Learning Mandarin – Difficulties and Opportunities

Mandarin language research is problematic. Mostly because Mandarin is varies greatly from other languages that people in the west have tried to get to grips with before necessary . learn Chinese, not because learning Mandarin is much more troublesome. Mandarin is strange in any ways. The writing system is obviously completely different. Is undoubtedly no alphabet as the one that Germanic and Latin derivates have. Instead images defines every word; or rather a series of what is termed as strokes. For example, three stokes that together make a square means mouth, one combination of strokes that associated with depicts a woman holding a kid means mother and so on. But right after don’t end and then there. The grammar is largely made up in the is called contaminants. For example; adding a syllable pronounced ma after a sentence turns it best suited question, adding guo after a sentence means that going without shoes happens in in the marketplace. Combining these basic examples; you go shanghai guo master of arts? Communicates the question: a person have gone to Shanghai? The differences are however much more explicit that your. Even the sounds of spoken Chinese are completely different from western counterparts.

Chinese spoken words are not only defined by syllables as western words are. The word for mother in English is just 6 different sounds noted by each character; M, O, T, H, E and R. In Chinese there is 2 syllables, not four characters, ma and ma. The twist is that “mama” can be pronounced in twenty-five methods. Each of 2 syllables, ma and ma, can be pronounced with 5 different tones, making a total matrix of 5 times 5 possibilities, and just one means mother. The tones are called tones but might not tones like A minor or G, they are pitch modulation. The very tone is a somewhat steady high set up. The second is a rising pitch. 3rd tone goes down and then out. The fourth is a clear, crisp decline in pitch from high to low. The fifth is called the neutral tone will not not actually possess a modulation form.
