3:52 食人鱼=Fish that can eat humans (Eat+Human+Fish) 10:42 个 is not a measure word but a quantity marker, so it cannot replace any measure word with a strong sense of unit (in other words, for most of the nouns that we do need a measure word in English cannot be replaced by 个).
My experience is starting is very hard. But once you get to intermediate-advance level it becomes easy. Anyways, if you have persistence and passion nothing is too difficult.
Chinese American here, I honestly believe Chinese is one of the easiest languages, if not, the easiest language to learn; 1, no change forms since the characters remain the same at all times;2, the grammar is waaaay simpler than other languages. 3, characters are challenging at the beginning but keep in mind you only need 2000-3000 to be able to read and write very good in most cases;
Cambodian African languages are most easy you can use 100 words you can say and read anything like English but Chinese know 3k words you can talk about Chinese food alone over 3k words like what seasoning veggies fruit sea food ingredients but if you want talk Vietnamese food you need to know another 3k words and if you want talk about American food then you need another 3k words and if you want talk about politics then you need learn another 3k words, very easy best writing system you need remember over 30k words to talk about anything, very easy. For English language you need to know 100 character to be able read and write anything, too hard, that's English language is not popular but Chinese everybody use Chinese for communication business technology politic science spelling and sound. You are too smart Chinese.
My tips as a pretty much native speaker would be 1) learn the tones and basic vowels 2) learn pin yin 3) start learning characters By learning pin yin YOUR LIFE WILL BE SO MUCH EASIER, you will know how to read the words with pin yin. It’s basically English for how to read it with the tones.
As Mandarin words are unchanged for at least 2000 years since the start of the Li script (隶书）, learning Mandarin opens a door to have quick access to ancient literatures. Chinese primary students can easily recite poems from Tang dynasty, some 1300 years ago. This is an advantage that I don't think many other languages have. By the way, if your knowledge of Chinese words is good enough, you can even read the old literature from Japan, Korea and Vietnam, as they are mainly written in Chinese characters.
Very interesting. There was a time when I was discouraged from learning Chinese being presented with the tones and failing to grasp minuite differences between them at first try but later on I concluded that it simply needs more training of my ear not used to tonal languages and recently have been thinking about giving this a second chance. Surely my brain is wired around extensive conjugation- based systems but actually more ideogram based languages are fascinating and tonal languages are very melodic, so I think it might be a great advanture for anyone who enjoys foreign languages to acquire at least some Chinese. Plus yes, Chinese civilization has such a long history, after all modern day administration has been invented there, being internally diverse China actually has had fewer military conflicts than any other country or region of the world ,what in itself is quite facinating ,this is why I think even if its not the easiest thing for the Western mind it's worthwile. After all now I see that languages I speak from childhood must be wway more harder for native speakers of Chinese than Chinese may ever be to me, so why not? If the West is ever supposed to communicate better with China without a massive language barrier I can at least test how much I can do on my own in this regard. I only regret that there is such scarcity of resources for independent western learners but I believe that if there is a will, there is a way.
The catch is that old literature is written in Classical Chinese, which can be quite different from daily conversation, upon which contemporary writing is based. Technically the character set remains unchanged but the classical texts tend to be much more concise, use rare words, and have transforms like using nouns as verbs. Kids in China are taught to understand some Classical Chinese but few are expected to master it. Also, Mainland China now uses the simplified form of characters, which is different from the traditional form. Pronunciations have shifted over time and space, causing some poems to lose their rhymes when read now.
@@grantyalekids in China are taught classical texts and are supposed to master it, as the high school enrollment test, high school graduation test, as well as college entrance exam all require substantial testing on classical poetry and essays. Using simplified characters and modern standard mandarin provides better access and makes little hinderance to interpreting and appreciating classics. Experienced Chinese teachers would explain ancient pronunciation and writing to help students understand classical texts.
@@MrJerryTAO I’m sure that’s true but the original comment implies that learning Mandarin provides “quick access” to ancient literature, and the context of the video is targeting foreign learners of Mandarin. As a non-native Mandarin student, I have my doubts, especially when you consider that many foreign students learn simplified characters rather than traditional. I believe what you said is true for children in China who have access to so many other cultural reference points but, for a foreigner, it is unlikely that you would be able to sit down and comprehend an ancient document.
@@johnorsomeone4609 actually as a Mandarin speaker, simplified/traditional doesn't actually play a big role in reading ancient texts because 1. Most simplified characters (sc) look similar to traditional ones (tc) 2. Even if you don't learn tc, you will be able recognize it because you are often exposed to it. 3. The biggest difference between modern chinese ancient texts lies in vocab and grammar, not orthography. Sc/tc is just a difference in orthography so an educated sc learner will be able to read ancient texts better than an uneducated tc learner. 4. Because sc/tc is an issue of orthography, conversion of ancient texts to sc is trivial and no information is lost unless the writer is doing some visual wordplay. 5. Ancient texts also use variant characters that are neither sc/tc and those cases would catch anyone by surprise. That being said, I agree that such material is beyond what most people want to learn chinese for anyway.
I've been studying Chinese fairly intensively for the last 3-4 years, and living in Taiwan for most of that time. For me the hardest thing (apart from listening comprehension) is the number of synonyms and near-synonyms. It's a bit like English, where you will often find a group of words that have basically the same meaning, but slightly different nuances or usages (e.g. "change", "alter", "amend", "adjust" etc.). Chinese has the same issue, but it's so much worse than English. The amount of vocabulary you need to learn to become really fluent and literate is massive...
It can't be that hard, no? Not a professional, but my interpretation is that Chinese words are composite from 1 to many characters, if you get the meaning of individual characters, you get the meaning of the word.
I'm not saying Chinese is easy, but as someone who has been learning Japanese for a couple years and is basically fluent in it, Chinese seems like a breath of fresh air
How do you go about memorizing words with theirs tones? There's just so much. I've been studying Japanese for like 4 or 5 years and I'm very comfortable with it in terms of things I don't know but Chinese seems like a whole mess of words going by. And some of these kanji are unrecognizable
Japanese words are longer, Chinese words are short, and many words have the exact sound and tone, you can only understand them in context. Well, I am trying to learn Chinese, Japanese could be my next target, but after just a few audios, that was my impression.
I am an English learner, and Chinese is my native language. In my opinion, the most challenging aspect of Chinese is the abundance of idioms and ancient allusions. With over 3,000 years of written civilization history, a multitude of ancient stories and fables have become deeply ingrained in the Chinese language and cannot be separated. Foreign friends learning Chinese may find it very challenging (perhaps Japanese or Korean speakers might find it somewhat easier). When I was learning English, I found that references to ancient Greek or Roman stories, for example, did not frequently appear in the writings of ordinary people. In contrast, in Chinese, similar allusions not only appear in the works of intellectuals but also abound in the colloquial conversations of the illiterate. This is what I mean by internalization into the Chinese language.
I’ve been learning Chinese for more than 25 years, studied abroad in China, and married into a Chinese family. I think the learning curve at the beginning can be quite difficult with the tones and writing. However, I’ve seen many of my friends mastering oral Chinese very well and far faster than reading/writing. For me as someone who’s studied for such a long time, Chinese gets ridiculously difficult as a non-native learner is when you reached the native Chinese level where you’re slammed with idioms, ancient poetic references, ancient sayings, slangs, couplets and what not. In other words, you’ve caught up to the level where you’re supposed to understand Chinese as a native Chinese speaker which can be extremely difficult. Even for Chinese speakers, they may find it difficult to understand. Also, writing at a native Chinese level is also difficult and almost requires you to re-think how you learned Chinese as a non-native speaker, otherwise your writing will sound like it was written by a foreigner.
Its actually the opposite. The starting is the hardest, but once you get near native level (Which I have) it becomes easy. Yes, of course you would come across some phrases and words you haven't heard of now and then but since you already understand 99% (or more) of what is said, just reinforcing the 1% becomes easy.
I'm fluent in Mandarin. I work in the language. I can guarantee it is difficult and worlds apart from learning a romantic language. The grammar is not hard but if you want to become fully fluent and not be continuously frustrated because your level of Chinese is limited, you'll need 7-10myears living in China, learning and using everyday.
Depends upon your goals. I'm talking about being good at Chinese. You could communicate sufficiently after about 3 years, living in China and studying. @@adamdivine5642
食人鱼(piñaha) is more like "people-eating fish" because although 食 is generally paired with "物" (noun indicator) to form the word 食物(food), the ancient meaning for 食 is "eat", usually used as a verb
A few examples of 食 as to eat or eating: 食之无味弃之可惜 - tasteless to eat (but) a pity to discard ; 过午不食 no eating after noon ; 食言 literally to eat one's words, meaning to renege on promise
Not, in china 食人鱼literally means the fish which would eat human. We were taught that this kind of fish will chose human as its food, isn’t that a true fact in other countries? I really don’t know this fish could be an ingredient abroad.
I self learnt Chinese mandarin over lockdown from mid June 2019 using apps and youtube then I met my now Chinese wife because of that now im pretty much fluent because of lots of hard work and dedication.
I wouldn't say it's "easy" but it's less difficult obviously with practice and patience and I was just fortunate to meet Chinese people in the uk and my wife and because I to this day speak chinese at home it helps. You have to use it frequently and be immersed in it even if your not in China
@@Nath_davey , So you wouldn't recommend it to someone who wants to learn it for fun ? Also what sires did you use ? I'm really interested in learning mandarin
I am a Chinese and I think one of the harder thing to grasp is the arrangement of characters, especially shortened headlines. They swop the characters around very flexibly and you can easily misread it. I saw quite a number before but I can't think of an example now lol.
"shortened headlines"- and what does it work like preciesly? Maybe as a native speaker you could make a video or a series of videos on this aspect of chinese language? I think it would be benefitial to many people to learn what the core issue is in this regard and how to tackle this problem best while learning chinese.
@@agatastaniak7459 Hi there, I can't remember the examples but I can come up with a simple one. EG: 吃好饭 (chi hao fan), 好吃饭 (Hao chi fan) and 饭好吃 (fan hao chi). These sentences have different meanings just by swopping the characters around. It happens very often in Mandarin. You are right though, I did consider making videos before lol.
Chinese is a difficult language to get started with, but its ceiling can be very high. Once you're in the door, you can talk to almost anyone about anything without obstacles. In English, to get into a major, you have to learn more specialized vocabulary. In college, if a professor speaks English and you know nothing about a certain subject, you will have no idea what he is saying. If the professor is speaking Chinese, it's gonna be a totally different story. I'm learning the forest science and one lesson was about "mor" and "mull". If you didn't learn anyting about it, you will not know the meaning of these two word. "Mor" means "粗腐殖质". "粗" means "coarse" or "something that hasn't been processed"; "腐" means "decay" or "decompose"; "殖" means "produce" or "breed"; "质" means "matter" or "thing". Then you can get the meaning of "mor", which is "The coarse mater or things which produce by decomposition". Also, "细" means "fine". So, "mull", which is "细腐殖质" in Chinese, means "The fine mater or things which produce by decomposition". If you learn nothing about Chinese, you may not get what I'm trying to say. But I can tell you, if you've already got the rudiments of Chinese, you will easily know the meaning of each Chinese common character at the moment you see the character (Chinese primary school students can basically do this). This shows that the primary school students can easily understand what "mor" and "mull" is, even they know nothing about edaphology (soil science). And people cannot do things like this in English environment.
@@inorial5960 Yes, I know. But in terms of principle and origin, English is still more phonetic, and Chinese is more ideographic. Let me give you an example: do you know what are "mor", "mull" and "humus"? Humus refers to the colloidal substance formed by the decomposition and transformation of fresh organic matter by microorganisms. Humus in Chinese is "腐(decompose; decay)殖(generate; produce; form)质(matter; substance)" which can be directly translated to "matter formed by decomposition". "粗" means “coarse” and "细" means "fine". Then "粗腐殖质" means "coarse humus" which is "mor" and the "细腐殖质" means "fine humus" which is "mull". The characteristic of Chinese is that as long as people who have learned basic Chinese (primary and secondary school students in China, or foreign Chinese beginners), they can understand the basic meaning of all Chinese words (including professional terms in various fields), without the need for professional study.
Yes. The short answer is YES. Did not watch the video yet but I have been learning Chinese for over 3 years and I would not say the language is difficult per se. It is the fact that you need to get used to different concepts like characters, tones, no alphabet btw, similar sounds and same sounds but different words.
@@胡利奥 just because the grammar is quite simple, doesn’t mean it’s easy to understand or speak well. Pull up a new article written in Chinese or a line from a book and you’ll see what I’m talking about. The structure of the language is still far removed from English.
I have HSK 5 level of Chinese, which is pretty fluent for day to day usage. I would say that in my experience the speaking and listening is not hard- the grammar is relatively simple. Characters are strictly memorization for reading, hand writing is crazy hard, by far my weakest skill. Typing is okay if you know pinyin well and can recognize the characters. For my tones is a little overblown for the difficulty. I never bothered to memorize which tones words are, you simply learn them in the correct tone by the sound and hearing the difference the way native speaking talk within each tone.
@@Vhisper depending on your current level. Try to find some content with pinyin and characters at a basic level to watch and listen to. I’ve just started Olly’s story method for Spanish and find it pretty good, but can’t comment on the Chinese one. I learned in China, so it was much easier being immersed in it
I prefer learning Indo-European languages, I love finding similarities between languages and I think I would struggle with tones and with the Chinese writting system. I think it is doable to learn it, but it is like "how long will it take? Will it be worth it?". If you have a connection to the language or a strong reason to learn it, it might definetly be. But I feel like it is not the case for me.
True. If you're only learning casually, just for fun, it's usually best to go for a language similar to yours. But if you like the challenge, and find yourself enjoying the incredibly different cultures, there's no harm in at least dabbling in a difficult language. I plan on first learning Spanish, but wanna eventually go for something like Urdu lol
I remember when I was learning English (Spanish native speaker here) I was so excited and always willing to learn new things. A lot of years passed and I learned Brazilian Portuguese as you can image this was way easier and I learned it as a way to prepare to learn French. Long story short I tried German and didn't start with French. With both Portuguese and German I didn't feel the excitement of learning English. It was till I started to consume C-dramas last year that the excitement of learning a language sparked again. I've been studying Mandarin for a year and I don't plan to stop. I think is the level of variety of things to learn: a writing system, a phonetic writing system and recognize different tones(something related to music), that brings me joy all the time.
6:27 食人鱼 actually more accurately translates lit. to eat-human-fish (or man-eating fish). The use of 食 as a verb is actually an archaic use not often seen in modern Mandarin anymore but very much present in archaic idioms and terms, such as e.g. 天狗食日 (lit. heavenly dog eats the sun) for solar eclipse but also in some modernly used words, e.g. 肉食动物 (lit. meat eating animal) for carnivore. This verb usage of 食 is still maintained in e.g. Japanese which uses characters (Kanji) derived from ancient Chinese where 食べる is the infinitive for (to) eat.
食 is also the preferred form of the verb "to eat" used when writing southern chinese dialects. The cantonese (which retains a lot of grammatical forms and vocabulary from middle/classical chinese) word "sik" for example is represented with this character "si" in mandarin.
being a foreign chinese but grew up in other country...the hardest part for learning chinese is the use of tones....tones must be accurate or else the meaning will turn out differently....and you need quite a good memorization cause a character + character not all the time have the relevant meaning ....the usage sometimes is different as well
As a Chinese: I feel like Chinese is easier to learn than French: At least Mandarin has no tense, no conjugation, no articles , no gender. The only problems are: 1. Tones. But usually Chinese people can understand you when the tones are not perfect) 2. The writing system. You used to need to learn both writing and reading but nowadays you just type Pinyin in the smartphone and it has this AI boosted input system which will predict what words you need and you just pick them. So no more writing to learn.
As an English native speaker, I've learned both French and Chinese. It's easier to learn new vocabulary in French, as there is usually a related word in English to help you remember the vocabulary. However, the grammar and genders are really challenging to learn. The almost complete lack of grammar in Chinese means that when I say a Chinese sentence, it's more likely to be 100% correct than when I say a sentence in French. In French, it's likely that I mess up a gender or grammar conjugation. Ultimately, I think French is easier for English speakers, but that's only because French is a language relative of English. Arabic speakers might well find Chinese easier than French to learn.
@@jeremywhite92 Totally! I saw this joke once: How to buy things in Paris? Always ask to buy two so you don't need to remember the gender. Je voudrais deux baguettes, s'il vous plait!
@@allejandrodavid5222 It's better to get them correct but most people just need to ponder for some extra few seconds to understand. Plus when typing in the smartphone, the software usually needs no tone to predict what you want to write.
I disagree with you in the first one. In Chinese, tones REALLY matter. More than pronunciate correctly some letters like; zh, ch, sh, r and z, c, s. In the second one, in modern China you just need to know how to write your name in Chinese and the basic characters. And for reading at list 1,500 basic characters.
As a languages learning enthusiast when i started to learn mandarin gradually deeply, there are actually also lots of other difficulties coming out besides tones and characters, the endless homophones, deep idioms tons of which are used daily, subtle grammar, well yes chinese grammar is morphologically really simple with no inflections but that also makes its structure rules very subtle and highly contextual with many unclear rules than are hard to predict because they are not strict, and so on. I thought chinese would be easier when you learn more and more just like many say, in basic parts yes but there are too a lot of foreign new concepts gradually emerging and then you realized the learning won't have an end. So i would say if notbeing the hardest, this language is still definitely, if not one of, the most time-consuming you'll ever encounter.
Chinese culture looks really interesting. Trying to learn the tones doesn't put me off, however the thought of having to learn a new writing system does. If I was to rank languages that I want to learn next, Chinese comes third on list. I might give it a go later in life, after I've explored other languages first.
Simple answer is YES, it's difficult, I only spent my entire basic education until high-school learning this mind-f in school, but not impossible. Learning to speak is possible without ever learning to write. I speak another Chinese language , Hokkien, and I can't write in it. After high-school I can only write basic things probably for a pre-schooler because I have never written Chinese outside of school. I can speak and converse in basic things so it really depends on how far you want to take Chinese. It would take years, I studied it for 13 years 90 minutes per day from nursery to high-school, but if you lived in a Chinese speaking country then you'd get further than me in 13 years for sure.
I first studied Mandarin in 1974 at DLIFLC in Monterey California, before it was popular. We started out reading dialogue in Wade-Giles romanization, then gradually added characters into the text. Midway text was over half characters. By the end of the 47-week course it was all in characters.
When I was learning Mandarin, I could learn the characters quite well, but I would forget the tone of a word quite easily. If you're like this, maybe consider dropping hanzi-learning for a while and concentrate heavily on audio and piyin.
Piranha is more correctly translate as eat people fish in Mandarin, the word shi(食) is usually seem as a verb, unless its paired with a different character like the word wu(物), which means object then shi(食) together with wu(物) means food.
My method in learning Mandarin was brute reading and listening right after I mastered the phonology, no flashcards and almost no vocab notes because I hate those lol. Also, living in Taiwan helps a lot. Now I speak and read quite decently.
Personally I find the grammar quite challenging. I'm italian and I've been studying mandarin for five years now . I think that the super easy stripped-down chinese grammar its actually very insidious. Think about the words order. While its true that the basic order is subject-verb-object it is also true that the subject-object-verb order is quite common. Recently, I found out that in China grammar isn't even a thing. They do not study grammar at school and the word itself has been introduced quite recently. Chinese people are much more familiar with the 语感 (language-feeling) concept rather than with the grammar one. That's clearly because of the isolating nature of the language itself which as such rely much more on words order, intonation, particles and pragmatism rather than on grammatical rules, tenses and so on.
Yeah, it's typical. As a language becomes less synthetic, the word order tends to become stricter since there's less things like agreement in gender or conjugation to keep meaning clear.
I agree. I'm a native Chinese speaker. I think the so-called language feeling is very important in learning a foreign language, probably more so in learning Chinese, more important than grammar IMO. A baby learns to speak without learning grammar and an intelligence challenged individual has no problems speaking his native language without knowing anything about it's grammar. Many grammatical rules that an Indo-European language speaker is familiar with simply don't apply to Chinese. When he said Chinese has one tense, I would say Chinese doesn't have tenses, or conjugations or inflections or genders, and probably more precisely, those concepts simply don't apply to Chinese. Chinese is in general, S-V-O, sometimes not even that is true.
Another easy aspect that makes Chinese easy is that it's easy to find people to practice with, especially if you are living in china. If you speak chinese to chinese person, you are likely to get response in Chinese. Unlike Thailand where many people understand and speak English, you will be pushed to speak Mandarin while in China. Dutch and Swedish might seem easiee than Chinese, but in reality, getting to practice is way harder since most of the natives are not so compromising to let you speak with them in their language but reply to you in English
Obviously everyone is different but I think learning Korean first is nice because it's easy to read with little to no characters used. Then Japanese because it has a syllabary and similar grammar to Korean but you get introduced to characters and pitch accent. Then learn Chinese because you will have some character knowledge but then get the much easier grammar as you learn more characters and tones. I've only got the Korean and Japanese down right now so no comment on how great this will work but maybe one day I will try Chinese.
I started with Chinese and I found scarier to learn Japanese even though the pitch accent I believe works the same as in Spanish. My next will be probably Korean but with Germanic or Latin language in the middle.
Sounds like an interesting idea. I got to grasp some Korean as a kid but later on have forgottten it all. I had plans to learn some Korean when I will be older but maybe I should try to take Your advice and use as a shortcut as sequence of getting the basics first in Korean,then in Japanese and later on in Chinese? Do You have any additional advice for anyone crazy enough to try to do it precisely in this order that you suggest?
@@agatastaniak7459 Not necessarily. Maybe learning some hanja which are the character that a lot of Korean vocab is based on and would be related to kanji and Chinese characters (traditional not simplified.) If you've ever seen the Oriental Pearl channel, she did the reverse. Learned Chinese (mandarin I believe?) first, then Japanese, and she is learning Korean now. For me I just think its easiest to start with Korean even though grammar is harder than Chinese languages because at least with Korean after a day or few days you can read the sounds even if you dont know the meaning. That's been my struggle with Japanese. I can try to read but if I haven't learned the kanji yet I dont know how yo read it unless it has furigana printed above. However, I do like that one a kanji is learned it is actually easier to understand the meaning than Korean which has many homophones because there aren't unique characters anymore.
@Mordraug good to know, thanks. I've got Japanese on pause at the moment to focus on Spanish as one of my jobs I'm working with Spanish speakers, and then also working on Korean because I may be moving to Korea next fall. So I figure if so I may start learning Japanese again after moving to Korea and then I can easily take a trip over :D Been 8 years since I was in Japan for a short vacation.
Writing Chinese is way way hard (although remember that English spelling is pretty wacky too!). However, conversing in Mandarin, for me at least, hasn’t been too terribly difficult. I was able to get the basic vocabulary together, and go visit my now-wife in China, in just 5 months! The grammar, as you pointed out, is really simple. Another reason Mandarin is pretty easy to learn - one you alluded to, but did directly say - is that there are very few syllables to learn to pronounce. Excluding tones, the entire language only has about 400 possible syllables, and counting tones, it’s only around 1200, and those syllables are very regular in pronunciation! 1200 may sound like a lot but it’s actually very tiny; English has about that many syllables just counting those in the form of consonant-vowel-consonant alone, let alone syllables like “string” or “brought”! Yes, the hardest part is the tones, and as you correctly pointed out, the toughest part of that is *hearing them* reliably at normal-speed conversation. Imitating them is not a big deal. Measure words are quirky and amusing, but not a really bit deal to learn: you rarely use more than 个, 条, 张, 只, and 头. I’m surprised that the US State Department puts Chinese in the same category as Japanese. Although I don’t know any appreciable amount of Japanese, from what I do know if it, I’d expect it to be 2-3 times as hard to learn!
6:27 I think it depends on how you translate the word. It could mean food. But it can also mean eat. “進食”=eat. So, for Chinese it's more like "eating ppl fish" aka "fish that eat ppl"
While the argument is correct, your example is not: In 进食, 食 is still used as a noun as the word means to “put in food” when literally translated. The use of 食 as a verb however is an archaic use not often seen in modern Mandarin anymore but very much present in archaic idioms and terms, such as e.g. 天狗食日 (lit. heavenly dog eats the sun) for solar eclipse but also in some modernly used words, e.g. 肉食动物 (lit. meat eating animal) for carnivore. This verb usage of 食 is still maintained in e.g. Japanese which still uses characters (Kanji) derived from ancient Chinese where 食べる is the infinitive for (to) eat.
Multi-phonetic words, like "覺”, pronounced as "jiao" when carrying the meaning of "sleeping". But pronounced as "jueh" when it contains the meaning of "awareness" 睡覺jiao：sleeping 一覺jiao不醒：sleeping all the way through 覺jueh知：awareness 覺jueh悟：enlightenment
I was gonna say, I've only been studying for a bit, but I know how to recognize tones because I play guitar and playing an instrument kind of builds your ear to notice those things. Pronouncing the tones is different, but practice makes perfect. I honeslty don't know why people complain about them that much. Maybe the nervousness where it all goes away trying to speak to a native speaker, that's possible.
Thank you so much for this great video! My girlfriend speaks Mandarin and I want to try my hardest to learn it without her finding out until I'm able to communicate at a minimal level and surprise her that I've been doing this, because I love her so much 😂
As someone who has learning Mandarin for about 5 years in total, all I can say is that Mandarin is a monster to learn. A lot of learners overestimate their ability to speak [Check out the video on RUclips with Mark Zuckerberg speaking "fluent Mandarin" and you'll see what I mean] and write in Mandarin [n the comment section, I literally saw someone say Mandarin's grammar is simple and then make a grammatical error in the same sentence]. Mandarin grammar only becomes more difficult the more advanced you become. Mandarin demands TIME and dedication. As a casual hobby, you're not getting to the advanced level before the 10 year mark. Native speakers and new learners also often downplay tones, but think about if you were tasked with remembering 5 varying levels of tones for a set of 10,000 English words (ex: hello [rising tone], goodbye [falling tone]). Pretty absurd task even though it's your native language, right? Mandarin's tones THEMSELVES are not difficult, but memorizing to a high degree of accuracy the tones for 10,000+ words to be C1+ is behemoth task. A task that is much more easily accomplished by perpetual exposure for years to allow these sounds to be engrained deeply in your brain. In short, if a friend asked me if they should learn Mandarin, I would reply "no" without hesitation. I would say to that same friend that you could gain fluency in Spanish, French, and Portuguese in that same amount of time.
I am bilingual and am thinking about learning a third language. My advice to anyone wanting to learn a second language is this: don’t bother if you plan to avoid immersion learning.
What do u mean bilingual, so you speak a language and english? That's everybody fam, that's like going to a gym as a fat guy and start giving advice out
盐 = salt 严= strict 沿= along These characters have the same pronunciation. Chinese characters have no phonetic basis at all and require a lot of memorisation.
The younger you are, the better! I had a mother of one of my Kindergarteners come in to teach Mandarin. The children did MUCH better than me at age 63! I couldn’t differentiate between some of the tones, thus couldn’t replicate them.
Thank you for the video! I just have a few things to add if that’s okay… 3:53 To add to what Bryan Siew had already said, the 食人魚 for piranha literally means “human-eating fish” or “fish that eats humans.” It’s usually only at the EARLY beginnings when the learner might tear down a “word” into its constituent characters and attempt an understanding from this perspective only. As the learner progresses, they would come to understand that “食人” means human-eating or eating humans, and adding 魚 at the end then makes a lot of sense for a fish like the piranha. It’s similar to / simpler than learning for example phrasal verbs in English, at least for me: “Take,” ok fine, I could get. Then there’s “take up”, “take down”, “take in”, “take on”, etc. To me, those were so difficult to comprehend and let alone remember, perhaps akin to how 「食人魚」 made you feel 😂 Mandarin grammar/character usage can also trip one up in unexpected ways. During a stage where the learner hasn’t really familiarized themselves with what they’re saying vs. the characters vs. the grammar, a learner trying to greet someone with 「你好嗎？」 (nǐ hǎo mā?) might accidentally alter the ordering of those 3 sounds, to potentially offensively hilarious situations. And the fun REALLY begins when one comes across a word that might have various meanings, for example 「意思」 (Mandarin speakers you know what I’m talking about!): Examples: 什麼「意思」？ 不好「意思」！ 小「意思」 「意思意思」 有「意思」！ 沒「意思」 沒什麼「意思」 … 😂 Come to think of it, would you ever do a video on that? 😂 I could paste you the little story that showcases this.
I am a native Chinese speaker who studying English now,I got 6 points in the ielts test so I can do basic communication fluently.I want to find a native English speaker who want to study Chinese and we can help each other.
I’d recommend HSK Level 1-6 textbooks and audio recordings to beginners and learners at all levels. HSK, a pinyin abbreviation of Chinese level test, is a standard, progressive, and comprehensive learning and testing system specifically designed for learners of Chinese as a second language, suitable for academics, business, and hobby purposes. Its development received massive funding and delicate treatment, so learners can receive most accessible and reliable resources following the path. The most popular version of HSK textbooks has English instructions and interpretations, but there are quite many versions of HSK textbooks written and recorded in other languages. Thus, learning Chinese through HSK should not be difficult or pricy to start with. And passing an HSK test may get you some substantial scholarship and business and career opportunities to liquidate your Chinese skills ASAP. 😂
10:53 as Chinese it's just respectively easier to learn Korean, Japanese, Cantonese once you'd learned Han characters, the hanja/kanji may have slightly different writing way or meaning but still guessable
Yeah like i started learning Korean before mandarin and i didn't study properly and my Korean level might be a2 and mandarin a0 but i realized it there are so many similar words. And pinyin is just lifesaver. And it might be wonderful if mandarin written with pinyin like Vietnamese. idk I'm learning characters with association. And when i saw a character i know what it means but i don't know how to pronounce it. So it's just a double shift for me. I need to learn character and pronunciation and then i need to match them.
i truly believe that chinese students (as in those in china, singapore, hong kong, macau, and taiwan) do so well in PISA (an international assessment of students all over the world) is partially because of the language. aside from the writing system (which actually helps keep the nation together despite people speaking different "dialects" that are as diverse as european languages), chinese is a surprisingly efficient and simple language. there are just no frills with modern day chinese. after you master a certain number of characters, things start getting really easy. for example, literally no one has problems telling the different areas of medicine apart. even an illiterate can tell what a cardiologist just from the name because a cardiologist is called a heart doctor. i took a course on latin and greek prefixes and suffixes so i don't get lost in a US hospital but most people really don't know much about latin roots. here's another example. a week goes from day 1 to day 6 and then day of the day (okay, i see sunday as the last day of the week).they call day 7 day of the day coz of sunday. and the months are just month 1 all the way through month 12.
As a native Chinese speaker, I would think it is easy for non-native speakers to reach the level of daily use, but I would also say it is very difficult to speak this language at the native speaker level. This is because the grammar is not a thing at all. It is easy, however, it is not followed properly most of the time. What really matters is the culture, the dialect(tbh many of Chinese people are not able to speak Standard Mandarin very well), the language feeling and so many. Sometimes a minor detail could change the whole meaning of a sentence, and even a native speaker needs some time to react and understand. You need to be fully immersed in the culture to understand everything. And of course, for most of the time, it is unnecessary to speak at this level, and it would be way easier to learn.
Some misinterpretation about piranha fish. The three characters refer to eat-people-fish respectively in this context or people-eating fish, so it translates well. Many characters play multiple parts of speech with related meanings, so the meaning and part of speech of a character should be flexibly pinterpreted with the context.
It's easy if you can memorize or at least remember characters easily and write it easily. Once you get used to the written form of sentences, speaking and listening will be cheese. It's a lot easier than japanese. That I can tell. Even with the 4000 characters commonly used by Chinese versus the 2136 commonly used by the japanese. It's a pretty straightforward language. You don't need to make it prettier. Basic is fine.
I have studied to read (=understand) Chinese text, but as if it was Japanese text. This technique is called Kanbun Kundoku. It is possible to modify this technique and read Chinese text as if it was English text. Actually the syntax of Chinese and English are quite similar, while the syntax of Chinese and Japanese are very different.
Mandarin is easy. That means, if I can't learn it then it's my problem. And when I have a problem I can work on it and solve it. So the problem is not Mandarin, it's me. Tones? Actually you can ignore the tones. Simply memorize the sound from audio (and then use Pinyin from time to time to lookup something, or to type on the PC).
English is the third language I learnt alongside Arabic and my native language Kurdish and I was only able to learn it thanks to tv shows,videos,movies and cartoons i spent my time watching them
As an English speaker who learned Mandarin Chinese, I can assure everyone that it is one of the most grammatically simplest languages to master for any speakers of English, Spanish, French or German, and possibly for any speakers of Indo-European languages. For example, it only takes a few minutes to learn how to use each verbs in Mandarin regardless of tense or case. It's even easier than verbs in the English language because there are absolutely no conjugations or noun genders in Mandarin.
If you're good at imitation -- like copying an accent, you can learn the correct tones by just imitating what you're hearing. So a word in 2nd tone and 4th tones will then sound like different words to you.
some example：给你细说一下为什么可以载入史册。这是团体赛，五局三胜制，有男双，女双，男单，女单，混双。在这之前，前面已经打了三局了中国1：2落后于日本，也就意味着，这是个赛点局，输了中国队将无缘决赛，并且在第二小局也是以21:19小比分险胜一局，可以说是，奇迹中的奇迹了。在男双极地逆风翻盘后，后面女双士气大增（本来实力就很强劲）直接把比赛打成表演赛了。成功晋级 反过来，咱们越是兴旺发达，就越是像撅了它们祖坟一样[呲牙]我一一年的时候遇到几个向我传教的，我直接怼过去了，指着鼻子骂完以后，偷偷跟着它们，报警顺便给警察指路 现在倒是要警惕“血气方刚”的学生，大部分都是白纸但又有热忱，但又被三言两语就拐偏了，尤其是有些学识但不精的人。。我也是学生过来的，高中放学的路上没少和同学“针砭时弊”，大学倒活动参加的少了，只是现在回顾过去我庆幸我当时的“懒”。。好多活动和小讲座真是处心积虑
So, yes there's many characters to remember but being perfectly honest even native speakers don't remember everything (as is true in most languages). A lot of the scary examples given I've literally never seen outside this video and are brought up to prove a point that's not necessarily true (which is sort of pointed out in the vid but not entirely) Edit: Also quick correction that some natives don't realize either. Mandarin Chinese has 5, not 4 tones. There's a hidden silent tone that I can best describe as cutting the sound short, which tends to follow doubles of the same word or certain combinations like 媽媽 or 哥哥
Imagine if words in English consisted of random patterns of letters (eg., djfbc for house). You simply had to memorize the letter patern for each word. There would be some pattern recognition with some combination words but overall it would be very difficult.
As a native Chinese speaker that is quite fluent but doesn’t know every single word in the book, I can confirm that Chinese, or Mandarin, is pretty hard. 1. It has over 10,000 characters. I’m not kidding. Really. 2. The tones are relatively easy, but there are so many characters with the same tone and sound. And all it takes to make it a different word is a slight change of tone. 3. There are different dialects; Sichuan, Dongbei, Shanghainese, Beijing Mandarin and other specific dialects to specific regions, though there aren’t a lot. 4. There are many ways to say a single thing. In Chinese, 早上，早晨，and 早 are all ways to say the word “morning”. Yes, there are different ways to say “night” too: 晚上，傍晚. 5. One good thing about Chinese is that the grammar is EXTREMELY easy. 你好，raw translated is you good, but it just means hello. There are only three pronouns, that act as he, her, and it: 他，她，and 它. 6. Vocabulary is immense. Because it has more than 10,000 characters, and many, many, MANY variations used on those characters, to be a fluent Chinese speaker, you have to know at least 4,000 characters. 7. Writing Chinese is equal to giving yourself torture. A tiny stroke can make a word different. 鼻 or nose, can become a meaning less word simply by missing one of the slashes or forgetting to add the dot. And do not add the amount of time it takes to write a sentence; 你今天开心么？or “Are you happy today?” can take more then 30 seconds to write, compared to english, which usually takes around 15-25 seconds, if you are a good writer. 8. In the old days, Mandarin used to be written from right to left. And some buildings still do that. Good luck if you’re a tourist in a historical spot. You might see A LOT of old Chinese.
人要是行，干一行行一行 一行行行行行 要是不行，干一行不行一行 一行不行行行不行 translation: If someone is capable, he does one job, that job will be well done; every job that he does will be well done. If someone is not capable, he does one job, that job will get messed up; every job that he does will get messed up.
@proxypylon actually it makes more sense to a native if your say it then reading it in this particular case. the character 行 has different pronunciation for different meaning.
Oof olly, love the videos usually but we get it, story learning. Maybe stop cramming it in our faces as frequently? Makes me less interested in purchasing.
man, this video isn't even good :/ like, that first tone clip isn't even from mandarin.. i'm wondering how much research this guy even did? def makes me not trust the product at least. also i don't get why he said/people in general say "chinese doesn't have tenses". it's so misleading to learners when that's said, imo. that's not entirely this vids fault though because it is true, just misleading. also there's a bunch of tiny mistakes like his definition of radicals is wrong, there's a typo in the pinyin, neutral tone is represented with a dot too later which is just weird, ect.
@@benji272 i don’t believe the mandarin clip is wrong, the tones sounded right; also yeah idk why you put a dot to signify neutral tone, but then again it could help beginners sorta know and differentiate neutral from other tones? i would think
“食人鱼”or“食人魚” means 'the fish which eat human' or 'the man-eating fish'. The '食' do not mean 'food' but mean 'eat'. "食物" is the "food". "物" means "thing". "食物" means "the thing that can be eaten", which is "food". Actually, "piranha" will be translate as "水虎鱼" (Water, tiger and fish. It means the fishes that like tigers in water) or "食人鲳" ("食人" means "human-eating" and "鲳" means "Pampus" or "Pygocentrus"). Both these two phrase are trying to describe a fierce fish. In this video, it is an obvious translation error. And why not you make a video that can explain the differences between ideograms and phonics. I think this gonna be very intersting!
MEASURE WORDS FOR ANIMALS, SUCH AS A 隻 PIG, 2 隻 DUCKS=一隻豬，兩隻鴨 A 條 FISH, 2 條 WHALE=一條魚，兩條鯨魚 A 條 DINOSAUR, 3 隻 DINOSAUR=一條恐龍，三隻恐龍 A 頭 OX, 4 隻 COW=一頭公牛，4隻母牛
Tones in English might be hard for mandarin speakers as well. Most of us speak like robots if you don't know enough about English, we just use the first tone instead. But it doesn't exist in English. Tones are also very important, we might be able to understand but sometimes we won't.(We'll also know you're a foreigner) "個" is ok for mostly everything but we use others more often.
a difficulty I've run into is the sentence order. Sometimes it's Time - Subject and sometimes it's Subject - Time. Think 今天我... vs 我今天... any tips on when to use which order? This isn't the only example.
It depends on whether you care more about time or yourself. Of course, if you don't care about either, then either choice is fine. In most cases, you don't need to choose one deliberately. The Chinese will use the words contained in what you say. to understand what you mean
I just got your full 3 part Spanish course. I just wanted to say I think your website could use a small amount of work to make it a whole lot better. The Special Offers page is just a wall of text on a white background. If I didn't know the courses were good quality I would be hesitant based on the poor look of the website. Great content though!
One of my favourite things about Chinese are the funny slangs and idioms. 吹牛 （blow cow) means to brag. 吃醋（consume vinegar) means being jealous. 拍马屁(slap horse arse) means to bootlick someone.
Every language has tone Even if there is only one tone, it is also a tone.... English says it has no tone...But people from different countries have different accents when speaking English, which is largely due to the tone of voice Chinese children do not need to learn tones when learning Chinese. They just need to remember the pronunciation, which includes tones... Therefore, if a Chinese person has not received education, he may not know how many tones Chinese has, even if he can speak fluent Chinese So it is difficult for foreigners to speak Chinese intonation, which I cannot understand.. It is clear that as long as you hear any sound, you just pronounce it and everything is OK. However, foreigners do not follow the sound you hear.. This leads to the difficulty in learning tones..
Chinese spoken language is actually very easy, because the verbs do not change, the nouns do not change, and adjectives do not change, whatsoever. Even the order of words do not change for most of time... only the written language is really hard.
I find a lot of people get tripped up by pinyin. It's hard for them not to tripped up with what they think a letter *should* sound like, and what it does in pinyin. For example, pronouncing 'hen' in an English way. Once they get past that, then there's just rules of pinyin that you have to remember. For example, the 'u' in 'qu' is pronounced like ü, whereas the 'u' in 'ru' is pronounced like 'oo'. It's for these reasons, that I recommend people, even if they're not going to use it for other purposes such as typing, train their pronunciation with something like zhuyin (also called bopomofo). It's not a roman alphabet, so it is less likely to confuse them, and the phonetics are far more accurate and straight-forward. For example, it differentiates between the 'u' in 'qu' (ㄑㄩ) and 'ru' (ㄖㄨ) -- ㄩ is ü, and ㄨ is 'oo'. Pinyin is excellent for typing if you weren't raised on zhuyin, though.
Different sounds in French Latin as opposed to Spanish Latin. Mandarin and Cantonese are different Chinese languages, like French and Spanish are not Latin dialects. Chinese characters for one group; Latin letters for the other.
My advice: Learn to SPEAK Chinese. It's relatively easy, as Chinese has almost no grammar. Worry about Reading, and possibly Writing, considerably later. This is partially because the spread between speaking and writing in Chinese is one of the biggest difficulty jumps of any language. If you can speak Italian, you can likely read and write it for free. Not so with Chinese. So don't bother -- just learn to speak.
Chinese is NOT easy to speak. Just because the grammar is quite simple, doesn’t mean it’s easy to understand or speak well. Pull up a new article written in Chinese or a line from a book and you’ll see what I’m talking about. The structure of the language is still far removed from English. Besides, Chinese does have grammar. It have post positions, the word order in sentences shifts a lot, there’s lots of particles that modifies verbs, much of while has no equivalent in English. And most importantly, it has a massive alien vocabulary that’s nearly devoidly loanwords common in most indo-European languages like Spanish or French. Almost everyone I heard saying Chinese is easy or has no grammar has never read a book in language and realize how far removed it is from English.
@@matthewbitter532 I feel like you and OP have different points. You started off trying to argue for why Chinese isn't easy to speak and then went on about reading, which are different skills
I wonder how much easier Chinese will be if you've already learned Japanese. Seems they're really similar in a lot of aspects and even some vocab, so that's already a lot of concepts to get used to out of the way
If you are an English speaker, Mandarin Chinese syntax and grammar is closer to English than Japanese and it has no case marking or gender. A lot of people think that if you know Kanji, Chinese characters will be no problem, which is true, but know that not all Chinese characters have the same meanings or usages as their Kanji counterparts. For centuries, Japan has adopted Chinese characters and Kanji has really evolved into its own Japanese system. As far as pronunciation, I feel that Japanese is relatively easier to pick up than Mandarin which has certain consonants (i.e. j, q, x, r, and zhi, chi, shi) that can be hard to pin down as a non-native speaker. But do enough listening and you'll get it.
TL;DR it helps a lot with vocab Fluent in japanese, learning mandarin. It helps a lot with the vocab because many words are written the same and some characters are even pronounced similarly or the same! 开 kāi / kai 差 chā / sa 老 lăo / rou Some meanings or usages of words and characters that exist in Chinese but don't exist in English, also exist in Japanese. A bonus is that you really get to see how much Chinese has influenced Japanese, even below the surface. But that's about it.
Did you know "Chinese" is NOT actually a language? Hear the full story here👉🏼 ruclips.net/video/7As4NaOD_uM/видео.html
3:52
食人鱼=Fish that can eat humans (Eat+Human+Fish)
10:42
个 is not a measure word but a quantity marker, so it cannot replace any measure word with a strong sense of unit (in other words, for most of the nouns that we do need a measure word in English cannot be replaced by 个).
Neither is Mandarin. However, there is a dialect called Pǔtōnghuà.
Chinese is a group of related languages and dialects.
Besides Mandarin. Hokkien and Cantonese also popular.
在汉语中,不包括少数民族语言,大概有7~11种无法互通的语言,我会三种,普通话可以视为官话的一种标准版本
Chinese isn't easy, but wayyyyyyyyyyyy easier than you'd expect if you're motivated to learn.
I agree
My experience is starting is very hard. But once you get to intermediate-advance level it becomes easy. Anyways, if you have persistence and passion nothing is too difficult.
@@icyboy771z I know some Japanese and have learned around 1.5k kanji. Would it be easier for me?
@@mukunda33no idea as I don't speak Japanese. Probably just very little help tbh.
@@icyboy771z but, a word has a bunch of meanings, especially when you combine them
Chinese American here, I honestly believe Chinese is one of the easiest languages, if not, the easiest language to learn; 1, no change forms since the characters remain the same at all times;2, the grammar is waaaay simpler than other languages. 3, characters are challenging at the beginning but keep in mind you only need 2000-3000 to be able to read and write very good in most cases;
Cambodian African languages are most easy you can use 100 words you can say and read anything like English but Chinese know 3k words you can talk about Chinese food alone over 3k words like what seasoning veggies fruit sea food ingredients but if you want talk Vietnamese food you need to know another 3k words and if you want talk about American food then you need another 3k words and if you want talk about politics then you need learn another 3k words, very easy best writing system you need remember over 30k words to talk about anything, very easy. For English language you need to know 100 character to be able read and write anything, too hard, that's English language is not popular but Chinese everybody use Chinese for communication business technology politic science spelling and sound. You are too smart Chinese.
My tips as a pretty much native speaker would be
1) learn the tones and basic vowels
2) learn pin yin
3) start learning characters
By learning pin yin YOUR LIFE WILL BE SO MUCH EASIER, you will know how to read the words with pin yin. It’s basically English for how to read it with the tones.
As Mandarin words are unchanged for at least 2000 years since the start of the Li script (隶书）, learning Mandarin opens a door to have quick access to ancient literatures. Chinese primary students can easily recite poems from Tang dynasty, some 1300 years ago. This is an advantage that I don't think many other languages have. By the way, if your knowledge of Chinese words is good enough, you can even read the old literature from Japan, Korea and Vietnam, as they are mainly written in Chinese characters.
Very interesting. There was a time when I was discouraged from learning Chinese being presented with the tones and failing to grasp minuite differences between them at first try but later on I concluded that it simply needs more training of my ear not used to tonal languages and recently have been thinking about giving this a second chance. Surely my brain is wired around extensive conjugation- based systems but actually more ideogram based languages are fascinating and tonal languages are very melodic, so I think it might be a great advanture for anyone who enjoys foreign languages to acquire at least some Chinese. Plus yes, Chinese civilization has such a long history, after all modern day administration has been invented there, being internally diverse China actually has had fewer military conflicts than any other country or region of the world ,what in itself is quite facinating ,this is why I think even if its not the easiest thing for the Western mind it's worthwile. After all now I see that languages I speak from childhood must be wway more harder for native speakers of Chinese than Chinese may ever be to me, so why not? If the West is ever supposed to communicate better with China without a massive language barrier I can at least test how much I can do on my own in this regard. I only regret that there is such scarcity of resources for independent western learners but I believe that if there is a will, there is a way.
The catch is that old literature is written in Classical Chinese, which can be quite different from daily conversation, upon which contemporary writing is based. Technically the character set remains unchanged but the classical texts tend to be much more concise, use rare words, and have transforms like using nouns as verbs. Kids in China are taught to understand some Classical Chinese but few are expected to master it.
Also, Mainland China now uses the simplified form of characters, which is different from the traditional form.
Pronunciations have shifted over time and space, causing some poems to lose their rhymes when read now.
@@grantyalekids in China are taught classical texts and are supposed to master it, as the high school enrollment test, high school graduation test, as well as college entrance exam all require substantial testing on classical poetry and essays. Using simplified characters and modern standard mandarin provides better access and makes little hinderance to interpreting and appreciating classics. Experienced Chinese teachers would explain ancient pronunciation and writing to help students understand classical texts.
@@MrJerryTAO I’m sure that’s true but the original comment implies that learning Mandarin provides “quick access” to ancient literature, and the context of the video is targeting foreign learners of Mandarin. As a non-native Mandarin student, I have my doubts, especially when you consider that many foreign students learn simplified characters rather than traditional. I believe what you said is true for children in China who have access to so many other cultural reference points but, for a foreigner, it is unlikely that you would be able to sit down and comprehend an ancient document.
@@johnorsomeone4609 actually as a Mandarin speaker, simplified/traditional doesn't actually play a big role in reading ancient texts because
1. Most simplified characters (sc) look similar to traditional ones (tc)
2. Even if you don't learn tc, you will be able recognize it because you are often exposed to it.
3. The biggest difference between modern chinese ancient texts lies in vocab and grammar, not orthography. Sc/tc is just a difference in orthography so an educated sc learner will be able to read ancient texts better than an uneducated tc learner.
4. Because sc/tc is an issue of orthography, conversion of ancient texts to sc is trivial and no information is lost unless the writer is doing some visual wordplay.
5. Ancient texts also use variant characters that are neither sc/tc and those cases would catch anyone by surprise.
That being said, I agree that such material is beyond what most people want to learn chinese for anyway.
I've been studying Chinese fairly intensively for the last 3-4 years, and living in Taiwan for most of that time. For me the hardest thing (apart from listening comprehension) is the number of synonyms and near-synonyms. It's a bit like English, where you will often find a group of words that have basically the same meaning, but slightly different nuances or usages (e.g. "change", "alter", "amend", "adjust" etc.). Chinese has the same issue, but it's so much worse than English. The amount of vocabulary you need to learn to become really fluent and literate is massive...
Can you recommend any resources worth using? Especially for beginners? Or maybe for all levels?
Lol I’m actually a Chinese 😀
👍
This complexity in terms of variation und nuance in Chinese is closely connected with its picturelike writing system.
Yes omg the synonyms kill me. Oh great another 50 ways to say hard-working, amend, to cause, form/figure/shape, 😵💫
It can't be that hard, no? Not a professional, but my interpretation is that Chinese words are composite from 1 to many characters, if you get the meaning of individual characters, you get the meaning of the word.
I'm not saying Chinese is easy, but as someone who has been learning Japanese for a couple years and is basically fluent in it, Chinese seems like a breath of fresh air
How do you go about memorizing words with theirs tones? There's just so much.
I've been studying Japanese for like 4 or 5 years and I'm very comfortable with it in terms of things I don't know but Chinese seems like a whole mess of words going by.
And some of these kanji are unrecognizable
Japanese words are longer, Chinese words are short, and many words have the exact sound and tone, you can only understand them in context. Well, I am trying to learn Chinese, Japanese could be my next target, but after just a few audios, that was my impression.
@@Crouton-Don't worry, there are only thousands of Chinese characters used daily by Chinese people, and many of them are not unknown to us
I am an English learner, and Chinese is my native language. In my opinion, the most challenging aspect of Chinese is the abundance of idioms and ancient allusions. With over 3,000 years of written civilization history, a multitude of ancient stories and fables have become deeply ingrained in the Chinese language and cannot be separated. Foreign friends learning Chinese may find it very challenging (perhaps Japanese or Korean speakers might find it somewhat easier). When I was learning English, I found that references to ancient Greek or Roman stories, for example, did not frequently appear in the writings of ordinary people. In contrast, in Chinese, similar allusions not only appear in the works of intellectuals but also abound in the colloquial conversations of the illiterate. This is what I mean by internalization into the Chinese language.
I’ve been learning Chinese for more than 25 years, studied abroad in China, and married into a Chinese family. I think the learning curve at the beginning can be quite difficult with the tones and writing. However, I’ve seen many of my friends mastering oral Chinese very well and far faster than reading/writing. For me as someone who’s studied for such a long time, Chinese gets ridiculously difficult as a non-native learner is when you reached the native Chinese level where you’re slammed with idioms, ancient poetic references, ancient sayings, slangs, couplets and what not. In other words, you’ve caught up to the level where you’re supposed to understand Chinese as a native Chinese speaker which can be extremely difficult. Even for Chinese speakers, they may find it difficult to understand. Also, writing at a native Chinese level is also difficult and almost requires you to re-think how you learned Chinese as a non-native speaker, otherwise your writing will sound like it was written by a foreigner.
文言文是真的很难，我上中学时期 华语不及格就是从学习古文开始。但是后来学会粤语就开始容易明白一些了
@@alexlim1131 文言文确实挺难，我看古装剧有时候听不懂，屏幕上的字幕也没用，哈哈。其实我大学教授，他是一位美国白人，学了十几年的中文，而且专门学古诗。以前他把《诗经》翻译成英文的时候，也找到几位中国教授帮来他查看英语版是否有问题，确实很难。
文言文我也很难懂，主要是古时候和现在说话方式都不太一样，还有通假字什么的，考试最讨厌考文言文🤣
I agree. It kinda becomes harder the more you know! haha
Its actually the opposite. The starting is the hardest, but once you get near native level (Which I have) it becomes easy. Yes, of course you would come across some phrases and words you haven't heard of now and then but since you already understand 99% (or more) of what is said, just reinforcing the 1% becomes easy.
I'm fluent in Mandarin. I work in the language. I can guarantee it is difficult and worlds apart from learning a romantic language. The grammar is not hard but if you want to become fully fluent and not be continuously frustrated because your level of Chinese is limited, you'll need 7-10myears living in China, learning and using everyday.
7-10 years? 😨
your pulling these numbers out of your ass
😢what?
Depends upon your goals. I'm talking about being good at Chinese. You could communicate sufficiently after about 3 years, living in China and studying. @@adamdivine5642
I mean, if you made an effort, I didn’t think it would take quite that long…
食人鱼(piñaha) is more like "people-eating fish" because although 食 is generally paired with "物" (noun indicator) to form the word 食物(food), the ancient meaning for 食 is "eat", usually used as a verb
It’s more like “man-eating fish”
@@Weeping-Angel The word 人 does not indicate gender or plurality/singularity. So both are correct
A few examples of 食 as to eat or eating: 食之无味弃之可惜 - tasteless to eat (but) a pity to discard ; 过午不食 no eating after noon ; 食言 literally to eat one's words, meaning to renege on promise
@@Weeping-AngelChinese is largely a gender-neutral language, almost like modern English. So 人 basically means a person or people regardless of gender.
Not, in china 食人鱼literally means the fish which would eat human. We were taught that this kind of fish will chose human as its food, isn’t that a true fact in other countries? I really don’t know this fish could be an ingredient abroad.
I self learnt Chinese mandarin over lockdown from mid June 2019 using apps and youtube then I met my now Chinese wife because of that now im pretty much fluent because of lots of hard work and dedication.
It's easy. Don't you agree? I mean if you have a visual memory and you can remember strokes with ease
I wouldn't say it's "easy" but it's less difficult obviously with practice and patience and I was just fortunate to meet Chinese people in the uk and my wife and because I to this day speak chinese at home it helps. You have to use it frequently and be immersed in it even if your not in China
@@Nath_davey , So you wouldn't recommend it to someone who wants to learn it for fun ? Also what sires did you use ? I'm really interested in learning mandarin
I am a Chinese and I think one of the harder thing to grasp is the arrangement of characters, especially shortened headlines. They swop the characters around very flexibly and you can easily misread it. I saw quite a number before but I can't think of an example now lol.
"shortened headlines"- and what does it work like preciesly? Maybe as a native speaker you could make a video or a series of videos on this aspect of chinese language? I think it would be benefitial to many people to learn what the core issue is in this regard and how to tackle this problem best while learning chinese.
@@agatastaniak7459 Hi there, I can't remember the examples but I can come up with a simple one. EG: 吃好饭 (chi hao fan), 好吃饭 (Hao chi fan) and 饭好吃 (fan hao chi). These sentences have different meanings just by swopping the characters around. It happens very often in Mandarin. You are right though, I did consider making videos before lol.
I wish to learn Mandarin and Cantonese. Thank you for this video
Chinese is a difficult language to get started with, but its ceiling can be very high. Once you're in the door, you can talk to almost anyone about anything without obstacles. In English, to get into a major, you have to learn more specialized vocabulary. In college, if a professor speaks English and you know nothing about a certain subject, you will have no idea what he is saying. If the professor is speaking Chinese, it's gonna be a totally different story.
I'm learning the forest science and one lesson was about "mor" and "mull". If you didn't learn anyting about it, you will not know the meaning of these two word.
"Mor" means "粗腐殖质". "粗" means "coarse" or "something that hasn't been processed"; "腐" means "decay" or "decompose"; "殖" means "produce" or "breed"; "质" means "matter" or "thing". Then you can get the meaning of "mor", which is "The coarse mater or things which produce by decomposition".
Also, "细" means "fine". So, "mull", which is "细腐殖质" in Chinese, means "The fine mater or things which produce by decomposition".
If you learn nothing about Chinese, you may not get what I'm trying to say. But I can tell you, if you've already got the rudiments of Chinese, you will easily know the meaning of each Chinese common character at the moment you see the character (Chinese primary school students can basically do this).
This shows that the primary school students can easily understand what "mor" and "mull" is, even they know nothing about edaphology (soil science). And people cannot do things like this in English environment.
yes we can ? we just have to look at the root of the words ? every language can do this
@@inorial5960 Yes, I know. But in terms of principle and origin, English is still more phonetic, and Chinese is more ideographic.
Let me give you an example: do you know what are "mor", "mull" and "humus"?
Humus refers to the colloidal substance formed by the decomposition and transformation of fresh organic matter by microorganisms.
Humus in Chinese is "腐(decompose; decay)殖(generate; produce; form)质(matter; substance)" which can be directly translated to "matter formed by decomposition".
"粗" means “coarse” and "细" means "fine". Then "粗腐殖质" means "coarse humus" which is "mor" and the "细腐殖质" means "fine humus" which is "mull".
The characteristic of Chinese is that as long as people who have learned basic Chinese (primary and secondary school students in China, or foreign Chinese beginners), they can understand the basic meaning of all Chinese words (including professional terms in various fields), without the need for professional study.
Yes. The short answer is YES. Did not watch the video yet but I have been learning Chinese for over 3 years and I would not say the language is difficult per se. It is the fact that you need to get used to different concepts like characters, tones, no alphabet btw, similar sounds and same sounds but different words.
I would say difficult. But it's grammar is one of the easiest
@@胡利奥 just because the grammar is quite simple, doesn’t mean it’s easy to understand or speak well. Pull up a new article written in Chinese or a line from a book and you’ll see what I’m talking about. The structure of the language is still far removed from English.
I have HSK 5 level of Chinese, which is pretty fluent for day to day usage. I would say that in my experience the speaking and listening is not hard- the grammar is relatively simple. Characters are strictly memorization for reading, hand writing is crazy hard, by far my weakest skill. Typing is okay if you know pinyin well and can recognize the characters. For my tones is a little overblown for the difficulty. I never bothered to memorize which tones words are, you simply learn them in the correct tone by the sound and hearing the difference the way native speaking talk within each tone.
Hope to reach your level one day 🙏
@@Vhisper it takes time. Stick with it. What country are you learning from?
@@xxxxx2084 Lithuania 🤠
@@Vhisper depending on your current level. Try to find some content with pinyin and characters at a basic level to watch and listen to. I’ve just started Olly’s story method for Spanish and find it pretty good, but can’t comment on the Chinese one. I learned in China, so it was much easier being immersed in it
@@xxxxx2084 Lucky you, I only learn by learning chinese songs and reading in pīnyīn. I could say I am a complete beginner.
I prefer learning Indo-European languages, I love finding similarities between languages and I think I would struggle with tones and with the Chinese writting system. I think it is doable to learn it, but it is like "how long will it take? Will it be worth it?". If you have a connection to the language or a strong reason to learn it, it might definetly be. But I feel like it is not the case for me.
True. If you're only learning casually, just for fun, it's usually best to go for a language similar to yours. But if you like the challenge, and find yourself enjoying the incredibly different cultures, there's no harm in at least dabbling in a difficult language.
I plan on first learning Spanish, but wanna eventually go for something like Urdu lol
I remember when I was learning English (Spanish native speaker here) I was so excited and always willing to learn new things. A lot of years passed and I learned Brazilian Portuguese as you can image this was way easier and I learned it as a way to prepare to learn French. Long story short I tried German and didn't start with French. With both Portuguese and German I didn't feel the excitement of learning English. It was till I started to consume C-dramas last year that the excitement of learning a language sparked again. I've been studying Mandarin for a year and I don't plan to stop. I think is the level of variety of things to learn: a writing system, a phonetic writing system and recognize different tones(something related to music), that brings me joy all the time.
croatian also has tones ;) on top of the seven cases and other stuff 😅 but writing is super simple😁
@@marjan7241 Gigachad language
That's called staying in the comforts zone
6:27 食人鱼 actually more accurately translates lit. to eat-human-fish (or man-eating fish). The use of 食 as a verb is actually an archaic use not often seen in modern Mandarin anymore but very much present in archaic idioms and terms, such as e.g. 天狗食日 (lit. heavenly dog eats the sun) for solar eclipse but also in some modernly used words, e.g. 肉食动物 (lit. meat eating animal) for carnivore.
This verb usage of 食 is still maintained in e.g. Japanese which uses characters (Kanji) derived from ancient Chinese where 食べる is the infinitive for (to) eat.
食 is also the preferred form of the verb "to eat" used when writing southern chinese dialects. The cantonese (which retains a lot of grammatical forms and vocabulary from middle/classical chinese) word "sik" for example is represented with this character "si" in mandarin.
being a foreign chinese but grew up in other country...the hardest part for learning chinese is the use of tones....tones must be accurate or else the meaning will turn out differently....and you need quite a good memorization cause a character + character not all the time have the relevant meaning ....the usage sometimes is different as well
6:29 the 食 in 食人鱼 is a verb which means "eat" so it is more like "eating-people fish".
As a Chinese: I feel like Chinese is easier to learn than French:
At least Mandarin has no tense, no conjugation, no articles , no gender.
The only problems are:
1. Tones. But usually Chinese people can understand you when the tones are not perfect)
2. The writing system. You used to need to learn both writing and reading but nowadays you just type Pinyin in the smartphone and it has this AI boosted input system which will predict what words you need and you just pick them. So no more writing to learn.
Obrigado! Eu pensava que os chineses não entendiam caso o tom não fosse o correto.
As an English native speaker, I've learned both French and Chinese. It's easier to learn new vocabulary in French, as there is usually a related word in English to help you remember the vocabulary. However, the grammar and genders are really challenging to learn. The almost complete lack of grammar in Chinese means that when I say a Chinese sentence, it's more likely to be 100% correct than when I say a sentence in French. In French, it's likely that I mess up a gender or grammar conjugation. Ultimately, I think French is easier for English speakers, but that's only because French is a language relative of English. Arabic speakers might well find Chinese easier than French to learn.
@@jeremywhite92 Totally! I saw this joke once:
How to buy things in Paris?
Always ask to buy two so you don't need to remember the gender.
Je voudrais deux baguettes, s'il vous plait!
@@allejandrodavid5222 It's better to get them correct but most people just need to ponder for some extra few seconds to understand. Plus when typing in the smartphone, the software usually needs no tone to predict what you want to write.
I disagree with you in the first one. In Chinese, tones REALLY matter. More than pronunciate correctly some letters like; zh, ch, sh, r and z, c, s.
In the second one, in modern China you just need to know how to write your name in Chinese and the basic characters. And for reading at list 1,500 basic characters.
As a languages learning enthusiast when i started to learn mandarin gradually deeply, there are actually also lots of other difficulties coming out besides tones and characters, the endless homophones, deep idioms tons of which are used daily, subtle grammar, well yes chinese grammar is morphologically really simple with no inflections but that also makes its structure rules very subtle and highly contextual with many unclear rules than are hard to predict because they are not strict, and so on. I thought chinese would be easier when you learn more and more just like many say, in basic parts yes but there are too a lot of foreign new concepts gradually emerging and then you realized the learning won't have an end. So i would say if notbeing the hardest, this language is still definitely, if not one of, the most time-consuming you'll ever encounter.
是的，中文语法很随意，但是语法学习曲线陡峭，精通很难。并且汉字也很难学习。对于使用字母文字的人来说，真的很难学习。英语母语者学习法语，德语，西班牙语比学习中文容易的多😂
Chinese culture looks really interesting. Trying to learn the tones doesn't put me off, however the thought of having to learn a new writing system does. If I was to rank languages that I want to learn next, Chinese comes third on list. I might give it a go later in life, after I've explored other languages first.
Simple answer is YES, it's difficult, I only spent my entire basic education until high-school learning this mind-f in school, but not impossible. Learning to speak is possible without ever learning to write. I speak another Chinese language , Hokkien, and I can't write in it. After high-school I can only write basic things probably for a pre-schooler because I have never written Chinese outside of school. I can speak and converse in basic things so it really depends on how far you want to take Chinese. It would take years, I studied it for 13 years 90 minutes per day from nursery to high-school, but if you lived in a Chinese speaking country then you'd get further than me in 13 years for sure.
I first studied Mandarin in 1974 at DLIFLC in Monterey California, before it was popular. We started out reading dialogue in Wade-Giles romanization, then gradually added characters into the text. Midway text was over half characters. By the end of the 47-week course it was all in characters.
I'd love to see you do an in depth video on Esperanto
When I was learning Mandarin, I could learn the characters quite well, but I would forget the tone of a word quite easily. If you're like this, maybe consider dropping hanzi-learning for a while and concentrate heavily on audio and piyin.
I love how "ma" high means mother, but when "mother" falls (is disappointed) it becomes "scold." 😂
Piranha is more correctly translate as eat people fish in Mandarin, the word shi(食) is usually seem as a verb, unless its paired with a different character like the word wu(物), which means object then shi(食) together with wu(物) means food.
My method in learning Mandarin was brute reading and listening right after I mastered the phonology, no flashcards and almost no vocab notes because I hate those lol. Also, living in Taiwan helps a lot. Now I speak and read quite decently.
Learning like a baby is the best way
Personally I find the grammar quite challenging. I'm italian and I've been studying mandarin for five years now . I think that the super easy stripped-down chinese grammar its actually very insidious.
Think about the words order. While its true that the basic order is subject-verb-object it is also true that the subject-object-verb order is quite common.
Recently, I found out that in China grammar isn't even a thing. They do not study grammar at school and the word itself has been introduced quite recently. Chinese people are much more familiar with the 语感 (language-feeling) concept rather than with the grammar one.
That's clearly because of the isolating nature of the language itself which as such rely much more on words order, intonation, particles and pragmatism rather than on grammatical rules, tenses and so on.
You've got the point! Chinese students have never heard of the word "grammar" until they start to learn English as their first foreign language.
Yeah, it's typical. As a language becomes less synthetic, the word order tends to become stricter since there's less things like agreement in gender or conjugation to keep meaning clear.
finally someone who really actually knows this language
I agree. I'm a native Chinese speaker. I think the so-called language feeling is very important in learning a foreign language, probably more so in learning Chinese, more important than grammar IMO. A baby learns to speak without learning grammar and an intelligence challenged individual has no problems speaking his native language without knowing anything about it's grammar. Many grammatical rules that an Indo-European language speaker is familiar with simply don't apply to Chinese. When he said Chinese has one tense, I would say Chinese doesn't have tenses, or conjugations or inflections or genders, and probably more precisely, those concepts simply don't apply to Chinese. Chinese is in general, S-V-O, sometimes not even that is true.
13:33
Yeah, being an object of envy for your friends is the worst motivation I've ever heard.
Thanks man, for that deep and wisdom advice.
For me it's a great motivation, don't judge the learning reasons of others
Another easy aspect that makes Chinese easy is that it's easy to find people to practice with, especially if you are living in china. If you speak chinese to chinese person, you are likely to get response in Chinese. Unlike Thailand where many people understand and speak English, you will be pushed to speak Mandarin while in China.
Dutch and Swedish might seem easiee than Chinese, but in reality, getting to practice is way harder since most of the natives are not so compromising to let you speak with them in their language but reply to you in English
Same with German
Obviously everyone is different but I think learning Korean first is nice because it's easy to read with little to no characters used. Then Japanese because it has a syllabary and similar grammar to Korean but you get introduced to characters and pitch accent. Then learn Chinese because you will have some character knowledge but then get the much easier grammar as you learn more characters and tones. I've only got the Korean and Japanese down right now so no comment on how great this will work but maybe one day I will try Chinese.
I started with Chinese and I found scarier to learn Japanese even though the pitch accent I believe works the same as in Spanish. My next will be probably Korean but with Germanic or Latin language in the middle.
Oh Korean is so much easier for us Europeans to learn than Mandarin is.
Sounds like an interesting idea. I got to grasp some Korean as a kid but later on have forgottten it all. I had plans to learn some Korean when I will be older but maybe I should try to take Your advice and use as a shortcut as sequence of getting the basics first in Korean,then in Japanese and later on in Chinese? Do You have any additional advice for anyone crazy enough to try to do it precisely in this order that you suggest?
@@agatastaniak7459 Not necessarily. Maybe learning some hanja which are the character that a lot of Korean vocab is based on and would be related to kanji and Chinese characters (traditional not simplified.) If you've ever seen the Oriental Pearl channel, she did the reverse. Learned Chinese (mandarin I believe?) first, then Japanese, and she is learning Korean now. For me I just think its easiest to start with Korean even though grammar is harder than Chinese languages because at least with Korean after a day or few days you can read the sounds even if you dont know the meaning. That's been my struggle with Japanese. I can try to read but if I haven't learned the kanji yet I dont know how yo read it unless it has furigana printed above. However, I do like that one a kanji is learned it is actually easier to understand the meaning than Korean which has many homophones because there aren't unique characters anymore.
@Mordraug good to know, thanks. I've got Japanese on pause at the moment to focus on Spanish as one of my jobs I'm working with Spanish speakers, and then also working on Korean because I may be moving to Korea next fall. So I figure if so I may start learning Japanese again after moving to Korea and then I can easily take a trip over :D Been 8 years since I was in Japan for a short vacation.
3:53 to be accurate, the character ‘食’ here stands for eat
The literal meaning of piranha is actually “eat people fish” or “fish that eats people”. The character 食 can be a verb, “to eat” or a noun, “food”.
Writing Chinese is way way hard (although remember that English spelling is pretty wacky too!). However, conversing in Mandarin, for me at least, hasn’t been too terribly difficult.
I was able to get the basic vocabulary together, and go visit my now-wife in China, in just 5 months!
The grammar, as you pointed out, is really simple. Another reason Mandarin is pretty easy to learn - one you alluded to, but did directly say - is that there are very few syllables to learn to pronounce. Excluding tones, the entire language only has about 400 possible syllables, and counting tones, it’s only around 1200, and those syllables are very regular in pronunciation! 1200 may sound like a lot but it’s actually very tiny; English has about that many syllables just counting those in the form of consonant-vowel-consonant alone, let alone syllables like “string” or “brought”!
Yes, the hardest part is the tones, and as you correctly pointed out, the toughest part of that is *hearing them* reliably at normal-speed conversation. Imitating them is not a big deal. Measure words are quirky and amusing, but not a really bit deal to learn: you rarely use more than 个, 条, 张, 只, and 头.
I’m surprised that the US State Department puts Chinese in the same category as Japanese. Although I don’t know any appreciable amount of Japanese, from what I do know if it, I’d expect it to be 2-3 times as hard to learn!
I’m Cantonese so it’s pretty easy for me to learn Mandarin Cantonese but to speak it well with perfect accent it’s quite difficult.
6:27 I think it depends on how you translate the word. It could mean food. But it can also mean eat. “進食”=eat. So, for Chinese it's more like "eating ppl fish" aka "fish that eat ppl"
While the argument is correct, your example is not: In 进食, 食 is still used as a noun as the word means to “put in food” when literally translated. The use of 食 as a verb however is an archaic use not often seen in modern Mandarin anymore but very much present in archaic idioms and terms, such as e.g. 天狗食日 (lit. heavenly dog eats the sun) for solar eclipse but also in some modernly used words, e.g. 肉食动物 (lit. meat eating animal) for carnivore.
This verb usage of 食 is still maintained in e.g. Japanese which still uses characters (Kanji) derived from ancient Chinese where 食べる is the infinitive for (to) eat.
Multi-phonetic words, like "覺”, pronounced as "jiao" when carrying the meaning of "sleeping". But pronounced as "jueh" when it contains the meaning of "awareness"
睡覺jiao：sleeping
一覺jiao不醒：sleeping all the way through
覺jueh知：awareness
覺jueh悟：enlightenment
I love languages and I have studied Mandarin…it is really easy for a musician in particular….it’s the reading and writing that’s complicated
Haha just use pinyin and smart input software, then only reading is needed :)
I was gonna say, I've only been studying for a bit, but I know how to recognize tones because I play guitar and playing an instrument kind of builds your ear to notice those things. Pronouncing the tones is different, but practice makes perfect. I honeslty don't know why people complain about them that much. Maybe the nervousness where it all goes away trying to speak to a native speaker, that's possible.
Bar far not everyone in the world is a musician.
Thank you so much for this great video!
My girlfriend speaks Mandarin and I want to try my hardest to learn it without her finding out until I'm able to communicate at a minimal level and surprise her that I've been doing this, because I love her so much 😂
As someone who has learning Mandarin for about 5 years in total, all I can say is that Mandarin is a monster to learn. A lot of learners overestimate their ability to speak [Check out the video on RUclips with Mark Zuckerberg speaking "fluent Mandarin" and you'll see what I mean] and write in Mandarin [n the comment section, I literally saw someone say Mandarin's grammar is simple and then make a grammatical error in the same sentence]. Mandarin grammar only becomes more difficult the more advanced you become.
Mandarin demands TIME and dedication. As a casual hobby, you're not getting to the advanced level before the 10 year mark. Native speakers and new learners also often downplay tones, but think about if you were tasked with remembering 5 varying levels of tones for a set of 10,000 English words (ex: hello [rising tone], goodbye [falling tone]). Pretty absurd task even though it's your native language, right? Mandarin's tones THEMSELVES are not difficult, but memorizing to a high degree of accuracy the tones for 10,000+ words to be C1+ is behemoth task. A task that is much more easily accomplished by perpetual exposure for years to allow these sounds to be engrained deeply in your brain.
In short, if a friend asked me if they should learn Mandarin, I would reply "no" without hesitation. I would say to that same friend that you could gain fluency in Spanish, French, and Portuguese in that same amount of time.
There's a reason why this language is placed in class 5 by FSI
I am bilingual and am thinking about learning a third language. My advice to anyone wanting to learn a second language is this: don’t bother if you plan to avoid immersion learning.
What do u mean bilingual, so you speak a language and english? That's everybody fam, that's like going to a gym as a fat guy and start giving advice out
@@pnksmigge5324 bro are u confused 😂
@@pnksmigge5324 as in fluent in two languages, I'm only fluent in English for example, learning 日本語 to contradict that
@@rudalph529 yeah so you're like 90% of people in the western world, that doesn't make you a language expert needing to give advice eh
@@wettablesalt744 no u
盐 = salt
严= strict
沿= along
These characters have the same pronunciation.
Chinese characters have no phonetic basis at all and require a lot of memorisation.
The younger you are, the better! I had a mother of one of my Kindergarteners come in to teach Mandarin. The children did MUCH better than me at age 63! I couldn’t differentiate between some of the tones, thus couldn’t replicate them.
作为一个正在考雅思的中国人，看老外从他们的角度看中文觉得有趣极了
I learned perfect Chinese in 2 weeks, i did 10 duolingo lessons now I am professor at a Chinese University
Thank you for the video!
I just have a few things to add if that’s okay…
3:53 To add to what Bryan Siew had already said, the 食人魚 for piranha literally means “human-eating fish” or “fish that eats humans.” It’s usually only at the EARLY beginnings when the learner might tear down a “word” into its constituent characters and attempt an understanding from this perspective only. As the learner progresses, they would come to understand that “食人” means human-eating or eating humans, and adding 魚 at the end then makes a lot of sense for a fish like the piranha.
It’s similar to / simpler than learning for example phrasal verbs in English, at least for me: “Take,” ok fine, I could get. Then there’s “take up”, “take down”, “take in”, “take on”, etc.
To me, those were so difficult to comprehend and let alone remember, perhaps akin to how 「食人魚」 made you feel 😂
Mandarin grammar/character usage can also trip one up in unexpected ways. During a stage where the learner hasn’t really familiarized themselves with what they’re saying vs. the characters vs. the grammar, a learner trying to greet someone with 「你好嗎？」 (nǐ hǎo mā?) might accidentally alter the ordering of those 3 sounds, to potentially offensively hilarious situations.
And the fun REALLY begins when one comes across a word that might have various meanings, for example 「意思」 (Mandarin speakers you know what I’m talking about!):
Examples:
什麼「意思」？
不好「意思」！
小「意思」
「意思意思」
有「意思」！
沒「意思」
沒什麼「意思」
…
😂
Come to think of it, would you ever do a video on that? 😂 I could paste you the little story that showcases this.
I am a native Chinese speaker who studying English now,I got 6 points in the ielts test so I can do basic communication fluently.I want to find a native English speaker who want to study Chinese and we can help each other.
Me! I have we chat
@LPSDesires tell me your we chat number
Planning to move to Montreal and learn french and mandarin
I’d recommend HSK Level 1-6 textbooks and audio recordings to beginners and learners at all levels. HSK, a pinyin abbreviation of Chinese level test, is a standard, progressive, and comprehensive learning and testing system specifically designed for learners of Chinese as a second language, suitable for academics, business, and hobby purposes. Its development received massive funding and delicate treatment, so learners can receive most accessible and reliable resources following the path. The most popular version of HSK textbooks has English instructions and interpretations, but there are quite many versions of HSK textbooks written and recorded in other languages. Thus, learning Chinese through HSK should not be difficult or pricy to start with. And passing an HSK test may get you some substantial scholarship and business and career opportunities to liquidate your Chinese skills ASAP. 😂
10:53 as Chinese it's just respectively easier to learn Korean, Japanese, Cantonese once you'd learned Han characters, the hanja/kanji may have slightly different writing way or meaning but still guessable
Yeah like i started learning Korean before mandarin and i didn't study properly and my Korean level might be a2 and mandarin a0 but i realized it there are so many similar words. And pinyin is just lifesaver. And it might be wonderful if mandarin written with pinyin like Vietnamese. idk I'm learning characters with association. And when i saw a character i know what it means but i don't know how to pronounce it. So it's just a double shift for me. I need to learn character and pronunciation and then i need to match them.
i truly believe that chinese students (as in those in china, singapore, hong kong, macau, and taiwan) do so well in PISA (an international assessment of students all over the world) is partially because of the language. aside from the writing system (which actually helps keep the nation together despite people speaking different "dialects" that are as diverse as european languages), chinese is a surprisingly efficient and simple language. there are just no frills with modern day chinese.
after you master a certain number of characters, things start getting really easy. for example, literally no one has problems telling the different areas of medicine apart. even an illiterate can tell what a cardiologist just from the name because a cardiologist is called a heart doctor. i took a course on latin and greek prefixes and suffixes so i don't get lost in a US hospital but most people really don't know much about latin roots.
here's another example. a week goes from day 1 to day 6 and then day of the day (okay, i see sunday as the last day of the week).they call day 7 day of the day coz of sunday. and the months are just month 1 all the way through month 12.
食 in 食人鱼 not means FOOD but means EAT. It's the residual of ancient Chinese.
bro, mostly precise, but for "食人鱼“, it should be "people eating fish", 食 here should be interpreted to the verb “eat"
Hello. Chinese can have an alphabet, it’s called Zhuyin and it’s only used in Taiwan. :)
Chinese isn't hard, it takes a lot of work and is time-consuming. That's been my experience.
Well, the complements specifying directions of motions, etc. are quite a hell, even now after years I feel awkward using them
As a native Chinese speaker, I would think it is easy for non-native speakers to reach the level of daily use, but I would also say it is very difficult to speak this language at the native speaker level. This is because the grammar is not a thing at all. It is easy, however, it is not followed properly most of the time. What really matters is the culture, the dialect(tbh many of Chinese people are not able to speak Standard Mandarin very well), the language feeling and so many. Sometimes a minor detail could change the whole meaning of a sentence, and even a native speaker needs some time to react and understand. You need to be fully immersed in the culture to understand everything. And of course, for most of the time, it is unnecessary to speak at this level, and it would be way easier to learn.
Some misinterpretation about piranha fish. The three characters refer to eat-people-fish respectively in this context or people-eating fish, so it translates well. Many characters play multiple parts of speech with related meanings, so the meaning and part of speech of a character should be flexibly pinterpreted with the context.
作为中文母语者，我真他妈很幸运掌握了世界上最难的语言，现在正在学习英语
Piranha - 食人鱼 (食means eat, not food. 食物 is food, direct translation to English "eat things"). So 食人鱼means "eat human/people fish".
"食物" means "the thing (物) can be eaten"
It's easy if you can memorize or at least remember characters easily and write it easily. Once you get used to the written form of sentences, speaking and listening will be cheese. It's a lot easier than japanese. That I can tell. Even with the 4000 characters commonly used by Chinese versus the 2136 commonly used by the japanese. It's a pretty straightforward language. You don't need to make it prettier. Basic is fine.
I have studied to read (=understand) Chinese text, but as if it was Japanese text. This technique is called Kanbun Kundoku. It is possible to modify this technique and read Chinese text as if it was English text. Actually the syntax of Chinese and English are quite similar, while the syntax of Chinese and Japanese are very different.
Mandarin is easy. That means, if I can't learn it then it's my problem. And when I have a problem I can work on it and solve it. So the problem is not Mandarin, it's me.
Tones? Actually you can ignore the tones. Simply memorize the sound from audio (and then use Pinyin from time to time to lookup something, or to type on the PC).
English is the third language I learnt alongside Arabic and my native language Kurdish and I was only able to learn it thanks to tv shows,videos,movies and cartoons i spent my time watching them
As an English speaker who learned Mandarin Chinese, I can assure everyone that it is one of the most grammatically simplest languages to master for any speakers of English, Spanish, French or German, and possibly for any speakers of Indo-European languages. For example, it only takes a few minutes to learn how to use each verbs in Mandarin regardless of tense or case. It's even easier than verbs in the English language because there are absolutely no conjugations or noun genders in Mandarin.
How did you memorize the characters and their pronunciations?
我认为欧洲人和黑人学汉语通常很准确，学会了口音说的很标准，相反日本人和韩国人则很难学，说的很别扭
The reading and writing is much easier to progress in than Japanese, in my experience.
9:02 You really stand by this point. It might sound demotivating for some. The tones can come naturally over time after a while, no?
If you're good at imitation -- like copying an accent, you can learn the correct tones by just imitating what you're hearing. So a word in 2nd tone and 4th tones will then sound like different words to you.
some example：给你细说一下为什么可以载入史册。这是团体赛，五局三胜制，有男双，女双，男单，女单，混双。在这之前，前面已经打了三局了中国1：2落后于日本，也就意味着，这是个赛点局，输了中国队将无缘决赛，并且在第二小局也是以21:19小比分险胜一局，可以说是，奇迹中的奇迹了。在男双极地逆风翻盘后，后面女双士气大增（本来实力就很强劲）直接把比赛打成表演赛了。成功晋级
反过来，咱们越是兴旺发达，就越是像撅了它们祖坟一样[呲牙]我一一年的时候遇到几个向我传教的，我直接怼过去了，指着鼻子骂完以后，偷偷跟着它们，报警顺便给警察指路
现在倒是要警惕“血气方刚”的学生，大部分都是白纸但又有热忱，但又被三言两语就拐偏了，尤其是有些学识但不精的人。。我也是学生过来的，高中放学的路上没少和同学“针砭时弊”，大学倒活动参加的少了，只是现在回顾过去我庆幸我当时的“懒”。。好多活动和小讲座真是处心积虑
So, yes there's many characters to remember but being perfectly honest even native speakers don't remember everything (as is true in most languages). A lot of the scary examples given I've literally never seen outside this video and are brought up to prove a point that's not necessarily true (which is sort of pointed out in the vid but not entirely)
Edit: Also quick correction that some natives don't realize either. Mandarin Chinese has 5, not 4 tones. There's a hidden silent tone that I can best describe as cutting the sound short, which tends to follow doubles of the same word or certain combinations like 媽媽 or 哥哥
Imagine if words in English consisted of random patterns of letters (eg., djfbc for house). You simply had to memorize the letter patern for each word. There would be some pattern recognition with some combination words but overall it would be very difficult.
As a native Chinese speaker that is quite fluent but doesn’t know every single word in the book, I can confirm that Chinese, or Mandarin, is pretty hard.
1. It has over 10,000 characters. I’m not kidding. Really.
2. The tones are relatively easy, but there are so many characters with the same tone and sound. And all it takes to make it a different word is a slight change of tone.
3. There are different dialects; Sichuan, Dongbei, Shanghainese, Beijing Mandarin and other specific dialects to specific regions, though there aren’t a lot.
4. There are many ways to say a single thing. In Chinese, 早上，早晨，and 早 are all ways to say the word “morning”. Yes, there are different ways to say “night” too: 晚上，傍晚.
5. One good thing about Chinese is that the grammar is EXTREMELY easy. 你好，raw translated is you good, but it just means hello. There are only three pronouns, that act as he, her, and it: 他，她，and 它.
6. Vocabulary is immense. Because it has more than 10,000 characters, and many, many, MANY variations used on those characters, to be a fluent Chinese speaker, you have to know at least 4,000 characters.
7. Writing Chinese is equal to giving yourself torture. A tiny stroke can make a word different. 鼻 or nose, can become a meaning less word simply by missing one of the slashes or forgetting to add the dot. And do not add the amount of time it takes to write a sentence; 你今天开心么？or “Are you happy today?” can take more then 30 seconds to write, compared to english, which usually takes around 15-25 seconds, if you are a good writer.
8. In the old days, Mandarin used to be written from right to left. And some buildings still do that. Good luck if you’re a tourist in a historical spot. You might see A LOT of old Chinese.
It'd be hella cool if Chinese is still written from right to left in top down manner or completely switch to classical Chinese itself.
For a Cantonese native speaker, Mandarin is just a piece of cake
How so? Because you have more exposure to mandarin in your daily life like Tv shows, music etc than the other way around.
@@prasanth2601 not related 🙂
人要是行，干一行行一行 一行行行行行 要是不行，干一行不行一行 一行不行行行不行 translation: If someone is capable, he does one job, that job will be well done; every job that he does will be well done. If someone is not capable, he does one job, that job will get messed up; every job that he does will get messed up.
@mike hennessy absolutely. Interesting how the same character can be said in different ways and it actually make sense
@proxypylon actually it makes more sense to a native if your say it then reading it in this particular case. the character 行 has different pronunciation for different meaning.
Oof olly, love the videos usually but we get it, story learning. Maybe stop cramming it in our faces as frequently? Makes me less interested in purchasing.
man, this video isn't even good :/ like, that first tone clip isn't even from mandarin.. i'm wondering how much research this guy even did? def makes me not trust the product at least. also i don't get why he said/people in general say "chinese doesn't have tenses". it's so misleading to learners when that's said, imo. that's not entirely this vids fault though because it is true, just misleading.
also there's a bunch of tiny mistakes like his definition of radicals is wrong, there's a typo in the pinyin, neutral tone is represented with a dot too later which is just weird, ect.
Thanks for the feedback. I do appreciate it.
@@benji272 i don’t believe the mandarin clip is wrong, the tones sounded right; also yeah idk why you put a dot to signify neutral tone, but then again it could help beginners sorta know and differentiate neutral from other tones? i would think
Yeah, right, I liked better watching his videos and improving my listening in English but these “stories” only distract from the plot
Story learning is literally his thing, are you really expecting to go into an Olly Richards video and not expect him to plug his stories?
“食人鱼”or“食人魚” means 'the fish which eat human' or 'the man-eating fish'.
The '食' do not mean 'food' but mean 'eat'.
"食物" is the "food". "物" means "thing". "食物" means "the thing that can be eaten", which is "food".
Actually, "piranha" will be translate as "水虎鱼" (Water, tiger and fish. It means the fishes that like tigers in water) or "食人鲳" ("食人" means "human-eating" and "鲳" means "Pampus" or "Pygocentrus"). Both these two phrase are trying to describe a fierce fish.
In this video, it is an obvious translation error.
And why not you make a video that can explain the differences between ideograms and phonics. I think this gonna be very intersting!
great introduction
MEASURE WORDS FOR ANIMALS, SUCH AS
A 隻 PIG, 2 隻 DUCKS=一隻豬，兩隻鴨
A 條 FISH, 2 條 WHALE=一條魚，兩條鯨魚
A 條 DINOSAUR, 3 隻 DINOSAUR=一條恐龍，三隻恐龍
A 頭 OX, 4 隻 COW=一頭公牛，4隻母牛
Tones in English might be hard for mandarin speakers as well. Most of us speak like robots if you don't know enough about English, we just use the first tone instead. But it doesn't exist in English.
Tones are also very important, we might be able to understand but sometimes we won't.(We'll also know you're a foreigner)
"個" is ok for mostly everything but we use others more often.
食人鱼 translates to "eat people fish"... 食 means both food and eating
不，“食”就代表了“eat”，“食物”才代表了“food” or “the thing (物) that can be eaten (食)”
@@yuyuan7204 你忘了文言文，比如说吃食，食就代表食物
There are many dialects in chinese, Cantonese is one of them, it has 9 tones instead of 4
Cantonese is not a dialect
Amazing explanation. So accurate. K2.
a difficulty I've run into is the sentence order. Sometimes it's Time - Subject and sometimes it's Subject - Time. Think 今天我... vs 我今天... any tips on when to use which order? This isn't the only example.
It depends on whether you care more about time or yourself. Of course, if you don't care about either, then either choice is fine. In most cases, you don't need to choose one deliberately. The Chinese will use the words contained in what you say. to understand what you mean
I just got your full 3 part Spanish course. I just wanted to say I think your website could use a small amount of work to make it a whole lot better. The Special Offers page is just a wall of text on a white background. If I didn't know the courses were good quality I would be hesitant based on the poor look of the website. Great content though!
great video
One of my favourite things about Chinese are the funny slangs and idioms.
吹牛 （blow cow) means to brag.
吃醋（consume vinegar) means being jealous.
拍马屁(slap horse arse) means to bootlick someone.
Every language has tone Even if there is only one tone, it is also a tone....
English says it has no tone...But people from different countries have different accents when speaking English, which is largely due to the tone of voice
Chinese children do not need to learn tones when learning Chinese. They just need to remember the pronunciation, which includes tones... Therefore, if a Chinese person has not received education, he may not know how many tones Chinese has, even if he can speak fluent Chinese
So it is difficult for foreigners to speak Chinese intonation, which I cannot understand.. It is clear that as long as you hear any sound, you just pronounce it and everything is OK. However, foreigners do not follow the sound you hear.. This leads to the difficulty in learning tones..
Every language doesn’t have tones though. Tones an intonation aren’t the same
Chinese spoken language is actually very easy, because the verbs do not change, the nouns do not change, and
adjectives do not change, whatsoever. Even the order of words do not change for most of time... only the written language is really hard.
I find a lot of people get tripped up by pinyin. It's hard for them not to tripped up with what they think a letter *should* sound like, and what it does in pinyin. For example, pronouncing 'hen' in an English way. Once they get past that, then there's just rules of pinyin that you have to remember. For example, the 'u' in 'qu' is pronounced like ü, whereas the 'u' in 'ru' is pronounced like 'oo'. It's for these reasons, that I recommend people, even if they're not going to use it for other purposes such as typing, train their pronunciation with something like zhuyin (also called bopomofo). It's not a roman alphabet, so it is less likely to confuse them, and the phonetics are far more accurate and straight-forward. For example, it differentiates between the 'u' in 'qu' (ㄑㄩ) and 'ru' (ㄖㄨ) -- ㄩ is ü, and ㄨ is 'oo'. Pinyin is excellent for typing if you weren't raised on zhuyin, though.
Well done 👍
It depends where you are from.
Different sounds in French Latin as opposed to Spanish Latin. Mandarin and Cantonese are different Chinese languages, like French and Spanish are not Latin dialects. Chinese characters for one group; Latin letters for the other.
My advice: Learn to SPEAK Chinese. It's relatively easy, as Chinese has almost no grammar. Worry about Reading, and possibly Writing, considerably later. This is partially because the spread between speaking and writing in Chinese is one of the biggest difficulty jumps of any language. If you can speak Italian, you can likely read and write it for free. Not so with Chinese. So don't bother -- just learn to speak.
Chinese is NOT easy to speak. Just because the grammar is quite simple, doesn’t mean it’s easy to understand or speak well. Pull up a new article written in Chinese or a line from a book and you’ll see what I’m talking about. The structure of the language is still far removed from English. Besides, Chinese does have grammar. It have post positions, the word order in sentences shifts a lot, there’s lots of particles that modifies verbs, much of while has no equivalent in English. And most importantly, it has a massive alien vocabulary that’s nearly devoidly loanwords common in most indo-European languages like Spanish or French. Almost everyone I heard saying Chinese is easy or has no grammar has never read a book in language and realize how far removed it is from English.
@@matthewbitter532 I feel like you and OP have different points. You started off trying to argue for why Chinese isn't easy to speak and then went on about reading, which are different skills
@@matthewbitter532Just so you know, speaking is different than reading
9:27 I wish this information didn't disappear so quickly. It's kind of awkward and inconvenient to have to keep rewinding and pausing. 😅
I wonder how much easier Chinese will be if you've already learned Japanese. Seems they're really similar in a lot of aspects and even some vocab, so that's already a lot of concepts to get used to out of the way
If you are an English speaker, Mandarin Chinese syntax and grammar is closer to English than Japanese and it has no case marking or gender. A lot of people think that if you know Kanji, Chinese characters will be no problem, which is true, but know that not all Chinese characters have the same meanings or usages as their Kanji counterparts. For centuries, Japan has adopted Chinese characters and Kanji has really evolved into its own Japanese system. As far as pronunciation, I feel that Japanese is relatively easier to pick up than Mandarin which has certain consonants (i.e. j, q, x, r, and zhi, chi, shi) that can be hard to pin down as a non-native speaker. But do enough listening and you'll get it.
Only in characters would be easy, but the phonetics, grammar and words are completel different.
TL;DR it helps a lot with vocab
Fluent in japanese, learning mandarin.
It helps a lot with the vocab because many words are written the same and some characters are even pronounced similarly or the same!
开 kāi / kai
差 chā / sa
老 lăo / rou
Some meanings or usages of words and characters that exist in Chinese but don't exist in English, also exist in Japanese.
A bonus is that you really get to see how much Chinese has influenced Japanese, even below the surface.
But that's about it.
@@fingerstyledojo i like the example 便利
@@J-W_Grimbeek yeah, or 手紙.... :D
You: Now I am a Chinese expert😎
Chinese:
“明明明明明白白白喜欢他可就是不说。”
“干一行行一行，一行行行行行，要是不行干一行不行一行，一行不行行行不行，行行不行干哪行都不行。”
lol
Q: "Without alphabet, how do u read a word if u don't know the word?"
How about asking your teacher????