitle mistakes.
你這個summary不是華人的話，應該看不懂，哈哈，這也是我不認同中文簡單的原因
@@a72546600我都看不太懂了😂😂
I think the subjective factor in learning Chinese can be greatly improved when you have already *self-taught* one or two other foreign languages. You not only have the tools to language learning and understanding how your brain processes and memorizes most effectively, but perhaps most importantly you get that basic confidence in yourself that you can in fact learn and speak another language at a high level that is highly motivating and encouraging, especially when the objective factors are so intimidating.
Mandarin is just... something else.❤
我做为一个中国人觉得Steve中文说得很好！一个小问题，障碍一般不做动词，只做名词，比如造成障碍
可以換成阻礙
不過，在佛教用語當中，障礙也相當程度被作為動詞使用。
不过可以听懂，看起来词汇量更关键
这你就「不懂」了，可以说你「着相」了。中文名词和动词的界限非常模糊，很多动词和名词可以相互使用，只不过看说起来是否习惯，因为汉语有个最大的区别在于，是否说的习惯，说不习惯就会逐渐放弃。比如「吃饭」，说「吃了」，其实老一辈会说「餐了」，餐本身是名词，这里名词作动词。成语「风餐露宿」，「餐」也是动词，可「餐」做动词说的很不习惯，就逐渐放弃了。还有很多地方，都是名词作动词，就是听着是不是习惯罢了。
@@keli4775 一本正經地胡說八道就是你了吧
nice pronunciation. i am a chinese, but he speaks more standard putonghua than i do as i was born and live in southern china.
chinese is difficult to learn if the learner is not in a chinese-speaking environment. now chinese uses western linguistic grammar, but i think that is not what chinese is made. if some day we find out its real grammar, it would be easier for foreigners to learn it.
it's best for anybody to learn a foreign language in its environment. but, about half a billion chinese people are leaning english in China.
非常好，发音清楚，标准。语调上有点外国口音。在中国学汉语肯定会容易一点。他说的内容，适合学任何语言的人。
as chinese,i think your chinese is so great😱
respekt，您的中文说的太好了，闭上眼睛，不太感觉得到您是外国人，个别声调有一点点感觉，汉字博大精深，汉字是中国人智慧的结晶
我是中国人，正在努力学习英语，计划以后去美国留学，可是英语以及其他拉丁语系对我们来说也是非常困难，首先是发音，因为我们的母语是单音节，而英语是多音节，我们中国很多的声带就发不出来，或者说难以读正确，还有语法的使用也很难懂，用词的顺序是不一样。很多时候很想直接去英语国家学习，可是条件又不符合拿不到签证。
你的目的是嫁给老外吗
As someone more or drifting away from an attempt at Japanese, the importance in intensity is spot on. As David Moser put it:
"Now imagine that you, a learner of Chinese, have just the previous day encountered the Chinese word for "president" (总统 zǒngtǒng ) and want to write it. What processes do you go through in retrieving the word? Well, very often you just totally forget, with a forgetting that is both absolute and perfect in a way few things in this life are."
Intensity helps combat the forgetting that is absolute and perfect. In the beginning stages especially, breaks are absolutely lethal to the ability to read sinographs.
中文语法很简单，对外国人来说最难的应该是声调和汉字的书写吧，繁体中文更让人头痛。学习语言最重要的就是语言环境，当你每天都浸泡在某一语言环境当中自然而然就会掌握它了
I'm sure we all will be able to speak another language if we put enough effort to it 🔥 We just need 3 things: practice, practice, and more practice 😁 In my case, for getting more speaking practice, I've created my own English-speaking channel here 🙂😄 Thank you Steve for being the inspiration for me! 😌👍
Steve, you should make more videos in different languages to promote your belief. I am a language enthusiast myself. I understand the difficulties people now are facing while learning a new language. ... It's the thing that many teachers .... , especially native speakers who dun speak any other languages..... , have to look into ....
"xiansheng" actually is a Japanese word for “teacher”，and in Chinese we also have word “xiansheng” in same Chinese characters with Japanese word “xiansheng” but it is not used to indicate “teacher”. Instead, the word "laoshi" is for "teacher"
I was really surprised just how easy mandarin was when I studied it. It really shouldn't be ranked as one of the most difficult languages to learn.
What about arabic lang
中文难也是真的难…我五年级语文考试阅读理解扣光了，考49分，但是后来换了个老师，讲的更细一些，现在暂时全班第一
哪个国家？
作为一个中文英文两个都懂的人来说我觉得中文最难的是要明白的字太多，直到现在我还在学。而英文则是文法，因为我是先学华文的，所以英文文法对我来说就是地狱
as a person who knows both chinese and english i think the hardest in chinese is that you need to know too many words, even now im still learning my chinese. and english i think the hardest is grammar, because i learn chinese earlier than english, grammar is just hell for me.
文言文更地獄
@@a72546600
古汉文并不难😊
最常用的300个汉字的含义过去2000年基本没有什么变化！
例如：土，火，木，人，等等
现在中文没有像我们刚刚开始学的那么难，看纸质书比电子书难得多，看纸质书碰到陌生的字，要慢慢查纸质字典，数笔画，要查部首，要查字，要翻到第几页，很苦读，所以这就是为什么大家都认为中文那么难学，现在有电子书可以随时立刻参考几种不同的材料资源，了解生字怎么念，怎么用，如虎添翼似的比较快就学会了
你很厲害👍
会用如虎添翼👍
这如虎添翼用的很有灵魂😂
你的中文很棒！但是如虎添翼和似的这俩词不能一起连用，因为意思重复了，而且我们常常说，有你的帮助，他们做成这个事情简直如虎添翼。因为你的中文很好，所以我可能对你比较严苛了。
@@christinehunter7123
其实也可以用。比如：有你的帮助，我简直如虎添翼似的。我觉得问题出在“如虎添翼”与“比较快学会”放在一起有点怪，因为“如虎添翼”一般不作为某个动作的副词
Realy I don't understand but continue watching ❤️😂😂
I am currently learning and caught a couple of words.
There are CC in English.
@@markchavez738 I know but I still heard them
要写中文就要有办法认识字。现在也不需要写了，写是要记得到。Eg For those people don't like to write
Using tooth- pick sticks to form 人‘ after that add a small stick 一 to 人 became 大 Add 二 to 人 became天 . Add two small sticks to 大 became头....买卖 灾火🔥火灭灾火土 太犬 头. From 人 ，move two sticks apart became 八入 then bend two sticks became 儿, add a small piece together to form 又叉 又
write using two u, u and add l, 出 凹
巾帼 离 山 巨 叵 匠 臣 尺层.using handphone software, as long write
Going to beihai china at the end of the year. My cousin stayed there for 2 years. She said no one spoke English in the area she lived in and she only seen English speakers twice. She came back to Atlanta different with a accent. Lol. She was forced to learn to survive lol. She teaches in China now.
Great stream Steve!... Please invest in the Outlier system, to boost what you know already in Chinese language it will help you make better connections. kind regards WF Robinson
我小童 的时候我和我爸爸喜欢看见香港的电影.
我看过射雕英雄, 射雕回来, 打龙刀, 等等.
我也记得中国的朝代.
可是, 那个时候 1967-1998, 中文是禁止.
每个人能学习 英语, 德语, 法语, 日语, 没问题..
可是, 如果想学习汉语或者俄罗语, 就是限量.
而且被怀疑. 应该政府记录.
学习汉语才Gus Dur 的 时间 , 我们的总统1999-2001,有多参加者.
当我青年的时候我学习德语和法语.
我也已经去过欧洲为了学习那样语言.
现在当我希望去中国为了学习汉语, 忽然发生了冠状病毒. 因此, 不能去外国.
我只看见RUclips 的频道, 也努力写汉语在这里.
希望我能跟一个人说话.
谢谢....
你好棒呀！加油！
@@houniao123
谢谢..!!
加油！如果你想找个人一起说中文的话欢迎来找我！
你是那个地方的人?
@@sebastiand3472
我是印尼人 ...
I am a chinese and eager to improve my spoken English,I am envy your spoken chinese!
You're so amazing and talented at speaking multiple languages, especially tricky languages such as Chinese which is obviously the world's hardest one to learn. To be honest, I'm not interested in learning Chinese because learning it or mastering it was never my conviction because I don't like Chinese or any Asian language such as Japanese or Korean which are tough as well. Apparently learning Asian languages is a big hurdle because it's so challenging and represents an unwanted headache at the way how we see it. The Chinese language whether it is Mandarin or Cantonese has tones which are quite complicated to handle when it comes to speak that language unless you know well why you're learning it. It couldn't miss its famous characters of course, they're difficult drawings to make and it requires lots of concentration, time and motivation to do so, otherwise it would be impossible to do that. I don't think its grammar is pretty easy, but anyway I have no idea about it. I've always been setting realistic goals such as learning western languages such as English, French or Italian which are easy to pick up through so many language learning materials on the internet, so I don't have any intention to choose Asian languages like those I mentioned above because they'll never be useful to me for the rest of my life I think. Perhaps one day I could change my opinion or so-called misconception I have about the non-western languages but I guess that will never happen.
我想不到我自己会理解百分之九十的这个视频的内容。当然我还是一边看字幕一边听他说话。只是有一些词汇我不知道。比如客观、主观、因素等等。
我总觉得我的中文还是很差。不够信心。好像我要多多看这种视频🥺、为了提高了我的好态度。🙌
谢谢老师
I am a native Chinese who want to go abroad to English speaking countries for bachelor degree,If there is anyone wants to learn mandarin chinese,leave a message to become friends,make progress together.
作为一个学过中文的俄罗斯人我要说：
1. 最主要的问题不是中文的难度， 而是现在大多数中国人都会英文 （ 而且有很大的可能性他们的英文比你的中文好多（ 至少比我的中文好）
所以就算你来到中国， 除了老阿姨， 和一些taxi司机，你根本没有人练习（ 你这么长时间学习的） 普通话。
2. 对大多数会英文的中国人跟老外讲普通话货会有点尴尬， 因为他们听不太习外国人的口音，好多事情可能会听不。（ 也不太好意思让你再说一遍） 😂 这可能带来你们之间一些小误会。
所以我觉得除非你超级喜欢中国文化， 电视剧， 音乐， 你根本不需要在中文上花（浪费）自己的时间
（ 这就是我的意见， 可能会又一些人不同意吧😂 ）
不过最后我还是要说我非常的respect Mr. Steve Kaufmann.
Стив, если Вы это читаете, то вот вам моё virtual handshake 🤝
其实很多人也不知道遇到的外国人是想说中文还是英语，因为很多外国人来中国并不会中文，但如果你强烈要求用中文对话，应该都会帮助你练习的。
我認同，其實學中文根本沒用，除非你真的非常喜歡中國文化，不然根本浪費時間，而且老外會覺得中文很簡單，很大一部份是因為大部分的人根本不想糾正外國人，加上外國人對中文的認知，只有很粗淺皮毛的現代漢語。
Great video thanks for that! Each language has just their own specialties and characteristics.
You are right ,sir.
Characters and tones are difficult part, grammar is much easy, if your goal is to speak it and understand it when people talking, things get easier, once saw a man on Chinese TV understand the language but not including characters, got shaked at that moment.
You are amaaaaazing!!!
The hardest part about Chinese is listening comprehension, by far. With German, in a little over a year of diligent study I could casually listen to news and interviews with pretty good comprehension, with Japanese it took about two years, and Chinese still isn't quite there after eight years.
Every language glosses over or flat out omits syllables all the time when spoken, but when many conjunctions and verbs are only one syllable, syllables that can sound very similar to other words nonetheless (think of that "shi" poem 施氏食獅史 for example), in order to understand a Chinese sentence it's almost a necessity to have already heard and studied the sentence previously- it will be challenging to flat out frustrating to understand a sentence on the first listen because your ear will not be used to knowing how the sounds will change in that specific sentence structure, even if you're used to the sounds of the language overall.
Then there are also what I call the "three friends" (三个朋友）whose meaning you'll have to catch as a group, being almost impossible to infer meaning from individually. They're used much more in spoken/colloquial Chinese, for example:
犯不着
说不着
吃不上
吃不消
怪不得
不对劲
弄不清
I'd wager that if one understands any of those, it's because they've already encountered and studied them. The ROI of Chinese listening is closer to 1:1 than any other language, I think. I love it, but learning sentence A means you've learned sentence A, and most likely won't have much carry over to sentence B. Other languages allow for far more inductive reasoning and extrapolation based upon previous knowledge, in my experience anyways.
I feel like people don’t talk about this. Between my experience with Arabic, Korean, Chinese and Spanish. Chinese has the hardest listening comprehension by far and it’s not even close
@@aftersea2450 hardest
是的！我和你想的一样。 我是从三年学习汉语的， 可是我还不能听懂中文。好难过 。。。。。。 但我每天要练习练习 =）
@@sabrinabelarte1110 what about listening to something with a transcript ?
I am trying it... we'll see if it works 💪
I'm Chinese by heritage and I can't speak the language! I can understand bits of it; mandarin and to a lesser extend Cantonese and hokkien. The struggle is real lol
Ancestry doesn't provide any advantages when it comes to language learning unless it motivates you, which of course can be big.
@@Thelinguist you're exactly right! Every time when I attempt to speak the language, I can feel I'm causing native speakers to bleed through their ears. Lol! Mandarin is definitely in the checklist for me to acquire
As a Chinese who was born in Beijing I can confirm with you guys, this mr speaks really legit Chinese with the nearly 0 "foreign accent", it is really incredible to see such a fluent foreign Chinese speaker.
滚
滚
你中文说的是真的流畅！我还觉得英语难😭
这个好厉害呀- 基本上听不出来英文口音 :O as a bilingual person this is very impressive
To learn Chinese with Pinyin would be much easier, once you learn Pinyin you can type Chinese characters easily by practice. Learning how to handwrite Chinese characters is too time-consuming and thus unnecessarily at all. Moreover, with Pinyin, you could learn the Chinese pronunciations quickly and improve your oral-aural communication with Chinese too. As soon as you learned how to roughly understand Chinese orally, learning Chinese reading would be much easier through your Pinyin typing practice. In terms of learning the headache 4 different tones, there is no shortcut at all but daily practice and copy of local Chinese talking. The good thing is that even if you often speak Chinese with the wrong tones, people could still understand in most cases since you are anyway an expat in the Chinese eyes.
@Reece Selby It's 汉字 not 汉子 which means a man actually. That's why I said learning reading is more critical for a foreigner to learn Chinese quickly, as you may learn Chinese more efficiently through reading instead of writing. With a computer, you may easily type Chinese characters by spelling, while it would cost you much much more time to learn how to correctly handwrite Chinese characters.
@Reece Selby Good luck, mate.
I had a difficult time learning Spanish. much harder than I was expecting, and it took longer (2 years). Chinese is going to be one ass kicker if I ever decide to learn it
Maybe after having experience already learning a new language, it will be easier !
@@aphr0d I hope so!
I've lived in Spain for 10 years and my Spanish is still crap in comparison to my Chinese, Japanese and Russian simply because I love those languages but really don't like Spanish. It really is a motivation thing
Only two years....
Tal vez ni te importamos los hispanos, el español no es tan difícil, aunque eso depende de tú lengua materna.
For every character, there are three pieces of information to learn: The character itself, the meaning and the sound.
In languages with a phonetic alphabet, you get the sound more or less for free when you read it (depending on how cosistent the pronunciation is).
phonetic character
I think why Chinese character hard to learn for the westerners is because the (Alphabet) of Chinese is so different from linear one dimension writing system like english or spanish.First Chinese writing system is not linear one.English writing system is like building one line of one layer houses.Chinese writing system is like building houses from 2 different spaces.thats why Westerners cant get used to it.
But you don't really, though. Firstly, most Chinese characters are pictophonetic anyway, which means that half the character tells you approximately how it's pronounced. But only approximately. However, although English has you write out the sounds, most of the time the way it is written is somewhat inaccurate to what it actually sounds like due to a whole slew of historical spellings and other influences.
Like the example just above me. Dice does not at all resemble dais, and dais has a globbal stop so it's more like da'is, and the a in dice is different to the a in dais as well. Or things like cycle where the first c is pronounced s and the second one as k, and the infamous hidden a is here, too (saikle), and you just have to know this.
Chinese seems to have been far more an exporter of words than an importer of them and that makes a huge difference.
your Chinese is stunning .....from a Chinese native
Native Chinese writers spend at least 9 years on writing and recognizing characters. I think the foreigners could be more relaxed when learning the characters. Most of them learn faster than the native children.
中文母語人士學寫字認字也學了好幾年，應該入學第十年開始才會沒有「生字」，所以外國人覺得寫字很難很沮喪其實是沒有必要的，大部分外國人都學得比本國人快。
Chinese kids alread speak Chinese (they know many word and much grammar) by the time they start school, just like American kids know spoken English. It is harder to learn a written character if you don't already know the word's sound and meaning. American kids study writing in school, and already know most of the words when spoken.
In Taiwan we don’t do reading & wetting classes in Kindergarten. I don’t care how China does it.@@tedc9682
If you are interested in 5,000 years of civilization, you will be interested in Chinese. If you want to understand the confucian classics, historical records, philosophical writings and miscellaneous works, if you don’t know Chinese and just read the translation, you won’t be able to fully appreciate everything expressed in the text. Connotation, if it is a skill, such as traditional Chinese medicine, it is impossible to learn if you do not know Chinese. This is why in Korea and Japan, they have conducted in-depth research on traditional Chinese medicine, but they have not produced a traditional Chinese medicine doctor. is an interesting question.
如果您对5千年的文明有兴趣，就会对中文有兴趣，如果您想了解经、史、子、集，这些如果不会中文只看翻译，就不能完全领略到文字里表达的全部内涵，如果是一门技能，比如中医，不会中文是学不会的，这是为什么在韩国，在日本，他们对中医有很深入的研究，但却没有产生一名中医医生的原因，这是一个很有趣的问题。
发音和用词都很恰当，太厉害了
作为一个中国人来说，老师你的发音真的很标准。
说得真棒👍 我们学 English 也觉得难呢
Attitude is EVERYTHING.
首先，steve先生的中文真的很棒，但是我觉得给非中文语种的人科普中文是否难学，用中文真的合适么~
作為一個中國人，我只懂大約500個漢字，但我讀書時毫無問題，中文文法很簡單，幾乎不用思考
AS A CHINESE, I JUST KNOW ABOUT 500 CHINESE CHARACTERS. BUT THAT IS ENOUGH FOR READING BOOKS. THE CHINESE GRAMMAR IS SO EASY AND SO I DO NOT THINK TOO MUCH ABOUT THE CHINESE GRAMMAR
Chinese is not really difficult to learn, until we see Tanggut language which the characters are way too complicated to write.
佩服佩服，说到"词"，还有儿化音。
you are AMAZING MR STEVE best regards
中文是世界上最大的語言。全球人口中，５分之一的人說中文。英文是世界上最普遍的語言。外語當中，學英文的人最多。我們不得不學這兩門外語。中文固然很難，可是中國方言是難上加難的。我現在自學台語(福建話)。這個語言有８個聲調，此外還有十分複雜的變調規則。聽說Steve先生能說粵語。所以我佩服他。
台灣稱為台語，來源自大陸福建地區俗稱閩南話
台語除了台灣之外，在新加坡和馬來西亞等東南亞國家也能通用。我有許多檳城朋友。他們都說十分流利的福建話。
I'm currently studying 中文 in school,I hope to accomplish learning some of Chinese mandarin.
😂
加油(ง •̀_•́)ง
I nothing understood 😆 but it was interesting. I have to learn it!
Hi man,
You are aaaamazing 👍👍👍👍👍👍
哇 很棒啊 你的中文说的非常好 from China中国
I've gotten through about 5-10 lessons in Pimsleur for Mandarin. On Duolingo I'm on level 15 (out of 25 total levels). I have two versions of the Assimil Chinese course. Objectively, I find the 3 main difficulties of learning Mandarin have to do with 1) the thousands of characters one must learn (as you mentioned), 2) the lexical distance from English, and 3) the tones (but Cantonese has more tones than the four Mandarin has). Side by side, Russian is harder than Mandarin. While the Cyrillic alphabet is easy to learn, it's the grammar (noun and adjective declensions) and verb prefixes which make Russian hard. Right now I'm concentrating on German. After a while I may go back to Mandarin or start learning Japanese, Arabic, or Turkish.
Servus und viel Spaß beim Deutsch lernen!
spoken Chinese actually is one of the easiest languages to learn the Chinese language just like procedure codes
haha,it's so easy.
還挺意外的，你會的詞彙比我想像中的還多很多，一些比較少見的詞彙你都知道，不過也有些比較簡單的詞彙用的不太好就是了
OMG 你的中文真棒，发音真不错。
You're a master. Complimenti davvero
作為一個中國人，我沒有刻意學習中文的聲調，只要多聽多講，中文聲調自然學會
AS A CHINESE, I DO NOT LEARN THE TONES OF CHINESE LANGUAGE DELIBERATELY. I JUST "MORE LISTENING AND MORE TALKING", THAN YOU CAN LEARN THE TONES OF CHINESE LANGUAGE AUTOMATICALLY
No you can’t. 因爲你是一個土生土長的中國人，所以中文的發音早就已經被消化在你的腦袋裡頭啦
去年我开始了学习中文自己。今天我在HSK4。我没有老师还同学。非常容易。
----去年我开始自学中文，现在通过了HSK4考试，我没有老师和同学，我觉得不难学。
纠正一下
你是一个好人。太谢谢你。我自学了。
@@飞哥inThailand 嚴格來說是我去年。。。。 不是去年我中文的語法是 STVO。而且應該是HSK4級
讲的非常好非常标准
By the way, I saw you used '激動‘ while the English caption shows ’passionate‘ (3:23)，I think you were supposed to say '熱情’？ "Have a passion in a language" is "對一門語言有熱情" but not "對一門語言有激動" - we don't use '激動' in this context :)
I really wanted to say 主动 take initiative. But since I rarely use Chinese, and the brain is a little woolier than it used to be perhaps, I kind of grasped at the wrong word.
@@Thelinguist probably similar meaning, one would only take an initiative when he is passionate about something :)
@@Thelinguist Mr. Kaufmann您好，我觉得这里您也可以用动机（Motivation）这个词，也很符合语境。您说的我很赞同，世上无难事，只怕有心人，如果真的想学就没有什么难的语言。
@@TCFung0101 I’m curious do you not care about English grammar when you’re studying English?
@@zankkai208動機跟Motivation還是有稍微不一樣的connotation
Steve , make a video about georgian language, please.
Bonjour et merci pour votre vidéo, je souhaitais savoir si selon vous apprendre la langue chinoise par le biais des BD ( Manhua ) est une bonne chose ?
hello Steve.
您是伟大👍
说的很对，教授，我订阅了
A Chinese coworker (we were Sanskritists) once recommended to me that I should learn Chinese, but I should either decide to learn the spoken language or the written language, and then the process would be very easy. He said that everyone he knows who made rapid strides in Chinese decided to only learn one or the other, and then they might fill the other side, but they would do so separately.
I know there are well-respected others who go by this method, if in condensed form (that is the recommended tactic behind the "Remembering Hanzi" series, after all). It may just be my natural curiosity and wanting dense interconnected networks of information, but I always found the reasoning behind that kind of rigid compartmentalization a little extreme.
I started with the "Remembering the Hanzi" book, but after a few hundred it got silly. I was learning a little story for each character (IN ENGLISH) but I wasn't learning Chinese. The language is sentences, not just words. I switched to a typical course (online) which worked well for me.
您的中文太棒了，可以说完全没有口音，很标准
说得非常好！
你中文已经很不错了👍
Hello Steve! As a beginner I wonder if it is normal to get tired when practicing speaking mandarin ?😪 I get physically tired of speaking after 2,3 sentences. I try so hard to say all tones correctly that Im out of breath 😅. Is it something that gets easier with time? I am scared I will never speak Chinese fluently.
Hello as a fellow beginner in chinese I had this problem too, now I can talk for 1h max before becoming too tired so don’t give up it’s totally normal because the muscles of your mouth and your tongue aren’t used to the chinese pronunciation yet, but with time it will become easier and easier 😄
Try singing Mandarin songs, it helps
I had this with English in the beginning too, it was super exhausting making all unfamiliar sounds but like going to the gym you get better and better over time. :)
加油
come on. You can do it.