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The Chinese Thread
- Thread starter danqi
- Start date
I think the word you are looking for is 'ideographic'. Where the characters represent ideas/concepts rather than individual phonemes (sounds).
Hey! I'm one of them!
Or at least I studied it at university for two years. I never did much on Chinese though. Spent most of my time studying African languages. I can't get the Chinese tones worth a damn but I can do some pretty rockin' palato-alveolar clicks 
Great idea for a thread, BTW. Always interesting to learn about another language/culture.
Argh! I can't click to sa ve my life.Originally posted by unharmed
...I can't get the Chinese tones worth a damn but I can do some pretty rockin' palato-alveolar clicks
(I took a linguistics course last year.
)But yeah, learning other languages & cultures is cool. I didn't realize just how much about my culture I knew until I came here, though. When I was back in Hong Kong I was trying so hard to become more "American" or whatever because I didn't like speaking to my grandmother in Chinese, and I didn't like my Chinese classes at school etc., but now that I've come to the US and I live here and go to school here and all that, I kind of wish I'd spent a little more time practicing my Chinese when I was back home.
Learned something new today: counting words.
****!!!
Arg, they suck. When you describe the amount of something in chinese you have to use counting words (right engl. word?). E.g.: Two c.w. bass. You can't just say: two basses.
The annoying thing is that there are different c.w. for different things.
For book you use the counting word for things that are bound but for newspaper you use the one for flat things. I already know that I am gonna hate these things.
Supposedly, in China they don't even use many of these anymore on the street. But we have to learn them, because we are learning proper Chinese. Great, and if I ever get to talk to someone in the streets in China I get beaten up because I speak so stuck-up...
****!!!
Arg, they suck. When you describe the amount of something in chinese you have to use counting words (right engl. word?). E.g.: Two c.w. bass. You can't just say: two basses.
The annoying thing is that there are different c.w. for different things.
For book you use the counting word for things that are bound but for newspaper you use the one for flat things. I already know that I am gonna hate these things.
Supposedly, in China they don't even use many of these anymore on the street. But we have to learn them, because we are learning proper Chinese. Great, and if I ever get to talk to someone in the streets in China I get beaten up because I speak so stuck-up...
No, they still use them, don't worry.
And the term I grew up with was "measure word."
But if that's hard for you, think about all the people who come from China and try to learn English, they're so used to having those measure words between the quantity and the object that removing it is equally as weird to them as adding it is to you.
And the term I grew up with was "measure word."
But if that's hard for you, think about all the people who come from China and try to learn English, they're so used to having those measure words between the quantity and the object that removing it is equally as weird to them as adding it is to you.
I can't even imagine how hard it must be for a Chinese to learn German.
Because of its peculiarities German, which is a harder language than English anyway, must be hell for a Chinese. I think German has got much more of the stuff that makes western languages different from Chinese. E.g. it has a more complex grammar than English.
As a former English teacher in China I can tell you that they have a tough time with english too. That's despite the fact that any chinese person that's in college has had at least 7 years. Considering that, most of my students' english was wretched and they get taught some really ridiculous things by chinese teachers.
One example - almost every one of my students and colleagues would add an 'r' to the end of the words "famous," "campus," and "idea." They were told by their teachers growing up (not native english speakers) that it made them sound more american if they did this. So now they all say "famurse" "campurse" and "idear." <?!> The first thing I started doing every day was working on proper pronunciation of those three words and others that they'd been taught incorrectly or had trouble saying as a whole.
They also had tons 'o problems with the ambiguities of the enlish language and expressing themselves through tone of voice.
brad cook
One example - almost every one of my students and colleagues would add an 'r' to the end of the words "famous," "campus," and "idea." They were told by their teachers growing up (not native english speakers) that it made them sound more american if they did this. So now they all say "famurse" "campurse" and "idear." <?!> The first thing I started doing every day was working on proper pronunciation of those three words and others that they'd been taught incorrectly or had trouble saying as a whole.
They also had tons 'o problems with the ambiguities of the enlish language and expressing themselves through tone of voice.
brad cook
I'm fairly certain most linguists would disagree with you here. English is generally regarded as the hardest to learn of its family (which includes German) due mainly to its highly irregular structure and huge vocabulary.
Pretty much the only complexity that German has over English is its retention of the concept of Gender that English has (thankfully) done away with.
I don't think so. German has a bigger vocabulary and a more complex grammar. I also has a lot of irregularities.
But this is just based on my personal experience and what our teachers told us. I have never spoken to a linguist about this. But I am very confident that any pro would agree with this.
Actually I think French is also harder than English. And of course Latin, too.
That's about all I have learned. But I have forgotten most of my French an Latin.
I don't want to derail this thread too much so I will PM you when I get home from work (gives me more time to come up with examples too!
).
Originally posted by orthanc
Actually I think French is also harder than English. And of course Latin, too.
That's about all I have learned. But I have forgotten most of my French an Latin.
After talking to my German teacher, she said that of the languages she speaks (completely fluent in german and french, semi-fluent in italian), French is definitely the hardest, since they have roughly 13 forms of tenses (past, present, future, etc.) and German was the easiet. She believes English would probably be the easiest language for foreigners to learn...but I'm pretty sure that english has the largest vocabulary of this family of languages.
I just wish I could speak German as well as my class requires (I'm a third year student)
That's one thing I loved about growing up in Hong Kong, we were taught English by English people.
Provided, a lot of my English teachers in my younger years absolutely hated me because I pronounced the last letter of the alphabet as "zee" and not "zed," and I spelled the word "color" instead of "colour" etc., but that had to do with my being born in the US and having parents who spoke and wrote more like they were from the US than the UK.
I guess the fact that they grew up in the US for at least part of their lives had something to do with that.
But all the people I know who learned English in Hong Kong might not have the "best" grammar or pronounciation, but you can definitely understand what they're trying to say.
Or maybe I just got used to hearing it all the time that I can understand it.
Actually, if you're asking for someone else's name, it should be:
ni jiao shen me?
Of course, that's really just "What are you called?"
Ideally, if you're being polite, it would be:
qing wen jiao xin?
Actally, the way you wrote it out was not the way it's pronounced. What Hu Jian and I wrote out is the official pin yin, which in turn is probably the closest to proper pronounciation that can be written out in the english alphabet.
