Chinese learning

Anyone learning/tried to learn Chinese? What's difficult? What's easy? Tell me.

Cantonese or Mandarin?

Sorry, I'm talking about Mandarin.

Tones. That is the hardest thing ever. A change in tone changes the meaning. For example, the word that is pronounced "lok" in Cantonese (I am a native speaker). By changing the tone, I can mean the color green, a deer, to be scalded, and to roll. You will encounter the same thing with Mandarin, but be thankful Mandarin only has 5 tones, compared to Cantonese's 7.

Mandarin has four tones and I can get them right most of the time. Cantonese is supposed to have nine, but I get by comfortably with six, get them wrong a lot and have no troube making my self understood at all times, and above all do not worry about it.

The hardest thing is learning the characters. Just a lot of work. The pronunciation of the sounds in Mandarin is easy for an English speaker. The 4 tones take a while but can be mastered. Another difficulty is that there is no free vocabulary such as you get when learning European languages.

On balance I found learning Mandarin well worth it. It takes you into a different language and cultural world and then you realize that it is not really all the different.

What seems strange at first is not all that strange. I am quite comfortable speaking Chinese and enjoying different aspects of Chinese culture (all except the unfortunate tribal nationalism that has taken hold of the younger generation there in the past few years).

Yeah, tones is a little easier once you put it in context of the sentence. I think that is how I get away with being understood.

The easy part is that there is ABSOLUTELY no verb conjugation. We have no past tense, future tense, subjunctive, etc. You will never see a "501 Chinese Verbs" published! We express those with an adverb or an adverbial phrase of time. For example, we can say: I/She/We/They eat breakfast yesterday/today/tomorrow. There is also no plural in the nouns. And the nouns don't have gender, hence, nor do the adjectives. Eg. I have one son. I have two son. These two points will help European language speakers understand the problems Chinese speakers encounter when we speak European languages and now you know why we make the mistakes that we do!

One thing I imagine would be difficult for foreigners is the indefinite article, i.e, a/an. We have a much longer list of articles. We don't just say: 1 person, we say "yi ge ren", 1 book, "yi ben shu", 1 picture, "yi fu hua". The articles here are ge, ben and fu. I can imagine that this is difficult because the foreign languages that I learned don't have this feature, except Japanese. I suspect that this is also true for Korean. But then, I suppose one would learn it like a romance language speaker would learn the noun together with the gender, not just the noun itself, i.e. el libro, la casa.

I speak Mandarin as a 3rd language, even though I am fluent in it, I have met quite a few Europeans/Americans who have better pronunciation (accent) than I do. They don't have that nagging Cantonese influence that I have. So, you can do it! Hope this helps.

I think one has to have a good musical ear to master the tones... Theoretical descriptions do not help... That was my experience with English intonation at least...

thankyou all for your replies.

I'm currently studying Mandarin here. It's surprisingly easy and really fun, especially since I have lots of people here at school to practice with. The tones take a little getting used to, but aren't that bad and are more than made up for by the simplicity of the grammar! The characters are a pain, yeah, but I figure I'll pick them up later... And Andrew is right about the articles. It's like having to say "a pair of pants" or "3 pairs of scissors" but for every noun, and with a lot more words than just "pair." But it's nothing compared to having to learn complicated tenses and things found in other languages.

Oh, and I'm a native English speaker, btw, simultaneously learning my 2nd and 3rd languages now: Chinese and Spanish.